One of the easiest methods of generating traffic is to use Pay per Click (PPC) advertising like Google Adwords. However, this method may prove to be very costly as average cost per click will be very high if your target market is a competitive one. For the budget conscious, there are more economical ways to generate traffic but it may involve a little more work.

1. Blog About Your Site

Search engines love blogs and best of all they are free. Create an interesting intro about your site in your blog and link it to your site or better yet, create a permalink to your site in your blog menu. One of the most popular blog sites on the Internet is Blogger.com. You can create a blog in Blogger in as little as 10 minutes and with a little HTML, you can customize the appearance of your blog easily. If you would like to have even more control of your blog, you can create a Wordpress blog that can be hosted on your website. Go to Wordpress.org to learn how to install a blog on your web host. Post regularly on your blog to continuously attract new visitors and the search engine spiders.

2. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques

Although the importance of search engines has reduced slightly with the advent of Web 2.0, search engines are still the main source of traffic for most websites. So it pays to make sure that your website is properly optimized for the search engine spiders. There are on-site optimization techniques and off-site optimization techniques. One of the easiest methods to perform on-site SEO is to add a sitemap to your website. But off-site SEO is most important, so getting a reciprocal link to your website from a high traffic site or a high page ranked site would be very helpful in your search engine rankings. To learn more about SEO and reciprocal linking, check out Brad Callen's informative Website Traffic Course that you can download for free from www.seoelite.com

3. Write articles on topics related to your website and submit them to article directories

Articles are a great way to automatically generate external links to your website. Write a few articles related to the topic of your website and add your website address in the resource box that you can include in all the articles that you have written. Submit these articles to popular article directories like www.articleteller.com, www.goarticles.com, www.ezinearticles.com and www.isnare.com. With every link to your website in your articles, you can generate more visitors and thereby improve your ranking in the search engines. You can also submit your articles to online newsletters or magazines in subject areas that are related to your topic. This will help establish you as an expert in your field and generate buzz for your website.

4. Post and respond to discussions in online forums

Search for popular online forums related to your website topic and become an active participant in these forums. If the forum allows you to include a signature box in your posts, add your website address in the signature box. Your website address will then be shown every time you post or respond to discussions. Besides attracting targeted like-minded visitors from the forums, you can also improve your search engine ranking by getting links to your website from every one of your posts.

5. Use Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges can generate traffic although they are not as effective as the above methods because the traffic generated is not targeted traffic but it is a very immediate and direct way of generating traffic to your site. Traffic exchanges are basically member sites that generate traffic to your site by displaying your site to members of the traffic exchange when you view other members' sites on the traffic exchange surf system. They are usually used to generate traffic to mini-sites or splash pages as the sites on traffic exchanges need to be immediately attractive to the surfer to command his attention. There are many traffic exchanges on the Internet and most of them are free; just search for "traffic exchange" on the search engines. Using a traffic exchange may also be time-consuming as it involves spending time surfing other members' sites everyday but it is relatively easy to do so, just allocate an hour or two daily on the traffic exchange to generate traffic to your own site.

To find out which blogging sites, article directories, online forums or traffic exchanges are worth your while, check out RatingsHub.com. Ratings Hub is a user-based review and rating website that has user reviews and ratings of many products and sites in these categories.

Using the above 5 traffic generation ways regularly and consistently will generate much needed traffic to your website. The key is to do it on a consistent basis and be patient! Some methods do require time to generate results but they can be very effective if applied on a consistent basis and best of all these 5 methods are very cost effective as they hardly cost anything at all besides requiring some time and effort on your part.