If you have been finding it tough to drive traffic for your business on the internet, then this might be the solution for you. Whether you’re an affiliate selling online products and services or you own a blog, you need to understand that driving traffic is a continuous task. One cannot expect to just sit back and wait for visitors to come automatically. Though attracting traffic is difficult, you can reap the benefits of online business by following these simple methods. I have come up with a few simple tricks that can help you to attract traffic for free:

Optimizing the site for search engines

Search engines have always been at the top and they will continue to be the most powerful tool for driving free traffic. You need to do your homework well when you are trying to rank your site on powerful search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. By searching the relevant keywords and investing some time for optimizing the site you can surely expect to attract huge amount of traffic for your website.

Social marketing

You would be well aware of this platform that proves to be the best area for promoting your product. Make sure you put up a nice brief of your product or the service you provide and you can expect to get huge amount of traffic through referrals on social networks like Facebook, Google plus, Twitter and much more. It is important that you mention all the important features of your product while you share it on social networks as it helps in attracting more and more visitors. People share this with their friends and it ends up with huge amount of people who could be your prospective customer.

Utilizing social bookmarking websites

Social bookmarking is yet another way that is a powerful tool for attracting free traffic. You need to learn the correct way of utilizing the social bookmarks and you are through with it. You can read my detailed explanation about utilizing social bookmarking in my tutorial. Sites like stumble upon, Delicious, Digg, etc. make sure that your products are shared with as many people possible and you get more and more referrals.

Focusing on forum marketing

Forum marketing proves to be one of the easiest ways of targeting traffic. You need to make sure that you are sharing the products or the service in the relevant forum and it will help you in getting the target visitor for your online store. For example if you are selling a health product then you must make sure that you are sharing it in the correct thread where people discuss on health and fitness stuff. Some of the famous forums that can help you out are digital point, warrior forum, wickedfire and various similar forums.

Exchanging links with websites in similar niche

Getting links from other site that are from similar niche is yet another way to optimize your site. You must make sure that you are able to get links from nofollow attributes, as the biggest advantage of nofollow links is that they bring huge amount of free traffic. Webmasters who manage to put their link in a visible place on the site with high volume traffic can expect to get huge amount of hits per day. While exchanging links you should take precautions that you are not sharing the links with bad neighbours as it would harm the rankings of the website.

Free promotion techniques

You might be aware of some free promotions techniques that can be pretty helpful in selling your products. Promoting through directory submissions, various listings and free classified ads is an effective technique to drive free traffic for your online store. Huge amount of businesses have benefited from this technique and you should look to reap benefits of this promotion method.

Using viral content

As the name suggests viral content helps in spreading different aspects about the product like a virus. Viral content makes sure the content is shared with as many people as possible and your site gets better hits. In this process once the user likes the content about your product they start sending it to their friends and the website starts getting more and more customers. Viral contents can also include presentation white boards or an interesting video on the product you are selling.

Entering into joint ventures

This is another way to get better traffic if you have a nice blog network. If you feel that you have a nice network and entering into a possible joint venture would help in promoting your business then don’t wait. You can enter into venture through facebook pages, twitter accounts or getting involved in an affiliate business. You just need to make sure that you don’t need to invest in this venture, though sharing some amount of profits doesn’t harm if your website is receiving nice traffic.

Utilizing offline promotion techniques

Offline promotion is yet another form of getting free traffic that has been in demand. Though most of the work is conducted through online mediums but offline techniques still help and it could prove to be a powerful technique. Sharing the Url of your website in your business cards, souvenirs, etc. would attract people and they would surely visit your website while searching for the product.

Including the Url in signatures

You must make sure that you are sharing the Url of your website wherever you make a post. For example if you make a comment in a forum or post a thread then the Url of your website should be visible in your signature. This is known to be a clever technique that attracts people to click on the Url of your website and they would automatically be directed to your website. If you want to focus the attention to some particular product –page then you can include the Url of that page in your signature and the visitors would be re-directed to that page.

Though directing traffic to your website for promoting the products is a difficult technique but it can be made simple by utilizing some effective techniques. It is a vast topic and a continuous process, with the changing algorithms of various search engines you need to make sure that you stay updated to get more and more free traffic for your website.