Website traffic is what drives your online business. It is the goal of all advertising efforts. Only by getting traffic to you website can you get those customers that mean money in your pocket. Many believe if you build a website that the customers will automatically come. That is not true. You have to let them know you are there and what your purpose is. This means advertising your site. But, advertising can be very expensive. How can you get around that?

The answer to getting traffic to your website without eating up any profits you might receive from your sales is to get free website traffic. How can you do that, you might ask? How can you get anything for free?

There are several methods to get free website traffic. Some are more effective than others. Some require more work than others. But, the bottom line is, they are all free. Examine the particulars of each method and decide which one best suits your situation.

Some of the methods for gaining free website traffic are:

Traffic exchange systems

Search engine submitters

Click exchanges

Website directories

Referral bar accounts

RSS feed displays

Various widgets such as search boxes, page rank boxes, keyword ranking, quizzes, weather, quotes, riddles and jokes

As you can see, there are many tools to obtain free website traffic. You just have to be discriminating about what you use. Some require very little time, just installation time, such as widgets and search engine submitters. Others require more time, such as click exchanges. Some don't require much time, but may not have as dedicated traffic as you might want. These include referral bars and traffic exchange systems.

Let's examine a few of these methods so you can make informed choices about what is best for you. You may decide to use all of them, or you may just pick a couple that you feel will bring you the most traffic for the least effort.

Traffic exchange systems are those programs where you get a snippet of html code to add to your website. When someone visits a site featured in the exchange, you get credit and your site will be featured on someone else's site. Of course, systems vary as to how targeted they are, but if you get in one that targets traffic well, you can get a lot of traffic for little effort. Your website traffic will increase exponentially as your get more and more traffic that clicks the links featured on your site, resulting in your site getting featured on many other sites.

Search engine submitters are snippets of code that you place on your website and it produces a box that readers can type their website into and submit it to major search engines with one click. These are very popular and will draw traffic to your site in order to submit their sites. If you have a good website, you can make customers of them while they are there.

Widgets are another method to drive traffic to your site. These, too, are snippets of code that you place on your site. The widget draws surfers to the site to take part in the widget. Widgets include quizzes, puzzles, weather information, keyword analyzers and such. Surfers go to your site to use the widget, and hopefully will become a customer.

Some of the methods for getting free website traffic, such as referral bars, click exchanges, and traffic exchanges are just code that you put up on your site and your site is put into a rotation based on how many times it is clicked from your site. This requires that you have some traffic to your site to start with, but will soon increase your traffic exponentially as clicks deliver more traffic to your site, which in turn leads to more traffic.

Though free means no money involved, there are some costs, such as your time to install, etc. Still, what is a little time invested to get all the free website traffic you want.