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The most important thing in any web business is traffic – lots and lots of traffic. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. So, the critical step is to generate a steady flow of visitors.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

• Web 2.0
• Article Websites
• Video Sites

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Article Websites

Article marketing really builds on the Web 2.0 concept. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. And the hidden benefit here is that your reach grows as other people take your articles and put them on their blogs and sites. And because the terms of the directory say they have to include your “resource box” you get links back from all these other sites, too. In order to get the most free traffic make sure you:

• First, spend the time to determine your keywords
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Once again, this is really a sub-set of web 2.0. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And if all that wasn’t enough, you also stand a much stronger chance of getting a high search engine ranking for the keywords you want with video than you do with text-based content.

Here are just a few video marketing tips:

• Set up your YouTube account
• When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
• Put relevant “tags” in your profile
• Add a link to your website
• Add 1 or more videos to your profile
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Putting it all together.

If you take action on the items listed here you’ll have free traffic in no time.