Having a web site itself is not enough if no one is going to visit it. Hence, being able to generate traffic to one’s web site becomes important. There are many ways to generate traffic to a web site but the key thing to note is that you only want to generate targeted traffic. The reason is simple: Untargeted traffic is useless!

There are countless ways to get traffic to your web site. Some ways are time-tested and proven to work. Some are newer ways that sprung up along the way as the Internet evolves. With all the talks about Web 2.0, new ways of generating traffic are popping up every single day as new ideas online became popular.

What most people are interested to know about are free ways to generate traffic to their web sites. While there are paid and effective ways to get traffic to a web site, not every individual or business has the marketing budget to spend on doing paid online advertising such as Pay-Per-Click advertising etc.

The focus of this series of Traffic Generation articles will be mainly on using free methods to generate free and targeted traffic. I am writing this series of articles based on my first-hand experience of using these free methods to generate few hundreds opt-ins to my newsletters, several hundred dollars of online profits to one of my web site projects within 2 months of using them. These methods really work but the key is for you to consistently apply them and do it on a continuous basis.

If you are not willing to spend money on getting traffic, then spending your time is the next best thing to do. Nothing spectacular ever drop from the sky for any one, most of the time. If you disagree, I welcome you to prove to me otherwise, on a perpetual basis, that everything drops from the sky for you every single time.

Here are the various free traffic generation methods that I adopt. They are not exhaustive of what one can do because there are really many other ways of getting traffic:

1. Find and do postings on relevant forums (make use of your signature to do the marketing, or write it in your forum posting. However, do not do blatant advertising. This will not get you anything except bans from forum moderators.)

2. Find and do postings on relevant blogs

3. Put comments on YouTube videos. If you are more IT-savvy, create your own videos and upload them onto youtube.com. You can try Google Video as well. Remember to link back to your own site.

4. Create a MySpace.com profile and use it to gain online exposure. Post your comments on myspace videos, blogs, friends’ profiles etc. Add friends to your MySpace.com profile.

5. Find free classified ads and do your free ads posting.

6. Sign up for social bookmarking sites such as http://www.del.icio.us, http://www.simpy.com, http://www.diigo.com etc and put your bookmarks online to share with everyone.

7. Sign up for free memberships at Web 2.0 web sites such as www.stumbleupon.com, www.squidoo.com, www.thisnext.com and exploit the power of word-of-mouth and social networking/collaboration sites to drive traffic.

8. Sign up at articles directories as a writer/author, write your articles, then submit your articles to them. Get ready for your articles to be plastered all over the Internet to drive traffic to your web site.

I welcome you to apply those traffic strategies above because they work well.