Driving targeted traffic to a website is where a lot of people seem to have difficulty. Generating traffic does take daily consistent effort but it is not difficult, you just need to have time, perseverance and patience. Whilst there are several reliable methods this guide looks at 5 free internet marketing methods that you can use to drive traffic to your website.

When you start off marketing your website your goal is to build back-links to your website. The more back-links pointing to your site will mean higher search engine rankings which will result in free organic traffic. Your ultimate goal of course is for your site to appear high up on the first page of Google. At the top of the list of free traffic generating methods is article marketing.

1. Article Marketing

Writing articles and publishing them on the Internet is known as Article Marketing. Don't panic - you do not have to be an author! You can add unique content to your website or blog using your articles as well as submit them for publishing on article directories. In order to gain back-links, at the end of your article you will include a resource or author's bio box where you can say a few words about yourself and post your website address as a link.

One of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website is by submitting articles to article directories. By writing about topics related to the products or services that you are marketing on your website people who are interested in finding out more will be able to visit your website via the link in the resource box of your article.

As the majority of article directories are free to submit to, you can write and publish your articles without spending any money at all. Here are a few of the best article directories on the internet that you can submit your articles to: Buzzle, Ezine Articles, ArticlesBase, Article City, Idea Marketers, GoArticles, Article Alley.

2. Set Up Your Own Blog

A free, easy and very effective marketing strategy is starting your own blog. Blogger provides you with the opportunity to set up a free blog in 3 easy steps. Once you have set up your blog be sure to link it to your website. Google owns Blogger so you can be sure that the Google bot will regularly crawl the postings on your blog if you post regularly. Try and post every day if possible and vary the length of your blog posts. It is a good idea that once you add an article to your website or an article directory to write a little about it on your blog and link your post to it.

3. Participate In Online Forums

It is highly recommended that you join a few online forums that are related to your business. Then get involved on a daily basis in the discussions with helpful contributions. Most forums allow you to put links in your signature line and so you will be able to promote your website. A carefully worded signature that is not too loud or large can generate targeted traffic to your website.

4. Promote With Traffic Exchanges

Go ahead and sign up for a free account with a few traffic exchange websites. Traffic exchanges allow you to submit a link to your website and will be able to earn credits by browsing other members' sites on the exchange. You can surf freely for credits or you can buy them and this is a quick and popular method of generating traffic to your site. The more credits you earn, the more often your website will be viewed by other members on the traffic exchange. It is advisable to use a splash page on a traffic exchange rather than your website.

5. Linking

The Internet is actually made up of a huge network of links. In order to get some of the action you will need to get as many good quality links pointing back to your site as possible. You can contact website owners whose websites are related to your category and ask for a mutual link from their site to yours, or find out how much they would charge for a small classified ad on their website. Submit your website to the online directories too to gain further back-links.

You will learn how to drive traffic to your website with other, more complex methods too, as your skills develop but for now the above internet marketing methods are proven ways of generating targeted traffic and building up your Internet business.