Let's assume you're reading this to promote a website. Your website needs traffic and getting that traffic to your site requires either significant time or money and usually both. Let's assume here that you're looking at getting ads for free as far as cost is associated. You're not necessarily looking for something that will magically appear and grant you "free advertising wishes". So, if you're willing to take the time to do some simple things on a regular basis, this article will help you find methods of generating traffic back to your website FOR FREE.



The first thing to start with on a very easy level is to become active in communities and websites with topics similar to the topic your website is about. You can find these very easily by searching within Google on both their blog search as well as within the Google groups. Take time to become involved in the community before you go all out and start plugging your website. You should consider having at least 5-10 posts that contribute more than, "great post, thanks!". Think through what you want to say and add value to the conversation. Participate in forums where you have the option for a "signature" box with the ability to include a link back to your site. Wherever possible, use the keyword that you're trying to get found for as the anchor text as an added SEO benefit.

This may not produce a ton of traffic, but keep in mind, it's free. If you've done your homework on keywords and use them effectively as anchor text, the search engines will begin to rank your site higher and higher. The more natural links, the more chances you have of getting your website listed in the search engines which is quite possibly the best possible "free" advertising you can even get.

Now, there's a lot more to SEO than I can even begin to talk about in this article, so I'll continue with some of the other free advertising methods. If you go to Yahoo and click through to the Yahoo Answers section you can search for keywords for questions people are actually asking and respond to those questions and place a link back to your site wherever appropriate. These typically add the "nofollow" attribute so they won't do much good for search engine optimization, but they will get you traffic to your site depending on how good you are at providing expertise.

You can also search on Google's Blogsearch and find relevant blogs that allow commenting and put a link back to your own blog or website (not usually in the actual comment, but put it in if the blog owner has a URL field). Remember to contribute and add value. Often your ability to add value to a blog will can generate significant results for incoming traffic to your blog.

The next technique is quite possibly a more advanced technique, but for those of you wanting to get into this, you can also get into sites like Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com and watch those top "diggers" or "stumblers" and see what websites they're stumbling or digging and where appropriate or available, add a comment to the blog itself with a link back or even a comment on the actual Digg page with the link. These comments may produce some residual traffic to your profile where you will have already put in the sites and projects you're working on. You can also contribute to several of these sites through Digging or Stumbling sites and adding your site for Stumblers.

When doing all of this "free" advertising, quite possibly the most important thing to do is to have some sort of analytics package on your site. Without this analytics installed, you'll have no idea what is working and what isn't. This is critical so you can truly tell where to put most of your resources. If you get a ton of traffic from Stumbleupon.com but virtually no traffic from some forum, you will want to know this so that you can know where to spend your time in the future.