This is a guest post by Debbie Dragon who is a full-time freelance writer and co-owner of Trifecta Strategies, LLC. The company provides a full range of content management and marketing services to clients around the world. In addition, Debbie mentors new writers through her Make Money From Writing program. Students of the program learn how to earn money writing online, find clients and run their own freelance writing businesses.

If you are interesting is submitting a guest post, please visit my guest poster page to find out more info. Now on to the the good stuff.

According to the Field of Dreams – “if you build it, they will come”, right? If only it was that easy online! Having a website or blog online will not immediately result in people finding it during their internet travels. The hardest part about having a website or blog is bringing traffic to it. How can you get your site in front of people who are interested in visiting it?

There are many methods for bringing traffic to your website, and most of the commonly used traffic generation strategies cost money. If you want to increase the traffic to your site on a tight budget, why not use some of these often overlooked strategies to increase your website traffic for free?

Set Up a Blog – If you currently have a traditional website or storefront, you should connect a blog to it. Search engines love blogs because they offer frequently updated content (as long as you remember to post!) and they are quickly indexed in the search engines. A blog gives readers a way to interact with you through blog comments, and helps you send targeted traffic to your website or storefront. For example, if you’re selling blue suede shoes, you can write a blog post about blue suede shoes and link to the sales page. Only people who are interested in blue suede shoes would be reading about them on the blog, and so only targeted visitors would be clicking the link to find out about buying them.

Use Blog Carnivals – A unique method of advertising blogs that is not available to a standard website is through the use of “blog carnivals.” These carnivals give incoming links to blogs. They’re heavily weighted by search engines because they’re coming from blogs on related topics, and the readers of the carnival host who click on your link are already interested in your topic since they’re visiting another website on a similar subject matter. You can submit your blog posts to carnival hosts, and if you’re included in the “carnival” you’ll get a link back to your site. Carnivals are a long-term strategy for building website traffic, but if you do them on a regular basis you’ll improve your positioning in the major search engines and receive direct traffic from people clicking on the links from the other blogs. To find out more about blog carnivals and to submit your own posts for inclusion, visit www.blogcarnival.com.

Use Article Directories – There are tens of thousands of article directories online. An article directory allows people to submit articles they’ve written on any topic and categorize it so that other website owners and publishers of newsletters can find it when searching for articles on a specific topic. When you submit an article to a directory, you give permission for other people to reprint that article – but only if they include your author byline with a link to your website. Each time your article is republished, you gain another link to your website which is great for SEO purposes – and it also gives you the potential to receive traffic from individuals who read the article and click the link to find out more. Some of the more popular article directories include iSnare.com, EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and GoArticles.com. Once again, this is a strategy that is free to use but offers the best results if you do it consistently. Aim to submit one or two articles per week on an ongoing basis to several article directories. Writing articles on topics related to your website has the added benefit of establishing yourself as an expert in your industry.

Write an Article for Another Newsletter – Visit websites that are likely to have site visitors who would be interested in your own website. If they offer a newsletter, ask to write an article for their newsletter in exchange for a link to your website. Often, the article is accepted in exchange for payment for advertising – as long as you make the article informative and interesting rather than a blatant advertisement. Not only can this generate new visitors to your website, but it also helps establish yourself as an expert in your field of expertise.

Traffic generating methods do not have to cost a fortune in order for them to be effective. If you use the methods in this article with consistency, you’ll start seeing positive results from your efforts.

Debbie Dragon is a freelance writer providing articles for Trace Media – a New York seo company specializing in getting websites up, and making sure they perform to their full potential.

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