We all want the same goal: to Make More Money, but the lifeblood of our Internet Business is traffic. Most of us when first starting out on the Web had, shall we say, less than an ideal amount of marketing dollars to spend on Traffic Generation.

What’s a website owner to do? Well, here’s a quick and dirty list of 7 ways to get FREE Website Traffic.

As a bonus when using all of these methods, you’ll not only get Free Traffic, but you’ll attract Targeted Traffic, which is the holy grail of online visitors. Make it a point to use all of these methods as often as you can cram into your schedule and you’ll start to be rewarded handsomely after a couple months of patience and diligent work.

Backlinks through Comments on other Blogs

Search for high-ranking blogs in or related to your industry and leave regular comments on their posts. Get the Google Toolbar when checking out each site so you can see the PageRank. Really, when you’re just starting out, pretty much anything that has some history and pagerank will help, but if you want to supercharge your results, aim for high pagerank posts that use similar keywords as you. Just make sure you’re actually adding to the conversation and not just typing a couple words for the sole purpose of getting a backlink. Also, check the source code for comments to make sure the links aren’t rel=”nofollow” so that you’re getting credit for all your posts.

Niche Forums

Find forums that are related to your site and become a regular contributor to them. Edit your profile and add a quick call to action with a link to your website in your signature so that everytime you make a post or reply it will automatically insert a backlink for you. Don’t be spammy with your writing; add value to the community.

Social Networking.

I know this one is mentioned everywhere, but still holds true today.Sign up for accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, and Twitter and draft quality information with links in your profile back to your site. Concentrate on useful content with emphasis on building lasting relationships with everyone you meet.

Article Marketing

There are numerous Article Directories where you can submit your work to that all include a Resource Box containing a brief sales pitch and link back to you. Some of the more popular directories can be found at Ezine Articles, Buzzle, GoArticles, and iSnare. I recently wrote an in-depth post on how to Get Free Traffic with Article Marketing if you’d like to find out more about this topic (link to blog below this article).

YouTube and other Video Communities

Open up a YouTube account and spend some time filling out your profile with links to your site and start posting informative videos related to your niche. Make sure to use the description field to your advantage whenever posting videos because it allows you to add more info and keywords that will help your video get ranked higher in the search engines, especially Google, since they own it. Don’t forget to put your web address at the beginning of your description, including the “http://” so it can show up as a clickable link in the “more info” section of the page.
It may seem obvious, but remember to edit your web address into the video at key moments to further expose your site and gain popularity. My Videos are more than Moving Pictures when it comes to Internet Marketing post gives more info (link to blog below this article).

Yahoo! Answers

Get a Yahoo! Answers account and fill-out your profile with website backlink and start answering questions related to your niche. Really try and provide quality responses that help their problems and you may even get picked as a “best answer” and drive a good amount of traffic back to your website.
Additionally, you can link your Yahoo 360 account to this profile for even more exposure. Give great advice, while posting often and you can expect a great response for your efforts. As you complete more and more answers, you have a rating that increases to further boost your expertise in that topic.

Link Exchange with others

The age-old link exchange still has its place in building free traffic and can really thrust your site into stardom if you can build a friendship with the right person. Try opening up the lines of communication between several key owners of popular sites in your niche or a related one and work on building up a trusting work relationship. After some time, go ahead and ask for the link or to write a post as a guest author and see what happens. You don’t know what someone will say or offer if you don’t try in the first place.

Use of these methods will really help with getting Free Website Traffic to your site and the great thing is that all of them will provide long-term results. They build upon one another and each and every link is an additional small boost in traffic. Eventually and with determination, you’ll grow a river of continually flowing traffic that will ultimately allow you to Make More Money Online.

There are many ways to generate traffic to your blog and I have mentioned plenty of them on my blog already, but what I plan on doing today is giving you a list of the methods I found work best.  I have tried many different ways and some of them give short term results while others have given long term results.  I think it is good to have a little bit of both so you get the maximum amount of traffic to your blog.  So below I will split my traffic generation into two categories: short term and long term traffic generation results.

Short Term Traffic Generation:

Yahoo Answers - If you are interested in driving traffic quickly and easily this is a good one for you to try.  What you do is you post answers or questions with links back to your website and write them in a way that interests readers to come visit your website.  You will get hits right away but they usually don’t visit again after the question is gone.

Facebook - I would say that the links you put in your profile are short term.  The reason that is is because all your friends will check out the new link to your blog / website when you first post it up because of the news feeds but then after that it will die down and you usually won’t get anymore new traffic.

Forums - Posting on forums can be a good way to get short term traffic to your blog.  As long as you are posting useful information on the forums and have a good signature with links to your website you will usually get some decent traffic back to your blog.  Usually a lot more traffic then some of ideas mentioned above but then again it is still only be short term traffic.  However one of the other benefits of this type of traffic is the linkbacks to your website which can help raise your PageRank.

Blog Comments - This is pretty similar to forum posts.  Basically you can get a bit of traffic to your blog / website but you are better off doing this to increase your linkbacks which in turn will hopefully increase your PageRank.

Link Exchange sites - Link exchange sites such as linkreferral will generate traffic to your blog as long as you are using them but once you stop so will the traffic.  Most of the traffic generated with this method however is not very good traffic because people are just interested in getting more traffic to their own website.  Since everyone has the same idea in mind no one really sticks around a website to see what it is about.

Twitter - As far as I can see so far this is a short term way of generating traffic to your blog.  May be after getting a very large follower base you can get long term traffic from this but in the mean time you get hits every once and awhile from this.

EntreCard - This is like linkrefferal in that it is basically a link exchange type program.  You can advertise on other peoples blogs and they can advertise on your blog.  It does generate traffic but majority of it is just traffic where people are interested in getting points so they can make more traffic.  It is worth a shot to try but it might not be the best solution in the long run.

Social Networking - This is a awesome way to get a ton of traffic to your blog.  If you can get to the front page of some networking websites you can see up to 50K unique visitors in a day!  This traffic is awesome but it will not last forever and its not easy to get to the front page.  I definitely recommend doing this step but don’t expect to see traffic for months and months after you post something on the website.

PPC Advertising - This is not something I have tried on this website but is something I have done with my full time job.  PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising and what that is is when you pay for each click you get on your advertising to go to your website.  An example of this is Google Adwords where you see advertisements on the right of the search results.  If you click on them the advertiser has to pay for each click on their advertisement.  This is a very good way to get traffic fast to your website but it will cost you and you will only get it when you pay for it.

Long Term Traffic Generation (The Good Stuff!):

Search Engine traffic - This is really good traffic.  If you can do a bunch of SEO on your blog/website and get a bunch of your pages ranked highly in search engines for key terms then you will get a lot of traffic to your website without a lot of work.  This will always be constant traffic as long as you do not get banned from search engines.  So just be careful not to employ black hat SEO techniques and you should be fine.

Article Directories - This is another way to get long term traffic to your blog.  Once you have submitted enough quality articles to article directories you will constantly get traffic from them to your blog and it is good traffic because people are interested in what you have to say.  So if possible try to always add more articles to article directories.

Link Exchanges - As long as the sites you are exchanging links with do not go under you can usually always get traffic from the links you have exchanged with other websites.  There are rumors that Google doesn’t like this type of traffic generation but I think if you do a little bit of it it cannot hurt your website rank and will bring in some more traffic.

Link Baited Websites - There might be another term for this but this is what I want to call it.  Basically what this is is websites that have linked to your website because they found it interesting and wanted to link to it.  If you can write blog entries that are very interesting to users they will most likely link to it and refer to it in their website.  This is great traffic because it is free and you don’t really need to work for it.

Banner Exchange - This is similar to link exchanges in that you exchange a banner with another website and there is a link on the banner.  It is good for long term traffic as long as both websites stay up and active you can always send traffic to each others websites.

So that is it

For now this is the list of things I have tried so far to generate traffic to my blog.  As mentioned in a lot of the paragraphs some of the traffic generated to the website is a lot better then other traffic but all of them are worth a shot.  I would try some of them yourself and see what works best for you.  And remember as long as you write quality content, lots of content, and do some SEO on your website you should get decent traffic from search engines.

Also if you guys have any other traffic methods you would like to suggest feel free to comment below and I can add your recommendation to my list and link back to your website since you are the contributor of the idea.