Free Online Traffic

Success online almost always involves generating high quality, free traffic to a website.

Anyone with even a small amount of experience online already knows that building a website is the easy part; the real mountain to climb is getting traffic to that site. Although PayPerClick methods are viable possibilities, my favorite online traffic is the free kind!

However, free online traffic comes in a multitude of flavors. Some are excellent while others can actually hurt success! New website owners have to understand the differences between the many methods of sending free online traffic to websites.

First, let's start with a method or two which will actually hinder success. John Doe Newbie sees an offer to rent a million email addresses. Along with it comes an autoresponder he can setup in his own host account. He gets it all for less than a hundred bucks. Besides the fact that a list like that is completely worthless, his ISP quickly bans his email account for spamming. Plus, the big ISP's around the world all flag his domain for spamming. His free online traffic method just destroyed any chance of future success his site had.

Another method for free online traffic which can hurt is any type of massive link exchange. Yes, incoming links are great. However, any offer which promises hundreds or thousands of incoming links for X amount of money will get your site flagged for spamming by Google. Trash links like that will not bring quality traffic anyway!

Some methods for free online traffic may not hurt your site, but they are sure to only waste your time. Too many beginners fall for the idea that the free classified sites are the way to get online traffic. By far, the vast majority of traffic going to a free classified site comes from beginners who go there to place ads...not to make purchases.

In a nutshell, any free online traffic method is useless if it somehow uses the "shotgun" approach. That is, if your link is somehow promoted in a way that may or may not be seen by someone truly interested in what you are offering. Always ask yourself if your chosen online traffic method falls into this category. If so, do not waste your time with it.

Hands down, the best free online traffic comes from the natural search results in Google and Yahoo. Simply put, if your offer is good and your site can be found easily with a relevant keyword search in the top search engines, your site will be profitable! SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key to achieving great success with free online traffic.

Good SEO techniques insure a site will receive targeted traffic. Optimizing pages for this free traffic is the key for success of most sites. It is very difficult for any site to do well without the help of free traffic from the search engines.

Along these lines, article marketing is a highly reliable free traffic method also. Just like optimizing a web page using SEO, writing an article which targets a keyword phrase is likely to bring plenty of search engine traffic too. With article marketing there is also the added benefit of enjoying incoming links to your site since most article directories allow the author to insert a link at the end of the article.

The best free online traffic methods do require some work and involve learning the skills of writing and optimizing. However, the good news is that success in smaller niches requires only moderate skill levels in these areas in order to enjoy great success!

Free online traffic which is well targeted must be a beginning Internet marketer's main focus. Without it, online success will be a very long and difficult road.