If you are new to Internet marketing you might have no idea how to drive traffic to your website. Don't panic! Generating targeted traffic does take some effort but it is not actually so difficult. There are several reliable methods which are easy to do and either free or cheap. So let's look at some of the easiest techniques that you can use to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Starting with some of the free traffic ideas for your website, at the top of the list comes "article marketing"

Article Marketing

Article marketing is the process of writing articles and publishing them on the Internet. You can publish your articles on your website or blog, or on article directories. At the foot of your article you will include a short blurb about yourself and post your website address as a link.

Submitting articles to article directories is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website. Write about topics related to the products or services that you are dealing with on your website and people who are interested in finding out more will be able to visit your website via the link at the bottom of the articles that you've submitted.

Most article directories are free to submit to, so you can write and publish your articles without spending a single dollar. Some of the best article directories on the Internet include:

articlecity.com ezinearticles.com ideamarketers.com goarticles.com linksnoop.com

Start A Blog

Starting a blog is a very easy and effective marketing strategy - and it is free! You can set up a free blog on Blogger.com in a matter of minutes. When your have made your blog, link it to your website. Blogger.com is owned by Google so you can be sure that Google will regularly come by and crawl the postings on your blog. It is advisable to keep your blog updated with posts every day if possible. You can vary the length of your blog posts. Any time you post an article to your website or an article directory, talk about it on your blog and link your post to it.

Online Forums

Get into the habit of visiting online forums that are related to your business. Join in the discussions with helpful contributions. In most cases you will be able to discreetly promote your website by putting your links in your signature line. If your signature is compelling, without being too loud or large, you will probably generate some more traffic to your website.

Traffic Exchanges

Sign up for a free account with a handful of traffic exchange websites. On a traffic exchange website you can submit a link to your website and will be able to earn credits by browsing other members' sites on the exchange. The more credits you earn, the more often your website will be viewed by other members on the traffic exchange. This is a quick and popular method of generating traffic to your site. Here are some of the biggest traffic exchanges:

Trafficg.com

Trafficswarm.com

LotsMoreHits.com

Get Linked!

The World Wide Web is a huge network of links. If you want some of the action you will need to get as many good quality links back to your site as you can. Contact website owners whose websites related to your category. Ask for a mutual link from their site to yours, or if you have a budget, find out how much they would charge for a small classified ad on their website.

As your skills develop you will learn how to drive traffic to your website with other, more complex methods too, but for now these five techniques are have described are great ways of generating targeted traffic and building up your Internet business.