21 Ways to Drive Free Traffic to Your Sites

Traffic is the most important concern for all the webmasters and bloggers. Without traffic a good, beautiful and informative site will be useless. There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your websites. Unfortunately you have to spend lots of money for some of them.

Although the traffic you receive through the paid methods has a good quality but there are many free methods that can drive a higher quality traffic to your websites.

Here is the list of the methods you can use to drive traffic to your websites for free. I am sure you are unable to use all of these methods but only a few of the online and offline methods is enough to drive thousands of free traffic to your website every month. Any money that you make through this traffic will be profit because you have not spend any money. Of course some of them are time consuming and time is more valuable than money but if you don’t have money to spend for advertising, you have to spend time.

1- Search engine optimization:
This is the most important method that can drive thousands of free traffic to your website every month. If you can achieve to have a high ranking website in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN you can even forget about all the other methods because the free traffic they drive to your website will be enough.

BUT fortunately or unfortunately it is not easy to have a high ranking website. It takes time and need to have a well-optimize (and not an over-optimized) website. Search engine optimization is a knowledge and this is what I will focus on it in this weblog more than the other things. You can also read the other articles I have written about it here in this weblog and stay tuned for other articles I will post.

 

It is not that hard to have a well-optimized website but the harder part is building the natural link popularity and fresh and unique content because search engines don’t rank a website just because it is optimized. A website need to have a good link popularity and also good, valuable, fresh and unique content.

The most important things about the traffic you receive from search engines is the quality. None of the traffic resources can generate the traffic comparable to the quality of the search engines organic traffic. Search engines organic traffic has the highest conversion rate and generate the maximum sales and clicks on the ads.

2- Write a free downloadable e-book:

You can have a free downloadable e-book about your website subject, activities, products and services and invite your website visitors to download, read and pass it to the others. This is a kind of viral marketing which is very effective and can generate a steady stream of traffic to your website after a while.

If you don’t know how to write an e-book, you can easily pay someone to do it for you. It will be just a one time payment and your e-book will work for you for good. One of the best and easiest ways to hire someone to write an e-book for you is the Elance service. You just tell them what do you want and they do it for you. It can not cost you more than $100 or $200 to have an e-book.

3- Add signature to your emails

Make a simple signature for your email and have your website URL and also the URL for downloading your e-book in it.

4- Use autoresponder

Autoresponder is one of the most important internet marketing tools. Try to collect the email address of your website visitors through a double opt-in autoresponder system and send an email update every now and then. Most visitors who come to your website, leave it before doing anything and never be back. Having an autoresponder is a good way to attract them to your website once again in future.

5- Exchange link

Exchanging links with other websites is a good way to receive free traffic but please note that if you do it excessively, search engines may penalize or even ban your website. You can exchange links with about 10 to 20 websites that are merely related to your website theme and subject, on the home page.

Most websites that are penalized because of link exchanging are those that have some separate pages or directories that are full of reciprocal links. When most of the incoming links of your website are reciprocal your website will be penalized or banned. So avoid mass link exchanging. Do it just for the traffic and not for building the link popularity and if you really want to do it for traffic, the way is the home page link exchanging with 10 to 20 related websites.

6- Exchange banner

Although internet marketers believe that banners have lost their attraction for internet users but you can allocate a small space of your home page to a 468×60 banner and receive a few clicks through it every now and then. You can sign up for the most famous banner exchanging programs like click4click and neobanners. You will not receive a huge quality traffic but it does worth a small 468×60 space from your website home page.

7- Participate in forums

If you are expert about something and you have a website related to your specialty and job, you can find the related forums, sign up, reply to others threads and post new threads. Have a signature for your posts and place your website URL in the signature. It not only increases your website link popularity but will drive traffic to your website.

8- Write articles and submit them to article directories

This is another free method to improve your website link popularity and drive traffic to it. If you can write articles, you should use this ability to make your website popular and if you can not, you can pay others to do it for you. Then you can submit your articles to the article directories. Don’t forget to have a good byline that includes your website URL at the bottom of each article.

9- Submit your website to web directories

Please read the article I have written about directory submission.

10- Create a group at Yahoo, Google and MSN groups

This is also a good method to drive traffic to your website. You just need to create a group in Yahoo, Google and MSN and ask people to join. This group should be related to your website subject. After a while your can have a big group with hundreds or even thousands of members. Then you can post articles and announcements to your groups.

11- Participate in Yahoo Answers

This is one of the jobs that you can do it in your spare time. It takes time to become a popular expert in Yahoo answers but if you do it seriously and give good answers to the peoples’ questions, after a while you will become popular and when you have your website URL in your signature, people will visit your website eagerly.

12- Submit your website pages and articles to social bookmarking sites

Please read the article I have written recently about social bookmarking sites.

13- Become an active member in social bookmarking sites

In social bookmarking sites you can post comment on others posts, add friends and vote for others posts and this makes you a popular user after a while. StumbleUpon.com is one of these websites that can send thousands of hits to your website. You need to be an active member and other members will find your favorites and posts more often and will visit your website.

14- Join traffic generating sites

Traffic generating sites like TrafficSwarm.com were used to be a good resource of traffic. Although they have lost their value, you can still receive a few clicks from them every day. There are tens of traffic generating sites but don’t bother to join all of them. Just the most popular one which is the TrafficSwarm.com will be enough and the rest are wasting of time.

15- Post comment on other weblogs on a regular basis

Posting comments on popular weblogs is also a good way to drive traffic to your websites. This will help other bloggers to know you and link to your weblog and posts.

There are also a lot of offline methods for sending traffic to your websites. Although some of them look time consuming, they are really effective.

16- Publish fliers

Publish fliers in your area. You don’t have to pay for it. You can do it with your own printer and with a very small budget. You can do it every weekend and distribute about 300 to 500 fliers in your area. This will generate a few hundreds of traffic per month. Although this amount of traffic doesn’t look reasonable, it has a high quality because only those who are really interested in your service/product will visit your website and you will receive reasonable number of orders.

17- Wrap up your car

The rear windshield is the most important part.

Some people sell advertising space on their car to make some money but you can advertise your own website on your car and it really works and drives traffic to your website. You can find car wrapping services in your city and pay them to wrap up your car. It will be a free resource of traffic.

18- Let your friends, relatives and neighbors know about your website and its activities.

19- Write your website URL on your garage doors.

20- Write articles for newspapers and magazines for free

Just have a very small byline at the bottom of your article and introduce your website. If you are a good writer, it will be a great way to drive free traffic to your website.

21- Give 2 hours lectures in the city communities, schools, colleges and universities

I have seen a lot of people who do it to drive traffic to their websites or find new customers and clients. You need a laptop and a video projector and some skills to make PowerPoint slides which is very easy. You have to do this on a regular basis and you will enjoy the traffic and customers it will generate for you.

Oh! I remembered some other ways:

22- Video marketing

I think all the internet users know about YouTube.com. It is a public video hosting website. You can upload your video files and let others watch it. By adding suitable title, description and tags to each video you upload, it will become easier for the users to find them.

You can have your website URL in your public profile page and also on the description of the videos and this will drive free traffic to your site. If a video becomes popular, it can be watched hundreds of thousands of times and this will drive a huge amount of free traffic to your site.

There are a lot of things that you have to know about video marketing. I am new to this kind of marketing but will talk about it more on this weblog.

Click here to see the videos that I have created and uploaded to Google videos and YouTube.

There are several video hosting websites but I believe that YouTube is the best one and uploading the videos on the others is wasting of time.

23- Photo Marketing

This is another free method to drive free traffic to your site and improve your website link popularity. If you have a digital camera and you take pictures, you can upload them to photo gallery sites like Flickr.com. It is so similar to YouTube. Each photo or each set of photos need to have a title, description and keyword tags. You should have your website URL in your profile and you can also have it in the photos descriptions. If any of your photos become popular, you will receive lots of free traffic.

Click here to see the photos that I have uploaded to Flickr.com.

24- Google Local

Google local is another way that you can drive local business and traffic to your website. I have already posted an article about this topic: Drive local traffic to your site

Be Careful!

All the ways I explained are good ways but you have to be careful not to spam. For example if you insert your website URL to the description of all the photos you upload to photo gallery websites, Google will penalize your site because Google knows this as a spam way to improve the website link popularity.