When people think of getting traffic to their site, one of the most common thoughts is to submit their URLs to the search engine directories. This method can often take months and months before your site will actually show up in the listings, and can be very time consuming. It is becoming outdated as a method of traffic generation. While it is still important to do this, one thing gaining in popularity these days is building and exchanging links with other websites, and making sure your link is on other people's sites, pointing back to your site. It is a free and extremely powerful way of advertising!

How do we generate links to our site? One of the ways is through participating in forums. When we do this, we normally include a signature at the bottom of all our posts with a link to our website. When visitors of the forum read a quality post, which offers some valuable information, tips, or help, they are more inclined to click on the link at the bottom of the post, giving you more traffic and potential sales.

Another way to spread your links around the internet is to write and submit articles, with your author information at the bottom, including a link to your site. When a publisher reads your article and gets something of value out of it, they may publish your article on their site or in their newsletter, or even just click on your author link, taking them to your site right away. Again, this is free advertising. Normally your articles and links, once published, will stay on the internet indefinitely, providing you with free advertising for life. A blog would work in the same way, in that you make a post with your author information and URL at the bottom of the post. You can also make comments on other people's posts, leaving your link behind on other people's websites.

Reciprocal linking is one popular linking method. This means that you exchange links with other websites. If you link to their site, they will link to your site - a win-win situation for both. This can be done manually, or with special linking software like Link Machine that automates the process and saves you time. You want to link to sites that have similar content to yours. Linking to your competitors can be a good thing because their website content is similar to yours. However, you risk possibly losing a sale to one of them if they click on that link instead of yours.

One-way linking where you don't have to exchange links, but can just leave yours, is perhaps the better way to go. Posting in forums, writing and submitting articles, and blogs are good ways to get one-way links pointing back to your site. You can also submit your URL to various web directories for free, or a small fee, either manually or with special software like Link Directory Submitter to automate and speed up the process. There are millions of web directory sites, so the number of links you can submit pointing back to your site are practically infinite.

One last thing: Don't forget to be consistent with every action you take, i.e. Contribute to forums, write articles and blogs, and submit your links regularly! Consistency in the end is what produces results!