How To Get Free Traffic Hits For Your Website

There are a lot of effective methods to get free traffic to your website. In this Hub I discuss several of the most popular and how they can be used most efficiently. Keep in mind that the most effective and fastest way to drive targeted traffic to your website is to buy your advertising.

I am not talking about guaranteed hits or pop under traffic that you can purchase buy the thousands. Those are garbage! I am talking about a targeted pay per click campaign or puchasing solo ads and ezine advertising. I would like to make a note that ezine advertising isn't as effective as it used to be. Pay Per Click is the King when it comes to targeted traffic and lots of it.

If you are new to internet marketing, please take my advice and make sure you are well read on the subject of pay per click before you just jump in. It is advisable to go slow and keep your daily budgets low until you get the hang of it or you can lose a lot of money in a short amount of time.

You can still do alright using free methods. The trade off is time. You need to devote at least a couple hours a day for the following methods to be effective. With that said, here is a breif run down of what I will be covering.

• Traffic Exchanges (some people call them Hit Exchanges)
• Safe Lists - permission based email marketing
• Article Submission - Free Reports
• Viral Techniques and Programs -most of which include some or all of the above methods
• SEO & Web 2.0 - ways to get your website ranked in the search engine results
• Directory Submissions - highly overlooked and very effective

I also have a Squidoo lens that covers some other methods that I don't discuss here. Make sure you click on the link and check it out. I am sure you will find it useful.

Traffic exchanges are the simplest way to get free traffic. You spend time viewing other peoples websites which earns you credits to show your websites to them. A simple concept although most are not an even 1 to 1 trade. This is reserved for "Pro" members who pay a monthly fee.

Since we are discussing free traffic methods, we are not going to worry about that right now. I mentioned earlier that the trade off for not paying is time. All of the traffic exchanges require you to view each page for a designated amount of time. The time varies from 5 - 30 seconds per page. With a 30 second timer, you could view 120 pages and hour which would earn you around 60 views for your website.

That is not very much. I have developed a free viral system, called Traffic Hits Multiplier, that can earn you that can increase that amount 10 fold in the same amount of time by using tabbed browsing. The system will also help you get a lot of referrals in the various traffic exchanges as well as build your opt in mailing list. This will optimize the time that you have to spend surfing to the max!

When you refer someone in a traffic exchange, you get bonus credits added to your account. You also get a small percentage of their earnings added to your account when they surf. With time, you can build and army of people earning credits for you.

I am running a demo of the system and have logged my statistics on my blog. Spending less than an hour a day on average, I have added over 120 opt ins to my list and have 52 people in my downlines in 6 weeks time. This is only using traffic exchanges to promote which hasn't cost me a dime.

Permission based email marketing used to be really popular in internet marketing circles. Then along came the "spammers" and with them, anti-spam software. To this day it is almost impossible to send an email to an AOL inbox. Personally, I never cared for AOL much any how but that is beside the point.

The solution to the spam situation was the creation of safelists. Safelists are groups of people that agree to except mail from people and in return they get to send mail to the group. Basically the same premise as traffic exchanges but with email. They also have "pro" memberships which allow you to send your mail more often or to more members.

Once again, we are going to concentrate on the free memberships for this discussion. I do recommend taking advantage of any lifetime membership offers that you run accross. That is, for safelists that you have found to be responsive. Lets talk about that for a minute because all safelists are not created equal.

You can test and track and spend a lot of time and effort finding out which safelists work. The easiest way is to let somebody else do it for you. Many of you have probably heard of Traffic Hoopla. They do weekly reports on the most effective safe lists and traffic exchanges. They have an awesome downline building system and it's free to join.

I have a page at Traffic Hits Multiplier that has all of the most responsive safelists that I use on a daily basis. All of these safelists are on Traffic Hoopla's top 20 or have been in the past. The ratings change from week to week but I only use the ones that have proved themselves to be responsive. The page also goes into more detail about the various types of safelists and which ones will work best for you.

This capsule relates to the video to your right. If you haven't watched it, then stop reading and take 5 minutes to watch it. The video shows you 2 awesome free methods to drive traffic to your websites using a program called "Submit Em Now".

The methods described in the video are only 2 out of 43 different techniques described in Ross's ebook Traffic Manifesto. Not all of them are free, but most of them are very inexpensive if not free. One thing you can count on is that all of them are very effective.

If you ever consider buying an ebook on how to generate "laser targeted" traffic to your website then my recommendation would be this one.

This is probably one of the most under used methods of all. I think the whole idea of writing an article intimidates people. You don't have to be an expert on a subject. Just pick a topic that relates to your website or product that you are promoting and start writing.

There are certain guidelines that you have to follow when submitting an article. The rules differ slightly from site to site but the general rules remain the same. The main thing you can't do is write an ad. You are writing an article not a sales page. If you promote to much in your article then it will be rejected.

It's no big deal if it gets rejected. Don't worry about it. Just make some changes and re-submit it. You can keep trying until you get it right. Try to keep in mind that the article is subtle advertising. You give away useful information and then leave a link in your biography to your website.

I'll never understand why people that write tons of articles never use press releases. A press release is just an article that is made to sound like a news story but will get your story 100 times the exposure that an article will. You can submit press releases for free but if you are willing to spend $15, you will get more exposure then if you submitted a thousand articles.

Do a Google search for press release or article directories and you will find 100's of places to make your submissions for free. If you are going to make mass submissions, I recommend using article submission software to substantially speed up the process as it can be quite time consuming. There are a lot of article submitters but most of them don't work properly and you end up having to do a lot of the work manually.

Brad Callen has put together some awesome software that will even store your login information for the article directories that require it. I have tried several article submitters and his is by far the best and most user friendly. The best part about it is that he gives it away for free. Click here to download your free copy.

He also has a free directory submitter that will submit your websites to hundreds of directories like DMOZ. This is a killer way to build some high power one way backlinks and of course, generate free traffic.

I have lumped these two together because they are all about getting "organic" traffic to your web site. I am talking about traffic that is a result of someone searching for a "term" or "tag" to find information.

SEO is all about tweaking your web sites so that they are more search engine friendly and building back links from web sites with similar themes to help build the validity and authority of your web site. This will increase your page rank and your place in the search engine listings, which will bring you more visitors.

Web 2.0 refers to blogs, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites that use tags to help people find information. There are many strategies to use these types of sites to create powerful one way backl inks that will facilitate more traffic to your website and help boost your SEO efforts at the same time.

Both of these topics are much too involved to go into here. You can check out my hub, Web 2.0 Submitter - Harness The Power Of Web 2.0, to learn more about Web 2.0 strategies. My hub, Which Design Code Is Best For Search Engine Optimization?, talks about some SEO strategies that might be helpful.

Instant Buzz was developed a few years ago by internet marketer extraordinaire, Mike Filesame. This easy to install toolbar can earn you tons of free traffic hits to your websites. All you do is go about your normal business on the internet.

Everytime you open a web page you earn a credit. If you put the hyperspace java code on your websites, you will earn credits everytime someone opens your website as well. There is even a feature where you can earn credits everytime you send an email.

Everything is totally free. It takes about half an hour to download the program, install the tool bar, and set up your ads. After that, all you do is your normal day in and day out routine while you earn free traffic. There is no reason not to join.

I have websites that get over 500 hits a day. That earns me a lot of free traffic hits with Instant Buzz. Click Here to join for free.

This free to join program has been around for several years, which is a long time by internet marketing standards, for a good reason. It works! The concept is very simple and since it has started there have been a million other programs that use the same concept.

It relys on geometric progression. In other words, if you take a penny and double it everyday for a month, you will have over 10 million dollars. I doesn't work quite that fast because it is dependent on you promoting your affiliate website that you get for free when you sign up.

Here is how it works. Some one runs across your affiliate website and decides to join. They have to view 7 different websites for about 10 seconds. When the timer is up you get a code that you enter in a box. When you have entered all 7 boxes you have completed your sign up obligation and you become a member.

You are given your own site, along with promotional material like the banner to the right, which you then promote. People join under you and gradually your add starts moving down the list as people join under them and under them. Simple viral marketing and it's all free. Click Here to give it a try.