Everyone knows the number one thing you need to be successful online is traffic to your website. The other 1% is what you do with that traffic, but if you have to traffic – you can figure out the rest. What you do with the traffic when it gets to your site could be any number of things. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Article Websites
• Video Sites

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

The term “Web 2.0″ is associated with websites that facilitate interactive information sharing and collaboration in a social media setting. 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. By placing links to your websites in this content you’ve created, you get traffic from the site and search engine ranking for the keywords you choose. 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.

Articles Sites

The natural next topic is article marketing. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. 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 in addition to this, other users can take your article and place it on their own website. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:

• Figure out what keywords you want to go after
• Write specifically to target these keywords
• Be sure to link to your site on the keywords you’ve chosen. Do this inside the article itself and in your author’s bio.

Video

The last of this group is video marketing. Here to we’re really looking at a web 2.0 sub-category. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And in addition to this, because Google and the others love video so much, you can get listed for highly competitive keywords much more easily.

Here are just a few video marketing tips:

• Get a YouTube account
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Add tags to your profile
• Include a link to your main site in your profile
• Add at least one video to your profile
• Include your keywords in the title, description and tags

In closing…

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.

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

But, first…

The first thing you need to do before you start going after any traffic is keyword research. This is because you will building your traffic funnels around specific keywords. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

While doing your keyword research, keep the following in mind:

• Will you be able to rank for these keywords? You’ll have to analyze the competition and see what’s out there for this.
• 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.
• Will these keywords bring affiliates? Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. 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. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

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

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Surveys
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video Websites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Traffic Traps”

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. One thing you can do is to visit sites like Craigslist and Yahoo! Answers and manually extract contact info to contact other users. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. This allows you to do the things in your business that can’t be automated and let the software just give you the leads.

Video Websites

Another great resource is video sharing sites like YouTube. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. You can even get software that will automatically do this for you.

Summary

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

Get started right away:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Set up some viral surveys
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• Capitalize on video!