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.

A large percentage of new bloggers want to make it big, to have a blog that tons of people visit and money pouring in. The truth is this rarely happens, and if your goal is to make money online, getting tons of people to your site is the wrong way to go about it.

I will probably get booed off the blogosphere for stating the obvious and so many people are ready to defend social media successes, but rarely do any of those defending it actually make money from the traffic that sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon deliver.

I won’t lie to you and say that if you make the front page of Digg you won’t get a ton of traffic, because you will. But did you know that most of Digg’s front page stories are generated by just a handful of people? The rest of the stories are generated by everyone else who is using the site. (Grip time) The traffic from these sites rarely comment, subscribe, buy, share or hang around.

When I first started blogging I used to think that social traffic was the end all and be all of blogging and that having good stats was better than anything. But if your goal is to make money, go where the money is and where you need to go in order to get paid. Provide for or target the people who are looking for a solution to their problems. Digg users aren’t looking for something in particular, they are looking for something random or weird that they can entertain themselves with for a few minutes while they kill time at work. They aren’t going to sign up for an affiliate program or buy a book. They are simply wasting time and floating from one thing to the next.

Making money online more often than not requires you to do and talk about the things that social traffic sites shy away from. This would be the niche blog or abstract art dealer site. By catering to the people who are looking for specific things like a service or collectibles you will find there is money to be made.

Before you persecute me saying you can convert that massive social media traffic, I will admit that many people can convert that traffic and have perfected the monetization of mass traffic flow. In the end, for me, if comes down to the amount of time spent achieving that goal and if that can sustain itself. If you stop for one week pressing, shouting, friending, digging, stumbling and so on, your business will wither. But if you set up a site that generates nice and consistent traffic and money you now have a business model. Don’t forget that a lead in the hand is worth more than a thousand fly by.

*For the record I have obtained mass traffic including having a number of posts hit the Buzz page on StumbleUpon, netting upwards of 35,000 page views per article. So it is possible, but simply unsustainable in the long run.

*Inspired by Vic and Grizz

Over the last month give or take I have been running a test for this blog to determine what kind of traffic and visitors I would receive if I put the least amount of effort into running my blog.

I did 11 posts over the past 30 days, just about averaging 1 post every 3 days for the non-math majors. Along with minimal posts, I quit buying Entrecard ads or promoting in any other way. I noticed a little down tick in traffic and comments as fewer posts are appearing but has been pretty consistent since, with about 330 unique visits per day and 600ish page views.

If you notice that little up tick towards the end of the chart, that was a result of my last post with the help of a WordPress plugin called Auto Social Poster (not an affiliate link). What you can do is have you post submitted to various different bookmarking sites at the time of posting. The plugin isn’t free, but I would highly recommend it if you are running a WordPress Blog.

I found that instead of posting and promoting, I can focus more on posting and know that promotion is being done. I will now run another experiment here to determine whether posting daily versus every three days with the aid of ASP will result in more traffic. I will continue to not buy any ads on Entrecard in order to preserve the experiment. Instead, I will be giving away all of the credits I accumulate to this month’s the top commenter (horse race can be viewed to the right the side bar —-> ).

On one more note, I have begun to use a mailing list. The purpose of the list is to provide only marketing ideas and marketing strategies to subscribers. I will not spam you or try to sell you anything. It is simply for the people serious in receiving free marketing ideas and using them anyway you see fit. To subscribe, fill in your email to the right sidebar and hit submit.