If you want to make money online, you will need to get visitors to your website. HOW?

By driving traffic to your site by advertising.

But this is expensive and do you really know if it will work for you. I am going to share with you 5 ways to generate free traffic for you to use.

1. Article Marketing- Start by writing informational articles in your niche. Make them about 500 words or so, the great part is that you can add your affiliate link on the bottom. You can submit your articles to as many directories that you choose. The great part is they never expire and when others look for free content, they may choose yours and reprint it on their sites or in their news letters. If you don’t think you can write your own articles, you can always hire a ghost writer at elance.

2. Forum Marketing- One of the most effective forms of free advertising out there. Here you will interact with people who match your product or service. Your affiliate link is attached to your signature with every post you make. You cannot promote your products directly or you will get kicked out. Start by reading posts and asking and answering questions. Also if you do write those articles ask others to critique them for you, they might like your content enough to use on their own websites.

3. Blogging- The first step is to go to blogger and create a blog. Start with a few pages and keep adding to them. Posting content allows it to get picked up by search engines. You will also want to go to ping o matic to inform all blog services about your posts to get them into the search engines. Google own Blogger, so eventually it will get picked up. Start pinging every time you update or put new information on your blog.

4. Free Classifieds- These are just like the ads that you see in your local newspaper, but they are on the internet. Most free sites are not worth your time, but if you look for formal looking sites that are up to date you should get some traffic from these.

5. Traffic Exchanges- There a quite are few online for you to use. You enter your url and it is presented on a rotation with other members of the exchange. Build a squeeze page on your website or make a blog to send them to. You can easily create your own free page using blogger or word press. Have a simple headline, a short description about what you have to offer and a opt in form for your auto responder to send them more information at a later time. They run on a credit system so the more you involve yourself the more views your website will get.

Remember to always track your advertising so you know what’s working and what’s not.

I hope this has given you some ideas on how to start generating free traffic. Take one idea and run with it for 90 days, then move on to the next and so forth.