Promoting a product on the Internet can be expensive. Not only that but you are never assured that the advertising you are doing is going to work. Therefore, you want to try to learn as many free or nearly free ways to get website traffic as possible. Here are 3 ways that have proven to be effective for Internet marketers in the past.

1. Article marketing continues to lead the way in free advertising. Writing articles a person would find interesting is a way to brand yourself as an expert, as well as develop free traffic.

If you go to any article directories such as Ezinearticles.com you will find articles written by people who are looking to get traffic to their website. They do this by including a resource box at the bottom of the article that contains a link back to their website address.

The more articles you have online in various directories the more potential traffic it can be for you. The only real cost to you is the time it takes to write and submit your articles.

2. Another way to use your article writing skills is to start a blog and update it on a consistent basis. Each blog article that you write should be social bookmarked to social directories as a potential way to get free traffic.

Traffic can come back to your blog in the form of the reader who is in the social directory, as well as from search engines to use your bookmarks as bait to rank your blog for targeted keyword phrases. Also people can subscribe to RSS feeds for your blog and be updated every time you make a new blog post.

3. Traffic exchanges are an easy way to get exposure for your business and get traffic to it too. Many people use traffic exchanges to build a mailing list by promoting a splash page on it.

The best traffic exchanges are ones that are credit based. You can either purchase credits to have your ad shown, or you can accrue credits by surfing on that traffic exchange. The more credits you have the more times your ad will be shown, which can lead to free website traffic.

One thing that I would suggest is that you master one form of traffic generation before taking on another one. This will help you become an expert in how to do it, and will also give you the maximum results from this particular free website traffic method.