Another popular and time-tested way of generating free traffic to your web site will be using online free classified ads available on the Internet and do your free ads posting online for others to locate you.

Most likely you have heard of using free classified ads web sites to sell your products or services but you may be thinking whether this traditional, time-tested method still work. From my own experiences as a business owner and Internet marketer, I can tell you that they still work because I am still getting sales leads and even sales from those classified ads that I put online.

You may not realize this but there are still many people who will go to online classified ads web sites to buy or sell something. Many buyers will go to such classified ads sites to look for good bargains and sometimes they do find one!

And if you are someone who has no experience selling anything online, online classified ads web site will be a great way to start because such sites tend to have more traffic as compared to a standalone site that you have just built up to sell something where you have no traffic! No traffic equals no buyers!

Some classified ads web sites are free, while some are paid. You may want to use some free classified ads sites before you invest in a paid one!

These are some of the popular online classified ads web sites:
www.craigslist.org
www.ablewise.com
www.usfreeads.com

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived on-going transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of web sites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

It also refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services – such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies – which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to Web technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the web as a platform. Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Some technology experts have questioned whether one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of “Web 2.0″ have existed since the early days of the Web.

In alluding to the “2.0″ version-numbers (in the term “Web 2.0″) that commonly designate software upgrades, the phrase may hint at an improved form of the World Wide Web.

Advocates of the concept suggest that the technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, Web APIs, Web standards and online Web services imply a significant change in web usage. In other words, genuine interactivity if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download.

As used by its supporters, the phrase “Web 2.0″ can also refer to one or more of the following:

• the transition of web-sites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming computing platforms serving web applications to end-users
• a social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation”
• a pronounced distinction between functionality and web technology, enabling significantly easier creation of new business models and processes by using readily available intuitive modular elements
• enhanced organization and categorization of content, emphasizing deep linking
• a rise in the economic value of the Web, possibly surpassing the impact of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s

During the first Web 2.0 conference, the key principles of Web 2.0 applications have been identified as follows:

• the web as a platform
• data as the driving force
• network effects created by an architecture of participation
• innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of “open source” development)
• lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication
• the end of the software adoption cycle (“the perpetual beta”)
• software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of the “Long Tail”
• ease of picking-up by early adopters

If you like to read more about Web 2.0, you can visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

If you have been on the Internet for a while, and especially if you have been doing Internet Marketing, I am very sure you have come across the terms “syndication” or “web syndication” before, even though you may really not understand what they are all about.

Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a web site is made available for other web sites to use. This could mean simply by licensing the content so that other people can use it; Generally though, web syndication refers to making web feeds available from a site, in order to provide other people with a summary of the web site’s recently added content (for example, the latest forum posts or news and announcements).

A large scale web syndication of content started only in 2001. Today, many different types of content are being syndicated on the Internet. Millions of online web publishers such as newspapers, commercial web sites and blogs now publish their latest news headlines, product offers or blog postings in a standard format news feed.

Syndication benefits both the web sites which are providing the information and the web sites which are displaying it. For the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to its pages, making it more attractive to users. For the transmitting site, syndication drives exposure across numerous online platforms. This exchange generates new traffic for the transmitting site — making syndication a free and easy form of advertisement.

The prevalence of web syndication is also of interest to Internet marketers, since web surfers are becoming increasingly wary of providing personal information for marketing materials (for example signing up for a newsletter) and expect the ability for them to subscribe to a feed instead.

Although the syndication format could be any thing transported over HTTP (such as HTML or JavaScript), it is more commonly done through XML.

The two main families of web syndication formats are RSS and Atom, which are also the most well-known formats available.

A lot of online publishers are taking advantage of web syndication to market and promote themselves online.

MySpace.com is another extremely popular, social networking web site that you can use to ‘steal’ traffic from. According to Alexa.com ranking, it is consistently ranked as the top 10 most visited web site in the world! How about having a small amount of traffic sent to your web site from MySpace.com?

To put it into simpler terms, myspace.com is a web site where people can get to know new friends, or to make new friends, interact and connect with each other’s network of friends/associates/family members/business partners etc easily. You can set up a free profile on MySpace.com, view other MySpace.com members’ profiles online and connect to any of them if you like what you see on their profiles.

You can connect your personal profile to someone that you like, and with the person’s approval to add you as a friend or contact, you are able to see his/her network of friends. And likewise, your new friend who has added you will be able to see your own personal network of friends and associates as well.

MySpace.com also allows you to set up your blog, share your videos, music and photos etc online with everyone else.

Here are some ways that you can generate free traffic to your web site:

• Set up a blog for yourself and attract others to read your blog
• Post your comments on someone else’s blog and link back to your own web site
• Upload videos to share with everyone online. Insert your link into your video post to drive back traffic to your own site
• Find interesting videos, comment on them and provide a link back to your web site or give away something. Be as creative as you can be!
• Find people that you like and add them as a friend. If they approve you as a friend, both of you can connect to each other’s network and this increases the exposure of your profile to more people online. This is a great way to build your network as well!
• In the profile that you have created for yourself, write about yourself. What you do, what you are selling (if you are), what you are looking for, provide a link on your profile back to your web site. Tell the world about yourself. Think creative, you do not have to limit yourself.

Just in case you are thinking that MySpace.com is just for youngsters or people who have nothing to do to put up their personal profile. I am sorry but to tell you in your face again that you are wrong. Reputable and highly successful people and businessmen like Anthony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Jack Canfield, John Assaraf etc all have their own MySpace.com profiles!

So, what are you waiting for? Go and sign up for a free MySpace.com account immediately!

Video marketing is another great way to generate good traffic to your web site.

These are some of the things that you can do with video to drive traffic to your site:

1.    Create a video and upload your video for everyone to share on the Internet.
One way of doing it is to create a video using your digital camera or video recorder and put it on extremely high traffic web site such as YouTube or Google Video to tap into their traffic and ‘steal’ some for yourself!

In your video, remember to put a link back to your own web site. I believe you may have seen some really interesting video in action which can generate hundreds or even millions of hits within days of going online. If you are able to do this properly, you can get great traffic to your own web site or blog.

Nevertheless, this method is only good if you are more technical-savvy to create and edit your own videos.

2.    The alternative way is to find very popular or high traffic videos and give your comments on the videos.
If you have already noticed, on many video web sites, you are allowed to leave your comments on a video, or even to create a new video by yourself in response to an existing video that you see on the video sites.

When you put a comment on a video with high traffic, you can potentially tap on those traffic if your comment has been seen by a video viewer on the web site.

Include your web site address on your comment and this allows people to be exposed to your web site address, and if they click on it, or if they are interested to find out more about your web site, they may launch a web browser and surf to your web site. There you go again, free traffic going to your web site.

2 of the most well known video sites are youtube.com and video.google.com. There are of course many other such video sites. Go to google.com and search for them if you need more video sites. If you are a myspace.com user, you can put your comments on those videos that you can find under the myspace.com video sections as well.

Here is a tip for you:
a)    If you are trying to comment on youtube.com, you are not allowed to insert a generic domain name into your comments such as www.mydomain.com. To work around this restriction imposed by YouTube, you can enter something like mydomain (dot) com, or mydomain-dot-com in order for your comments to appear. Most Internet users will be intelligent enough to get what you are trying to tell them!
b)    Some videos owners may not allow your comments to appear under the comments column of their videos when they do their comments moderation for your comments for whatever reasons that they may have. If that is the case, you may want to look for alternative videos to post your comments to get the traffic you want.

One of the best ways that you can drive traffic to your web site for free is via Articles Marketing! This is one method that I love best because it is free, effective and it builds credibility for you online!

To put articles marketing in simple terms: it means that you write an article about a topic, submit the article to articles directories, then allows other web sites or individuals to use your article for their own use but with your author’s credits and copyrights intact so that you are still the legal owner of the article or contents that you have created.

Anyone can become an author and writer online if you want. And these are the steps that you can take to start your article marketing:

1.    Write an article on a topic that you are interested about.
2.    Find a popular article directory to submit your article to. One very popular article directory is ezinearticles.com.
3.    Taking ezinearticles.com as an example, you can go to ezinearticles.com and sign up for a free account to start submitting your articles. Most article directories allow you to set up an online account for free.
4.    Upon successfully signing up for ezinearticles.com (or any article directories that you have chosen), submit your article to ezinearticles.com and wait for the editors at ezinearticles.com to approve your article.
5.    When your articles have been approved by ezinearticles.com, your article will appear on ezinearticles.com and you can reach out to potentially tens of thousands of traffic when you are being featured on ezinearticles.com.
6.    When your article appear on ezinearticles.com, many web sites or individuals/businesses will “pull” your article from ezinearticles.com and publish them on their web sites if they like what you write or if they think what you have written is relevant to what they are doing. What this means is that once you submitted your approved article to ezinearticles.com, you may potentially see many web sites all over the Internet featuring the article that you have written! What do you think this can do for you?

Articles marketing can help you to improve your visibility online and increases the likelihood of people finding you on the Internet.

Using my own experience, I took about 20 minutes to write one article in January 2007, another 10 minutes to submit it to ezinearticles.com. So far, this one article has generated me more than 100 email opt-ins, earned me more than USD$110 as of this writing, plus my article is appearing all over the Internet on other web sites. Not bad for 30 minutes of work! What if I multiply the effort by 10 times? Think about it!

Some tips for you when you write your articles:
a)    Remember to include a link back to your web site in your resource/credit box so that you can direct traffic back to your web to collect opt-in, or to read your salesletter, or to buy something from you etc.
b)    Each article directory has their own rules and regulations for submission of articles, so ensure that you comply to all of them. Failure to do so means that your article will be rejected and you will need to re-edit the article and submit it again to ensure your compliance with their articles writing guidelines before your article will be approved.
c)    There are article submission services that can help you submit your articles to many articles directories if you are wiling to pay for such services. You can search for it online.
d)    If you hate to write, you can also outsource your writing to some ghostwriters for a fee. You can look for ghostwriters online if you need some!

In summary, article marketing is a free, long-term strategy to generate web site traffic. To me, this is one of the best ways available to anyone because if you can do it right, you can do it only once, and get paid many times over and over again!

Another free and effective way to generate traffic to your web site will be the use of forums.

As you should already know, a forum is an online place where you can meet like-minded individuals with interest on the same topics. Traffic to a popular forum can be a lot and this is where you can leverage onto a forum’s popularity and tap into some of those free traffic to your own site.

But how do you do that, you may ask? Well, there are a few ways that you can ‘steal’ some traffic from a forum legally.

1.    One way is to start up your own forum if you know how to.
You must be thinking now: “Hmm… I do not know how to start up a forum!”

Sorry to tell you right in your face but you are wrong! I can teach you or anyone else on how you (or they) can start up a forum within a few minutes even if all of you are not a technical wizard. However, this is not the scope of this article.

Yes, start up a forum for yourself and attract traffic to your site. Usually forums are targeted at certain topics and everyone in a particular forum is usually interested in the same topic. Plus the fact that traffic are usually repeated traffic, which means that a forum user will return to the same forum over and over again in order to participate in the forum discussions. More than 2/3 of my Google AdSense revenue comes from my forums’ traffic, so I know this works!

2.    The other way is to find forums that are relevant to what you are doing for your site and be a forum member there.
Signing up for a forum is usually free, so join the forum community that you are interested in and be part of the forum. Join in the discussions whenever you can and do provide useful and valuable information or advice to the forum community there. If you can build up credibility and a solid reputation for yourself in the forum, then at will even be better.

So how, you are asking “Yes, I understand you, but how do I get traffic to my site from the forum?” The answers are simple, and there are 2 common ways you can steal traffic from the forum that you are in:

a)    Below each of your forum posting, you can include a forum signature below your post. A forum signature can often be a hyperlink to your web site or just a statement that you want to put across to your readers. Whenever someone sees it, there is a likelihood that someone may find it interesting and click on your forum signature. Most forums should allow a forum signature as many forums software allow a forum signature to be set, unless the forum owners or administrators disable this function. A popular forum discussion/thread can have many new and repeated views by forum visitors and you are exposing your forum signature to them. This increases your visibility online and increases the chance of someone clicking on it and going to your web site.

b)    The other way is to write or indicate your web site link in your forum postings. You may be asking someone to review your web site or give you some comments on your web site. Or maybe you have provided some useful information on your forum post and you can re-direct them to another web site whereby they can find more information on what you have posted. For example, the visitors may get a free report on another web site when they follow your link.
However, when you are doing this, be careful of what you are doing because if you are doing advertising blatantly without providing any real value to the forum community, you may be banned by the forum administrators.

This is another free, proven, time-tested and popular way of driving traffic to your web site. Try this out and do this consistently, I guarantee you will see results!

I hope you have enjoyed the first 3 series of “How To Monetize Your Web Site Traffic”. Today, I will talk about Kontera’s ContentLinks, another popular traffic monetization system for you to turn your web site or blog traffic into potential cash!

Kontera’s ContentLinks are contextually relevant keywords discovered in real time on a publisher’s web page that are automatically turned into a link to the most relevant and highest paying text ad from one of Kontera’s thousands of advertisers.

Kontera’s ContentLink In-Text Advertising solution lets you monetize your content in real-time, enabling an incremental increase in ad revenue by providing a new source of untapped ad inventory that does not compete with the other ad programs running on the site.

ContentLink also creates a valuable user experience by serving relevant and informational ads that match the user’s interest and frame of mind.

At the core of Kontera’s patent-pending technology are a set of proprietary algorithms that enable publishers to maximize their revenue and earn higher Click Through Rates. Statistical text analysis and clustering methodologies are used, combined with semantic analysis procedures.

Kontera’s platform, proven and optimized, on thousands of web pages over the last 7 years, facilitates the analysis of each web page in real-time. Keywords and topics are then extracted and ranked, and then instantly matching to the advertiser’s most relevant text ad.

The greater relevancy between the content, keyword and text ad made possible by Kontera’s proven technology increase the publisher’s revenue.

ContentLink provides the following features:

Instant Implementation
High Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Increased Incremental Revenue
Positive User Experiences
Untapped Sources of Ad Inventory
24/7 Customer Service
Online Reporting
Editorial Integrity
Content Monetization
Publisher Control & Customization
New Publisher Value-Added Functionality
and more…

Are you looking to increase your advertising revenue? Then Kontera enables you to take control of your advertising operations and increase your ad revenue with Kontera’s comprehensive advertising management solution.

Implementation is also very easy. When your sign-up with Kontera’s ContentLinks has been approved, you will be given a piece of code and you only need to paste it into your web pages and Kontera will start to serve ads on your web site. The implementation is exactly similar to Google AdSense or Chitika’s eMiniMalls as well.

Signing up as a publisher is free! You can visit http://www.kontera.com to read more about ContentLink Private Label Publishers Solutions.

The world’s best search engine Google has a very popular revenue-sharing program known as AdSense. It is a fast and easy way for web site publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google advertisements (ads) on their web site’s content pages and earn money from Google. Because the Google ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your web site (or matched to the characteristics/interests of the visitors that your web pages content attracts), you finally have a way to both monetise and enhance your content pages to make some money from Google online.

With Google AdSense, it is also a way for web site publishers to provide Google web and site search functionalities to their site visitors, and at the same time, to earn some money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.

Google also provides many useful tools for their publishers to increase traffic, provide smart analytics, or add interactivity to their web sites when you are accepted into their program, for example, Google Analytics.

So, how does Google AdSense work and how you can make money using Google AdSense? The concept is simple, if you go to Google.com and do a search for something, most of the time, you will see some “Sponsored Links” that appear on the top or right side of the screen that are relevant to what you have just searched for. Advertisers basically pay Google to display these ads and they are charged a pre-determined amount every time their ad gets clicked by an internet surfer. This is known as the Pay-Per-Click advertising in the industry, also known as PPC advertising for short.

With the Google AdSense program, your web site will also display these same, sponsored ads on your site, just like on the Google search engine, and you can get paid for it by Google for visitors’ clicks. Every time a Google ad is clicked on your site, you will receive a certain percentage of what Google receives from the advertiser. Once your account reaches $100, you’ll receive a check in the mail.

The Google AdSense program is free to join, and it combines pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression advertising – meaning that you get paid for valid clicks on the ads on your site or search results pages as well as impressions on your content pages. You will need to have a web site in order to apply for AdSense. (If you need a professional web site, check this out. You will get a free domain name with unlimited domains hosting with this! If you need help, contact me via this blog and I will show you how you can create a beautiful, professional, designer web site within 1 hour even if you do not know any technical skills like HTML! What I am going to show you have put some freelance designers out of job! )

If you already have your own web site, you can also implement AdSense on your web pages immediately after you have been approved by Google for the program.

Google will review your application and follow up with an email to you within 2 to 3 days of your AdSense sign-up. If you are accepted into the program, you can log in to your new Google Adsense account and get the HTML code to insert into your web pages. This is a very simple procedure to do so, hence do not worry about the technical implementation of the program on your web site.

However, I have a tip for you. Build up some contents on your web site or blog first before you apply to Google AdSense, if not, they will likely decline your application. Also, just for your information, there are some people who earn a 5-6 figures income from Google every month just from Google AdSense alone!

You can sign up for Google AdSense using the banner link below:

In today’s instalment of the “How To Monetize Your Web Site Traffic” series, I am going to introduce to you another PPC program known as Chitika – eMiniMalls.

Will you be interested to put an Interactive Merchandise Kiosk onto your web site and get paid for per click onto your kiosk? Does this sounds interesting to you?

Chitika’s flagship product, eMiniMalls, brings any product promotion to life on the Internet.

With Chitika’s eMiniMalls, you can provide your users with relevant content and comparative shopping information without even leaving your web site or blog! You can choose from thousands of products to feature on your web site – from mobile phones to baby strollers.

eMiniMalls enable a convenient, non-intrusive and interactive shopping experience for your audience on your web site. Geo-targeting in U.S., Canada, Europe, New Zealand and Australia means that you can now display localized merchants, products and prices on your web site.

Chitika’s intelligent coding learns and adapts to emphasize products your viewers are interested in buying, bearing in mind that as users interact with eMiniMalls, you earn PPC revenue from Chitika.

This is another great traffic monetization system for your web site to give you an additional source of extra income.

Sign up today via the banner below now: