Free Traffic Building Methods

As promised in my last post, I will be discussing the free traffic building methods that I have used and got some traffic for me. These free traffic building methods normally requires you to spend quite a lot of time to build up and depending upon the stickiness of your website, the free traffic may or may not be flowing for life. If your website has quite a lot of good content, it stands a higher chance to build it up and get the traffic to stay using free traffic building methods.

Established Free Directories
There are a few directories that are very large and established, yet Free. Getting listed in these directories will not only get you some free traffic, but they also give you link popularity. Since some websites use directories as the provider of their data, you do not just get a link from one source, but possibly many other sites as well. Another advantage is webmasters looking in these directories for partners and if your webby is in it, you may get potentially more deals. Not all directories are good and the two that I use are Dmoz.org and Zeal.com

Reciprocal Links
Basically, it means that you place a website’s link on your site, in return for the same favor. I was quite reluctant to use this method of getting traffic initially, because I thought my web space should only generate revenue for me. I was really naive then and since I started using this traffic building method, I have never looked back. Reciprocal links are marvelous in the sense that you can share traffic with many websites and this traffic adds up. Some people say that it’s a really good deal because you are trading visitors that do not wish to stay in your website for new visitors.

Social Networking Sites
Talk about MySpace fever and you will know that many webmasters are beginning to turn to MySpace for free traffic. Basically, the more friends you make, the more exposure you get. The idea is simple, but make too many friends in a day and your account will get deleted.

Topsites
These are websites that rank your website by the traffic that you send them. Nowadays, there are other kind of topsites, like those that rank the number of visitors on your website. They typically return quite a good number of visitors, with around 1 visitor per visitor you send them. I have seen some really good topsites that send me up to 4 visitor per visitor I send them. Of course, if you stumble upon one that do not give you much visitors, you can simply throw them away.

Forums
Just come up with a signature and continue posting in the forums like you always have. If your signature captures some form of attention, the traffic just keep coming, when you are likely posting about topics that you are interested in as well.

Joint Promotion
This method of promotion is very common for webmasters running newsletters. They will email their newsletter subscribers and promote a website, in return for the same favor. It works well if the subscribers in these newsletters have always liked the newsletters. You get not only free promotion, but in the eyes of these subsribers, it is sort of an endorsement. The gurus use this method a lot, but mostly on a cash basis.

Banner Exchanges
I do not have anything against Banner Exchanges, but rather simply bad experience. I’m not saying for sure that they do not work, but I simply dislike them. The problem with banner exchanges in my opinion is the lack of quality banners. Many new webmasters like to use them and some of them do not have the slightest idea about making banners. The result is that many unprofessional looking banners will appear on your website. Of course, it has been some time since I last use banner exchanges and maybe the situation is better now.

Go for it, champ
Now, with all that said… it is all redundant if they are not being used. Just keep on trying out different methods until you narrow down those that work for you. When you do shortlist a few promotion methods, amplify your efforts and see the results increase exponentially. When it comes to web-building, spending 10 hours in a day will reap better results than spending 10 hours over 10 days. Concentrate your efforts in the first month of launch and you will see a big difference in the number of visitors you can get.