Everyone knows that traffic is everything when it comes to making a profitable website. No matter how good your content is or how great your sales pitch is, if there are no visitors there will be no sales. In this article I'm going to show you seven ways to get traffic to your site and most of them are free.

1. SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the best way to get traffic to your site. It's free and if done correctly will have a long term effect. To properly optimize your site only requires a few things: your keywords in your domain, your title and in your heading tags. All of your content should be relevant and you should have your keyword in about 1 to 4% of your content as well as sprinkling relative phrases through out. Sometimes you will get more traffic from your related keywords than the ones you were going after.

2. Article Marketing. Don't let anyone tell you article marketing is a waste of time. Besides the fact that you will get visitors from your resource link, article marketing can also have a profound impact on your search engine rankings as well. Write enough high quality articles and you can literally force your way to the first page of the results, if not to the top place itself.

The key to using article marketing efficiently is that your articles really need to be useful to the reader. If the content is good your articles themselves will get picked by the engines and even if you submit the same article to multiple directories, all versions of it may show up in the SERPs, sometimes on the same pages.

3. Video Marketing. Video marketing works the same as article marketing, only of course, you're using videos. You will see some boost to your rankings if you add a link in your description box, even though they appear to be nofollow links, and if a video is done well it should entice the viewer to visit your site. I personally believe video is used better as marketing tool, but you should post at least one video for traffic purposes for every new site you build.

4. Social Networking. There are so many ways to use social networking that I couldn't possibly cover them all here. Entire books have been written about how to use sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to drive visitors to your site. You can use them to network to meet possible customers or visitors or just as a place to post links to your sites or videos. The possibilities are endless.

5. User Created Content Sites. Sites like Hubpages and Squidoo are a great place to build mini sites that drive traffic back to your main website. They're free to join and you can create as many Hubs or Squidoo lenses as you want. Besides directing traffic to your sites, these content sites have high page ranks and the links you place on them pointing to your own site will help move your site up in the results.

6. Pay Per Click. PPC is good way to drive traffic to your site especially if your objective is to capture their email address to market to them later. The drawback, of course, is that it costs money and when being used for email capture is a little hard to track unless you create separate landing pages for each keyword. PPC can be used to drive visitors to your main site, but if they do not stick around and read a little, those visits can actually hurt your rankings because of increase bounce rates and short visit durations.

7. Email Joint Ventures. If you have an email list you can make deals with other site owner to exchange emails. The way is should work is that you send an email to your readers encouraging them to visit the other site and then that site owner does the same for you. Never actually trade email lists with another person. That is a violation of every autoresponder's rules and it's also a violation of the trust that your subscribers placed in you not to abuse their information.

There's my seven ways to drive traffic to your site. They are listed in the order that I feel are most effective, so just start at the top and work your way down.

For more information on how you can drive as many as a million visitors to your websites a month and earn money online, visit http://www.notgettingrichquick.com.