Home Based Business

Succeeding online is all about traffic. Anybody who's trying to make an extra income online, has to realize that starting a new business on the internet requires traffic to the website for sales. Obviously, without visitors to the website there will be no customers and no sales.

There are basicly two methods of getting traffic to your site: 1) free or 2) paid. With the versatility of the internet you can either spend money or spend time (or both).  Spending money requires less time but spending time requires no (or little) money if you know what to do and where to go.

Paid traffic will get you in business quicker, but if you are on low budget it's a good idea to do it the free way, it only requires some hard work, patience and perseverance and desire to succeed.

1) Free Traffic Methods

* Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Quality SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is of extreme importance in quality traffic generation. The right kind of traffic from the right kind of sources can do wonders for your business.

Write good content for your website. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.  This would be in the form of natural listings on the search engine's results pages.

Making sure your web content is optimized for SEO should be one of the most important factors when you are either planning a new website or maintaining an existing one. Without effective SEO (search engine optimization) you may as well not even be online, with the traffic that you'll miss out on. Getting your website into the search engines to the highest level is your goal.

There is a very good tool to help you make the SEO of your web site as good as possible. Its name is Wordtracker, and you'll have more information about it here.

I recommend you to download and read this very good ebook (it’s free) on the issue: SEO Made Easy.

Another good ebook with a different approach is Derek Gehl's Six Steps (free download).

* Articles

Writing and publishing articles are a great way to get noticed. You must ensure that the articles are informative and with no intention of making sales. You'll be putting your link(s) back to your site in the resource box (not in the article text itself).

A site that gets the best targeted traffic is one that is constantly into article marketing. New articles should be submitted to major online article directories as often as possible. Good articles will be picked up by other webmasters and thus your links can be spread worldwide over time.

There are lots of article directories where you can post your articles (it's free) - here are some of the best:

EzineArticles.com

GoArticles.com

Free-Articles-Zone.com

Uber Articles.com

Website-Articles.com

ArticleDashboard.com

ArticlesBase.com

ArticleCity.com

Amazines.com

You'll find many more by searching Google for article directories.

Here is a tool that might help you write, organize and format your articles. It's called 8 Minute Article Writer and you can download it for free here.

There are also services helping you submit your articles to article directories and ezines. One of those is Article Marketer, who submits your articles for free to a limited number of directories. For a monthly fee of $22.50 you can submit an unlimited number of articles to hundreds of sites. Another very good service is Submit Your Article, where you can have submitted up to 8 articles per month for a fee of $37.00. Their service also includes other features that are worth looking into.

Here’s an exciting new traffic generation system: Free Traffic System. It submits an article to 30 sites (blogs) in one go, creating 60 backlinks to your site (or whatever links you choose). It’s completely free, but there is also a paid option that is even more effective (of course). I recommend you give it a try!

And here's a good submission software with which you can submit articles at the push of a button. It's called just Article Submitter and comes with a free (limited) version and a paid (pro) version. More information here.

It can be a tedious task to write article after article day out and day in. Fortunately there are tools that can save you a lot of time at article writing. This software called Magic Article Rewriter & Spinner  rewrites an original article into several new articles (you can set the number yourself), so out of one original article you can have many unique articles in just seconds. If you are using Free Traffic System or Senuke where the articles need to be spun, this tool is a must have – it will save you hours!

* Forums

I highly recommend that you participate in several forums where you will meet people who are doing similar business as you and have similar interests. Here you can get help and advice from more experienced people than yourself, and you can give help to others. If you participate and write posts on a regular basis you will - in the course of time - become known and respected and some of your fellow forumers might look at your website(s) and eventually do business with you. If you imply your web site address in your signature you also get backlinks from the forum sites.
 

Most forums are free to join. Here are some forums you could look into:

ConquerYourNiche

DigitalPoint

AblakeForum

NetMarketingForum

and the best known of them all - WarriorForum (paid membership).

Make a Google search for your business type + forum (f.ex. internet marketer forum) and sign up with a few of them. The time and work you spend on this will pay off in the long run!

* Directory Listing

Getting higher ranking in the search engines is much about having backlinks, meaning links on other sites pointing to your site. One way to obtain this is submitting your site to website directories. A web directory is a collection of links broken down into relevant categories. Submit your site to as many directories as you can. By doing this you'll get links on those sites pointing back to your site ("backlinks"), and it will improve your rankings with the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and more).

Here's a large list of directories that accept free site submissions and don't require a reciprocal link. Use your target keyphrase as your site's title for each submission. Submit your site to a few directories every day (search engines prefer sites that have their links built over time).

There is also a nice Directory Submitter (software) available for free which submits your site to 350 directories. They have a paid version as well that submits to 1350 directories! Download the free version here.

* Traffic Exchange

A free traffic exchange is one of the best sources of online advertising and free website promotion. Thousands of users generate targeted traffic to their sites by this means. With little effort, you can increase web traffic to your site by using a system especially designed to increase traffic for its members.

The reason they are so effective is because of the viral marketing or referral marketing aspect of them. When you refer people to sign up for the traffic exchange, you will earn a percentage of the credits they earn. This means you earn more traffic by referring other people. As those people refer others, you will continue to generate even more traffic.  In some cases you will earn traffic down through 10 levels of referrals.

Traffic Exchanges are often referred to as the "engine" of your marketing program. Join more than one and drive traffic to your website. Learning how to use them effectively can build a stream of free traffic to your web pages.

One of  the best traffic exchange programs is TrafficSwarm, and here’s a few others: TrafficG,  Hits4Pay,  ts25,  Trafficera and SpinSuccess.

Note: Start with just one traffic exchange and learn how to use it then add a new one which you learn and so on.

See a list here of the most popular traffic exchange sites.

* Social Bookmarking

If you've been reading any online marketing articles or websites you will have probably heard about a traffic generating technique called Tag and Ping. It is a great method to promote your websites and blogs.

Social bookmarking involves posting a link back to your web page or blog post from a social bookmarking website which stores the link. You enter keywords (called Tags) which categorize your bookmark and allow others to search, view and vote for your bookmark. You are basically sharing your sites with visitors and members of the bookmarking site.

There is benefit to this on several levels:

First you get direct traffic from people clicking on your bookmark and going directly to your web page. This usually won't be a huge amount of traffic in most cases, but is is very targeted. Also, every once in a while you get a site that will take off and become very popular from this alone.

The next benefit is an increased potential for fast search engine indexing. When you post your bookmark to a bookmarking site, it will be displayed on the front page. Now these pages are usually a very high PR, ranging from PR5 to PR7 or PR8!

What this means is that Googlebot and other search engine spiders visit this page hundreds of times each day. When they visit and find your links there they will check out your site immediately.

Click here to get information on how to imply these techniques in your marketing efforts.

* Free Ads

There are lots of sites on the web that let you advertise your site for free. Type "free ads directories" or "free classifieds" (without the quotes) into Google's search bar and you will come up with lots of sites offering free advertising.

Here are a few sites you can try: http://www.worldfreeads.com,  http://www.adsubmitter.com and http://www.freeadvertisingforum.com.
 

With most of them you need to create an account to be able to post ads, and you will be asked to put in an email address and a password (of your own choice). I strongly advice that you create a new email account at gmail.com or yahoo.com to use solely for this ad posting business, as you will probably receive lots of emails from people trying to sell you something when seeing your ads.

Posting ads on lots of websites is very time consuming, but fortunately there are a couple good tools that help speeding up the work.

Adwizard fills in the ads at a click of the mouse. It comes with hundreds of links to classifieds sites so you don't have to find them yourself. I suggest that you use the same email account and password with all classifieds accounts so you don’t have to remember a lot of login details. Download Adwizard for free here (60 day trial, $14.95 one time payment after that).
 

If you prefer to use different usernames and passwords, there is a superb tool that do all the remembering for you. It’s name is RoboForm. You type in the details only once and RoboForm takes care of the rest. A click of the mouse recalls the username and password when you need them. You can also put text – like ads – into RoboForm, and it can fill in all the text of the ads you are posting as well as username and password with just one click. There is both a free and a paid version; even the free one works well and it’s available here.

Here’s another free tool that will manage all your IDs, passwords, links and many other details related to a particular account: Password Manager.

* Newsletters

If you somehow have got a list of people you can email, you can have them visit your site by offering something of value like free gifts, reports, or anything that might be valuable to the reader.  Make sure you have entertaining and valuable information in your newsletter and you will see them pass this information along to those they know, which will increase your website traffic even more.

* Blogging

Another way to getting free traffic is to create a blog (or more) and put in as much content as possible. Search engines love blogs that are updated regularely with fresh content.  You can get a free blog at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. If you have an account with a webhosting service you can install a Wordpress blog there.

If you don't like to write yourself, you can "borrow" articles from article directories (see above), or you can use a very cool tool that puts content into a Wordpress blog on automation. It's called "Caffeinated Content" and it costs $77 (for the time being). You can have more info and buy it on this website, if you like.

2) Paid Traffic Methods

The fastest way to getting visitors to you site is undoubtedly to advertize on Google.  Your ad is displayed immediately and you may get visitors to your site moments after submitting. Please read first this introductional article on how to use Google Adwords.

You may download and read the very good ebook Google Adwords Made Easy. It's free!

A really amazing ebook called Get Google Ads Free is available here. It costs $67.00 USD and is really worth it’s price! It's a very content rich ebook and you will learn  a lot about advertising and how to getting traffic in general. The ebook explains how you can have other people paying your Google ads by selling ads to them.

There are of course many other places to put your ads. There are other search engines than Google and there are online (and  offline, for that matter) newspapers and magazines. Then there are thousands of ezines (Internet newsletters) out there right now with huge subscriber lists ready to send YOUR ad to their list.

There are two kinds of ezine ads: solo ads and classified ads. Solo ads are ads that are sent to the entire email list of subscribers all by itself and can usually be unlimited length. Solo ads cost a little more, but they generally deliver far more results because the ad is being sent out all by itself to the entire subscriber list.

Make a Google search for 'ezines' to find an ezine (or more) to place your ads; if you can afford it you should join the Directory of Ezines which gives you easy and instant access to thousands of ezines along with special advertising discounts from most of the ezine publishers listed in the directory.

In some of the traffic exchanges it's possible to buy credits that you can use to get your website exposed on that exchange. So if you don't have the time to surf to get credits you can buy them and get visitors that way.

As you can see there are many ways of driving traffic to your site, and obviously the more of them you put to work the more traffic you will get. So if you've got both some money and some time to spend you should be fairly well off getting visitors to your website!

Last but not least here's an exciting tool that guarantees you get to the top at the MSN search engine with any keyword: Loophole. Recommended!