How To Get More Traffic Than You Can Handle - For Free

There are as many types of business and website out there as there are people on the internet - everyone has their own angle, their own product and their own way of building their business. But one thing is common to all these businesses - they all need traffic! Without traffic, your website is just a pretty picture on your computer screen. With enough of the right traffic - it can be the source of residual income for years to come...

There are basically two kinds of traffic out there on the internet - the first kind is what I call "driven" traffic. This is typically traffic that you have paid for - whether through a pay per click ad, or a banner ad on someone's website or perhaps a classified ad, online or offline. This traffic can be very lucrative - especially once you get a finely tuned pay per click campaign running, you can get very targeted traffic sent your way. The problem that I have found is getting that "finely tuned" campaign can be disastrously expensive - especially if you are just starting out. It is frighteningly easy to run up a significant PPC bill and see no results. The second problem with PPC advertising is that if you stop paying, the clicks stop coming...

Which brings us to the second source of traffic - this one I call "attracted" traffic. With attracted traffic, people are pre-sold on what you have to say and to offer before they even visit. By definition - that means they are targeted visitors, making them much higher quality, and more likely to get involved with your business - whether that's joining your mailing list or buying your products. Also - attracted traffic always tends to be cheaper or even free because you are not forcing anything!) and they keep on working indefinitely. Something that you create today can, and will, continue to work for you and actually become stronger and stronger.

I just want to make sure everyone got that - I'm talking about a cheap, or even free, source of traffic - that keeps working long after you initiate it and actually becomes more and more effective the longer it exists!

Now - if you've been following any of the search engine optimisation emails and blogs over the last couple of years, you'll have learned how upset people get every time Google changes their algorithms. The reason they get so upset is that they have just figured out how to "play" the current algorithms, but now they have to rework everything for the new algorithm. Now Google know that they are being played and that's exactly why they change things - if they served up a bunch of spam every time you used their service, they would not have a lot of customers. It's not surprising that they are working to deliver quality content each time.

Are you starting to see what attracts traffic the best in the long term? It's got nothing to do with being clever or trying to play the system or having to understand how search engines work. This is all summed up in three words - "Content is King"! This is the way to build your traffic with this method:

Firstly - you need to be in a business that you either know a lot about, or are prepared to learn a lot about. Content is about sharing knowledge - you don't need to become an expert right away, but do your homework so that you can be knowledgeable.

Next - build your website for your business. That could be anything from a small landing site for an affiliate program, all the way to a full blown ecommerce site. But to create your content - make sure you have a blog on there. As you develop your business, share with your customers what you have learned, what people are asking you and anything else that is relevant. Just make the commitment to update this blog regularly - daily, weekly, monthly - what's important here is that you keep this fresh by adding new posts.

Finally - start publishing articles. You're going to get the material for these articles from all the research you've been doing, your blog posts and even from your customers. Bring this together into 400 - 900 word articles and submit them to article directories. Those dreaded search engines index the article directories regularly, so your article will start to show up very quickly - and of course, each article has a link to your main website in the resource box. That's the quick result - the exciting part is that those articles get republished by others wanting content for their websites and newsletters, etc. Now your article is being spread all over the internet - viral marketing is widely talked about? That's what this is - create a quality, informative article and you won't even believe how much coverage you can get, it's almost free AND Google will always index it because they are looking for content.

Bottom line - if you create good content, you will attract targeted traffic in all the volumes you can handle. Don't expect overnight results, but the returns can keep coming for ever!