The whole purpose of building a website is to get it noticed on the World Wide Web. However, without targeted traffic, your website will wither away and die. Traffic is the lifeline of a successful website business. In this short article, I am going to give you just 5 of the many possible ways in which to generate targeted traffic.

1. Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the very best ways for driving targeted traffic to your website. Write an article between 300-500 words and submit it to some of the many article directories on the internet. Be sure to include a resource box at the end of your article with a back link to your site. Make absolutely sure you follow the rules of the article directories you are submitting to. Once your article is approved you can enjoy the traffic it brings for a long time to come.

If you have written an informative article with high quality content, it may be picked up and used by bloggers, ezine publishers and owners of newsletters. Just one article a day submitted to the directories could result in 30 articles sending you traffic on a daily basis.

2. Submitting Blog Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites

There are hundreds of Social Bookmarking sites on the internet today. Sign up for several and submit your blog posts. Be sure to submit your post in the right category. Somebody that is interested in Internet Marketing wouldn't look in the Pets category!

3. Write Testimonials

If you have bought an online product and are happy with it, why not submit a testimonial? The site owner would be very happy to display your testimonial on their site to show other interested customers how great their product is. The beauty of doing this strategy is putting a link to your website on their website. If their website is popular it can generate a lot of traffic for you.

4. Forum Marketing

Forums are a great way for driving targeted traffic to your website. Find a forum that is highly targeted to your website and become involved with the community. You must also create a signature. With your signature, you should provide a link back to your website. Give the reader some value and provide a call to action to induce them to click on your link.

The biggest benefit of all with forum marketing is the fact that the community is a very tight knit group of people who are interested in the same subject, making them extremely targeted prospects.

5. Commenting

If, like me, you may have signed up for many newsletters. Upon reading the newsletter, and if you find it interesting, then why not comment on it? As most of the comments are moderated, it is in your best interest to say something useful and not just a one-liner such as: "Great Newsletter". This doesn't give value to the newsletter or to yourself, so think about creating an informative comment. You will provide a back link to your website. If the newsletter provider has a huge mailing list, then your comment and link will be in front of thousands.

These are just 5 of the very many ways in which you can easily generate huge amounts of traffic to your website for little effort and, best of all, for no cost.

Happy traffic hunting.