4 Great Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

I've said it before, I'll say it again - web traffic is the life blood of any online business. Even if you have the greatest product or website to offer, without traffic your business won't generate any money. So to help out those who are struggling to get visitors to their websites, I would like to discuss my 4 favorite and most effective channels to drive web traffic.

And the best part of it is - they are free.

So here they are -

Article Marketing

You write informative articles on your particular niche of interest and submit them to article submission sites. The reward comes in 3 ways. First, you can include a resource box with a link to your website. If your article is good, readers will want to visit your website for more good information. Second, if you use a keyword to represent the link, it can help you get ranked in the search engines for that particular keyword. In other words, this helps you in Search Engine Optimization. Third, a reader may pick up your article to put up on his site. As a courtesy, he is obliged to include your resource box and links. This gets you exposure from his readers as well.

Squidoo

Being a Giant Squid who has created more than 150 lenses, I can't stop telling you how awesome Squidoo is as a source of traffic. The great thing about Squidoo is that it is a very content rich site, and most search engines love content rich sites. With hundreds of thousands of lenses choked full of information, Squidoo lenses find it easy to rank high naturally in search engines. So this means free organic traffic from the search engines for your website if you structure your Squidoo lenses to link cleverly to your own website. But make sure your lenses are related to your niche or your traffic won't be relevant. The second good thing about Squidoo is that there are already many relevant readers on Squidoo itself, and you can easily get lots of Squidoo visitors if you reach out to other Squids on the Squidoo forum.

Forums

For every niche there is almost certainly bound to be a forum or several forums catering to it. In the most popular forums, there are thousands of prospects eager to discuss or learn more about your niche. If you have a good product or website to offer them, they would most certainly be interested.

You can search for forums related to your niche by typing this in search engine - "Your Niche" + forums. For example, if your niche is Golf, you type in 'golf forums'. You can also visit Big Boards - a directory which compiles the biggest message boards and forums online.

Yahoo Answers

Every day thousands of people visit Yahoo Answers to ask and answer questions. By searching for unanswered questions related to your niche and giving good informative answers, you can get a steady stream of traffic from this website if provide a link to your website. One thing you should realize however is that if you are chosen as the Best Answer, you get the most amount of traffic as your answer will be featured. So be sure to give thought to your answers and try to be as informative and helpful as possible.

Of course there are many other free channels, but I am discussing what work best for me and what certainly work best for many others.

Again, no single channel offers the same results for everyone. There are too many permutations involved. Personality, niche, web content, quality of article, writing style, etc all play a part in determining how effective a channel works for you.

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