Many people, especially when they're just beginning in the website game fail to take into consideration the importance of traffic. I know for me, I had some delusion of grandeur that like the movie Field Of Dreams, "if you build it, they will come". I quickly found out that this wasn't the case. As a matter of fact it was the furthest thing from the truth. The truth is that thousands of websites are being created every single day and put on the World Wide Web. Your website is just one of those thousands and thousands, all stacked on top of each other. Unless you figure out a way to generate traffic to your website, it's literally just sitting there adding no value to anything.

The first thing that comes to peoples mind, at least the first thing that came to my mind when I first started was search engines. Search engines are by far the most popular way for strangers interested in what your website is about to find your website. There's no doubt about that. The problem is that you need to be really careful who you listen to about search engines and getting listed on search engines, because it seems like everyone and their brother is a freakin' expert on the subject. And when you start tiptoeing through this minefield, you quickly find out that they all want your money!

When we first started our webmaster told us that for a mere $50 bucks a month he could have our site 'submitted' to all of the search engines and before long we would rank well for our chosen keywords. This all sounded great to us so we went ahead and did it, only to realize that it didn't freakin' matter art all. Just having your site 'submitted' is only a small piece of a very large puzzle. But did our webmaster explain any of this in order to help us out? Nope. He was only interested in our $50 bucks a month. So I made myself an expert on the subject of search engines and quickly realized that he was more or less stealing our money from us.

My point is that many times webmasters know a lot about creating a website (which ours does), but nothing about actually making that website worth anything to anyone. My main point is that none of this matters without traffic. So how do you go about getting people to your site without an advertising budget worth thousands of dollars? Without giving all of the same tired answers like message boards and banner exchanges the best way to get traffic to your site for free is to begin writing articles about your subject of expertise.

The key here is not to write 1 or 2 articles. You have to write a lot of articles and give them some time to do their work. You see, at the bottom of every article you write, there is a resource box with all of your author information and links to your website. Writing articles is like planting seeds. If you're constantly digging up the seed to see if it's starting to grow, it won't grow. And if you plant just 1 or 2 seeds, what are the chances of those plants growing to be healthy plants? But what if you plant 5000 seeds? Are you following me? The bottom line to all of this is that without traffic, having a website means very little and the best and most inexpensive way to generate that traffic is through the writing of articles.