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.

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

Traffic is useless . . . unless…

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. This is because you will building your traffic funnels around specific keywords. So you need to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are worth targeting.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

• Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• Are these “buying” keywords? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. This is not what you’re looking for.
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. Nothing brings more buyers like an army of affiliates. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. And hiring an expert is very expensive. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. Using tools like this speed up the process and improve your results, too!

Only then can you start getting traffic

Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.

Here’s a short list of sneaky traffic techniques:

• Most people overlook the power of Surveys!
• “Answer” Sites
• Video Websites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Traffic Traps”

Maybe you’ve seen these help sites where people post questions and other people answer them. But, like the surveys, that’s not why you’re going to pay attention to these sites. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. The good news is that it’s easy to find website traffic software that can do this automatically. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video

Video is huge and sites like YouTube and Vimeo are extremely popular. In fact, YouTube has over 2 billion videos watched per day! So don’t miss out of this incredible source of free website traffic.

Even if you don’t think you can make a good video. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then simply record yourself reading the text and you video the screen with a simple screen capture program. And like anything else, there is software available that will turn articles into videos for you automatically.

The Bottom Line…

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. And today there are tons of options for software tools that can help with every part of this process.

So, start right now and:

• Keyword research first is key
• Set up some viral surveys
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• And definitely include video sharing sites