Everyone knows the number one thing you need to be successful online is traffic to your website. Of course you also need to have a valuable offer for your visitors - a reason for them to transact with you. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. The most crucial aspect of this process is getting the visitors to your site.

Here are some tips for generating website visitors:

Here are a few of the most popular way to get traffic to your site - for free:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Article Marketing
• Video

Let's talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. What this means for you is that you can join into the community and add your own content. Because these sites get so much traffic, Google and the other search engines treat these sites with greater importance in their algorithms. And that's important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong "vote" in favor of your sites - lending you credibility in the search engines. The direct traffic from the Web 2.0 sites themselves is only part of the benefit. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don't have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Articles Sites

Article marketing really builds on the Web 2.0 concept. This is because article websites are really web 2.0 site. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you - so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. In order to get the most free traffic make sure you:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you've chosen
• Use anchor text links in the article and the "resource box"

Video

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. So, just like article marketing, video marketing enables you to add content to authority sites. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it's much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?

• Sign up for YouTube
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Use the tags in your profile to enter the keywords you want to rank for
• Include a link to your main site in your profile
• Upload at least 1 video
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Summary:

If you take action on the items listed here you'll have free traffic in no time.

Return to the home page of Jack Folsgood for more information on internet marketing.