Lead Gen, Associate, and SEO Guru Adam Torkildson

The holy grail of internet marketing seems to be getting “free” traffic. Even though you could do a lot with paid traffic, such as pay-per-click, free traffic is great. There are several ways you can get some free traffic to your main website.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get free traffic, but like any other website, you still have to get traffic to the main blog. However, blogs have a major advantage over regular websites because they have an RSS feed built in. Also, depending on which blogging platform you use, there are some instant advantages because if you use wordpress.com, the domain tends to rank very well with the search engines. Also, Google owns Blogger.com and has a tendency to “hang out” on their own properties looking for new updated content.

There are several social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us and other sites like this. You can “bookmark” your own blog posts and other pages to help them get ranked in the search engines. Often times these social bookmarking “tag” pages will get ranked as well. Although this isn’t a direct link, these pages can serve as bridge pages with links back to your site and these pages rank also rank very well with the search engines.

There are dozens of places on the internet that you can create mini-sites or individual pages. These sites typically will allow you to post whatever content you want to post including your own RSS feeds from your blog, other websites, articles, video or whatever else you’d like to create in these pages. The main key to success with these types of sites is to make sure that you’re posting links back to your website, especially the deep links. Those RSS feeds included in the mini-sites or pages are a great way to get links back to your site. Also, create an individual text links using html or even images.

Articles are an excellent way to get high quality links back to your website which will generate visitors as well as search engine benefits. The search engines reward relevant links and articles represent the most relevant pages simply because you are in charge of the content of every article. So, if you’re trying to get your site ranked for a specific keyword phrase, you can create articles on these topics and use the resource box or author profile to link back to your website using keywords for which you’re trying to get ranked.

Contributing to forums is a great way to get links back to your site as well. The downside to most forums is that they have a “nofollow” policy which means that the links aren’t “followed” by the search engines. These forums may not do as much to help you from the search engine perspective alone, but an often visited forum in a niche you’re in will get you some targeted traffic. This is usually done by adding a signature to your posts with a link. You’ll have to check with the forum to make sure this is ok and determine what their policy is regarding their signatures.

Many blogs get a lot of traffic and with the comments you can add on a lot these blogs, you’ll get people clicking through to your website. There are also what are called “dofollow” blogs that will help you with your search engine optimization as well.

Getting free traffic, or even paying for traffic is just the start to making sales and making money. These techniques can be used for non-ecommerce related sites as well.

Brian is an internet business coach that specializes in Bluehost Coupons. Brian also coaches people on how to get started with an affordable web host.

If you are looking to get traffic to your new website, you may have heard that you can use use social networking or social media sites, such as Myspace or Facebook, to drive users of these services to you. There are a few problems with this strategy. With the advent of quick and easy sites, like Twitter, social networking and media sites have seen a marked decline in the amount of frequent users. Consider these points before you solely rely on social networking sites to drive traffic to your website:

* Myspace and Facebook have a huge number of dead pages – So many users have “been there, done that” that they do not login to there accounts anymore. You would basically be marketing to the wall. * Myspace and Facebook has implemented numerous safety guards – They have made changes which are hypersensitive against spam, and they label any outgoing links as spam or potential phishing sites. This puts a scare into people using these services, and causes them to apprehensive to clicking any outgoing links to your site. * Social Networking is about dead – When these services were new, they were great. While you may find some amount of success with these sites, your effectiveness rate would be about 30% of what you would normally expect.

Unfortunately, that is the sad truth.

To respond to the many problems, some focus on SEO. SEO is the attempt to rank highly on search engine results for a keyword. This often results in steady traffic. But SEO can literally take years in competitive niches.

Perhaps the fastest and quickest way to drive traffic to your website using the search engines is through using pay-per-click advertising services, or PPC. PPC allows you to place an ad on the search engines based on the keywords which people search. You only pay for advertising when someone clicks through your ad. Three of the top PPC programs are:

Google Adwords Yahoo Search Marketing MSN Adcenter

There are other services such as Miva which is used often; and, incidentally, Facebook has an excellent PPC program, which seems to be highly targeted — it laser targets your potential visitors by age, interests, location, and much more. This ensures that the right audience is seeing your ads — maximizing exposure — and providing you with quality, fresh leads.

Rates for PPC traffic are always a little different, depending on the quality of traffic, the website purchased at, the service being used and the keyword chosen. For example, traffic targeted towards people interested in “credit cards” would be much more expensive than traffic targeted towards people interested in “elephants” – to use an extreme comparison.

You pay the price of the ad only when someone actually clicks on your ad. The goal is to figure out how much your website makes per targeted visitor, and then purchase traffic at a rate slightly less than how much you make. You’ll instantly turn a profit. An ROI of anything is justified because the entire process is automatic.

Want quick traffic, but don’t want to use the search engines or social media? PPC is the only way to go, and is both instant AND automatic.