Pay per click is the fastest way to get targeted traffic, but many webmasters just can not afford it. The nice thing about ppc traffic is you can get on page one of a search engine like Google or Yahoo in a matter of minutes once your campaign is set up. The disadvantage is the cost which eliminates many of us from doing it.

You can still get quality targeted traffic if you do it right. A good place to start is doing that I call forum marketing. Joining online forum discussion groups can be a tremendous source of quality traffic. In this type of marketing you want to join a forum that relates to the theme of your website. Join in the discussion and offer something to the group. As your reputation grows so does the trust people naturally have in you. Most forums will let you have a signature file containing a little classified ad about you or your business. You can include the url to your website and this is how you get traffic from forum marketing. There are people who lurk in the shadows of forums and get all of their ideas just from the links in the profile or signature file of the members posting. Some of those people may become your best traffic and it only cost you the time to be involved.

Article marketing is another excellent form of free traffic. If you can develop a style in your articles that is both informative and entertaining your readers will want to learn more about you. In your articles you are allowed to include a resource box. This is a chance for you to direct the readers to your website or blog. By telling them to check you out after they have read your article you will get some free traffic. Knowing where to submit your articles to get the greatest number of readers is important as well. Generally directories such as EzineArticles.com and IdeaMarketers.com are two of the best, but there are literally thousands of directories you can submit to. Using an article submission service such as SubmitYourArticle.com is a great way to get your articles out to hundreds of directories with one click. They offer a great program called Article Leverage that allows you to re-write one article into hundreds of unique versions. This helps you avoid any duplicate content penalty if you feel there is one.

Nowadays to compete for free targeted traffic you must have a blog. Even better is a Wordpress blogging platform which helps you to take complete advantage of social bookmarking. Getting your blog articles in directories such as Netscape and Digg can bring you all kinds of free traffic when your articles are read. A side benefit is that search engines love social directories. A well written article can end up on page one of Google in a couple of days bringing you hundreds or even thousands of free visitors for days, weeks, months, and even years to come. If you are not blogging and doing it correctly you need to get going on that.

This was just a few ways to generate free website traffic. There are many more ways and you are only limited by the time you have to explore and implement them. The key is to do as many as possible. Over time you will save a lot of money and generate a large base of repeat traffic as well.