Before any website can get sales, it must get traffic. The whole “build it and they will come” doesn’t work with the internet. I used to own the domain name “vwbus.com” and it got about 40 to 50 visitors a day by people simply typing that in to see what was there. That is the exception to the rule, however. Most sites have to leverage other sites with existing traffic in order to get started. Here are a few ways that you can get some free traffic and leverage these sites that can get you the traffic.

Starting a blog, whether on your own domain or even on a hosted site such as Blogger.com or Wordpress.com can give you a great advantage over just a regular website. The main thing that makes blogs great for getting traffic is that they have a built-in RSS feed. These RSS feeds allow search engines and several other directories or engines to index the content of blogs and do this very easily.

You can use social bookmarking sites to get both links back to your site for the search engines as well as direct traffic from people visiting these social bookmarking sites and clicking on the links in your bookmarks. You can use sites like socialmarker.com to get a list of social bookmarking sites that can be used to bookmark your blog posts, pages on the site and also use the profile options with several of these social bookmarking sites that allow you to put links in for your websites into the profiles.

Some other sites that can help you get traffic and rank well on their own are sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. If you have done your keyword research and know what keywords are getting searched for, you’ll have an easy time finding keywords that are getting searched, but have very little competition. Using these keywords in the title of your Squidoo “Lens” or your Hubpages “Hub”. Using the keywords in both your title and again throughout the page you create then doing some additional social bookmarking links back to your “Lens” or “Hub” and watch it get ranked in the search engines.

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.

These are some great ways to get free traffic but each of these requires an investment of time. If you’re willing to put in a consistent, dedicated amount of time each day or a few times per week. Consistency is a key part of success when it comes to getting traffic to your website.

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.

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