In this series of “How To Generate Traffic to Your Web Site”, I will talk about one social traffic generation strategy known as social bookmarking.

To put it simply: Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks online.

In the past, everyone used to store their bookmarks on their own computers, for example, when you visit a web site that you like, you bookmark it via your browser on your desktop computer at home. Now, if you are away from home, there is no easy way you can retrieve your bookmark from your home desktop.

However, the availability of Internet and social bookmarking sites had changed this.

Now, you can easily go to any social bookmarking sites and put your bookmarks online on the servers of the social bookmarking sites which you are on. You do not have to rely or go to your home desktop to retrieve your stored bookmarks. With social bookmarking sites, you can retrieve your bookmarks anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the Internet. Not only that, you can even share your stored bookmarks with the world if you like.

A typical social bookmarking site not only allows you to put up your bookmarks online, it also let you decide if you want to keep your bookmarks private for own use, for public access, or for restricted access to your contacts only.

Some social bookmarking sites provide even more functionalities than merely storing and displaying your bookmarks online. However, this is not the scope of this article.

There are a few ways of how you can generate traffic to your web site via social bookmarking:

a) Create your bookmarks online and share with everyone else.
Particularly, bookmark the sites that you want others to know, then share them online for maximum exposure for your sites so that anyone who viewed your social bookmarking profiles on social bookmarking sites can see them and hopefully, to click on the links to your sites.

b) For some social bookmarking sites, whenever you bookmark a web site, your latest bookmark will appear on the home page of the social bookmarking site.
Or for other social bookmarking sites, your profile will be featured on the home page of the site whenever you just bookmarked a site.
All these bookmarking tasks actually expose your bookmarks to more Internet users online, which in a way will increase your site visibility online, and possibly additional traffic as well because they provide a link back to your web site.

c) If you have a web site or blog, you can also put some social bookmarking scripts or plugins onto them so that you can allow any of your visitors to easily social bookmark a page or blog post on your web site/blog to share with everyone else. This simple method of allowing others to share your contents online will also bring you more free traffic.

Here are some more time-saving tips for you:
-    If you are looking for a great social bookmarking script or plugin, you must try www.addthis.com. I spent a lot of my time looking and trying out many of such scripts and AddThis is the one of the best out there, with the easiest implementation among many others.
-    Another great resource will be www.onlywire.com. If you are using multiple social bookmarking services and you are tired of having multiple shortcuts to add a social bookmark, then OnlyWire will save your time by allowing you to send once to OnlyWire.com and it will auto-submit your social bookmark to many social bookmarking sites that it supports. (Note: Although OnlyWire saves you time, it does not work perfectly as some auto-submissions to some of the supported social bookmarking sites do not work properly)

Squidoo.com is one of the world’s most popular web site for people who want to build a web page about their passions. Based on current Alexa’s ranking, Squidoo.com is the top 500 web sites in the world.

On Squidoo, you can write about the books you like, how to set up a blog, how to be a better lover, or just to share your knowledge or interest online, or even to spread the word about the stuff you love by creating a lens.

Signing up with Squidoo is fast, free, and super easy. You can do it within 5 minutes.

Basically, you can write about anything that you are passionate about on Squidoo even if you are not a technical person or web designer. At the same time you can also choose to raise money for you or even charity at the same time!

You can do all these by creating a lens on Squidoo. A lens is what Squidoo calls it and it is nothing but just another web page that you can create on Squidoo without knowing HTML, just like how you can create a free blog on Google’s blogger.com

Many web site owners experienced great results using Squidoo because Google indexes Squidoo pages very fast. Many of these site owners had problems getting their keywords ranked on first page of Google for many years but within a relatively short period of using Squidoo, they get ranked on first page of Google for the keywords that they wanted!

I experienced this myself too when Squidoo was relatively new on the Internet. I was promoting an affiliate program and in my test campaign in trying out Squidoo, I realized that my Squidoo page had beaten the product owner on their own product keywords and my Squidoo page was on the first page of Google search results!

I repeated the same Google first page search results when I was doing another test campaign for another affiliate program which I was on. From then on, I realized that Squidoo is one great service to use if you are promoting something online.

However, recently, Squidoo made the news when they became the targets of spammers. Google then gave them the Google Slap.

This slap from Google was said to have affected how Squidoo pages will rank on Google search engines as well as drop in traffic to Squidoo site.

However, if you ask me, I will still think that Squidoo will make a good place for us to tap some traffic from as long as the lenses that you are creating on Squidoo is providing real value to your readers and Internet users.

Also, Squidoo will be very helpful for those who want to share their expertise or knowledge online but do not have the technical skills to do up a proper web page and marketing skills to drive traffic to their web pages.

If you are interested to see how a typical Squidoo page will look like, you can visit one of the Squidoo page that I have set up at www.squidoo.com/freesoftwareguy

This Squidoo page will save you hundreds or thousands of dollars every year because it shows you where to download free and legal anti-virus software, free anti-spyware, free personal firewall, free office productivity software, free html editors etc.

One of the newer methods to generate free traffic to your web site is via stumbleupon.com. From my own experiences of using StumbleUpon, and those from my various Internet Marketing groups and associates, the feedback for traffic coming from Stumbleupon.com has been quite good!

So, what is Stumbleupon.com? StumbleUpon is a new web site that helps you to discover new web sites! If you do not know what web site to surf when you are bored, you must go to Stumbleupon!

How does it work?

• You can sign up for a free account with Stumbleupon.com and you will tell StumbleUpon during your sign-up process about what types of web sites or topics you will be interested in.
• Upon successfully sign-up with Stumbleupon.com, you will install a Stumbleupon toolbar on your browser (FireFox or Internet Explorer etc)
• When you are bored and you want to look for web sites to surf, just click on the “Stumble” button on your StumbleUpon toolbar, your browser will then load a web site in the category which you have indicated your interest in during your sign-up process. For example, if you have indicated that you like Self-Improvement web sites, whenever you click on the “Stumble” button, your browser will load a Self-Improvement related web site for you! So, no more thinking about what web sites to visit! Let StumbleUpon finds you a new web site!
• With StumbleUpon.com, you can channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great web sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon has millions of sites in its database, all submitted and recommended by other Stumblers.

Also, when you see a web site that you like, you can tell StumbleUpon that you like it via the StumbleUpon toolbar that you have already installed by clicking on the “I like it” button. If you dislike a web site that you saw, just tell StumbleUpon that you do not wish to see similar web sites again via the same toolbar! So essentially, StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better site recommendations for you.

Not only that, you can connect with friends and share your discoveries of great web sites and resources, meet online people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

If you are still wondering how traffic comes to you when you use StumbleUpon, let me enlighten you:

1.       When any of the other Stumblers clicks on the “Stumble” button on their toolbar, StumbleUpon may send them to you and you get free traffic!

2.       When you create your StumbleUpon profile, people can view your profile. Any web sites that you have ‘stumbled upon with a thumb-up’ will also appear in your profile and anyone, including your friends or strangers, who view your profile will be able to view those sites that you have indicated that you like. StumbleUpon works on the basis of the power of recommendation. If everyone is recommending a web site on StumbleUpon, do you think you will go and have a look too?

Now, I have some tips for you to bring you more traffic via StumbleUpon:
a)      Visit your own web site and gave it a thumb-up

b)      Tell your friends about StumbleUpon.com and get them to sign up and give your web site a thumb-up as well. The more the better, remember the power of recommendation?

c)      Add your StumbleUpon friends into your StumbleUpon network of friends!

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!