10 Free Ways To Get More Visitors

Here are 10 ways either to increase or get free traffic.
With these methods, you don't even have to be listed in the search engines!

NOTE: As with any and all things, do not SPAM any service. Even if the Web 2 sites have no strict Terms of use, don't take advantage; all websites are made so that their visitors will benefit. If people do things that are not good for their user's experience, they will eventually ban the activity. What would you do if you had a website and hundreds, if not thousands of webmasters are taking advantage and using your site as a free classified ads section? You get the point.

Using Forums

1. Write helpful answers in forums and use your website as your signature. Better yet, write the helpful answer in your website, mention a little bit about the answer, and link to it from the post. This is guaranteed to bring traffic.

Using Yahoo!'s Free Services

Yahoo! actually provides two extremely good sources of traffic: Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! Groups.

2. First of all, let's talk about Yahoo! Answers. Many of you are familiar with the service: it is an extremely high traffic 'forum' with just about any topic. Find the topic your site is about, write a nice answer, and say on the bottom 'Check out my site, it's got lots more helpful things in it. It's http://www.yoursitehere.com' or something similar.

3. Y! Groups is also a great way of getting the word out and also helping people. Find a group about your subject and join. When someone asks something, jump at it and quickly reply (with your website as the footer, or again, tell them the answer is on abcfg.com).

Using Free 'Viral' Advertising

4. Submit your site to LinkReferral. This is a program that does not rely on 'credits' or 'points' to show your site: this is the good part, because this means you will never 'get off the list.' Here's how it works: you visit others' sites for 'ranking' in their directory. When you review sites, your reviews will be reviewed by moderators. The better your reviews are, the higher you''l get ranked. This programs is one of the few out there that actually work for me. Join here.

5. InstantBuzz is a free ad program that utilizes a toolbar that sits on your browser to earn you credits . The credits are used as money to advertise your site (as of right now, 1 credit equals one impression).
Tip for those of you who use InstantBuzz - A report I read shows that if you advertise on Thursdays, your CTR will be highest, on Friday, the conversion rate will be highest, and ads shown on Tuesday and Wednesday have the worst percentage of clicks and conversions.
Here is the code for 100000 free credits: 167829. Click the InstantBuzz icon on the IB toolbar, and select Member's Area. Click Your Ads, then click PowerPack, enter the code, then click redeem.

6. TrafficSwarm is another viral program. You can read about it in this post

Using Web 2.0 to Promote Your Website

Web 2 is powerful. You may have used it without knowing-- del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace, and YouTube are all 'Web 2.0'. User-powered content, that is. You can use this effectively to promote your website.

7. Write a little about yourself and your website on MySpace. Include a link to your website.

8. YouTube, recently acquired by Google, generates a ton of traffic every day. In the video description, include a link to your website by typing your URL along with the http://www. into the description.
Creating a video isn't as hard as you think-- just take some videos that relate to your topic (e.g. sports sites, sports videos; money-making sites, video tutorials). Camstudio is a free software to record whats happening on you screen, and you can input audio from your microphone or your speakers.

9. Get a Squidoo Lens. A Lens is a page that lets you put content from your RSS, text, and links, and other 'modules' onto it. Another benefit of Squidoo is that it has built-in Adsense, and you can earn money from it!

10. Track your results. This really isn't another way to get more traffic, but can help you as much as the ones above. Find out which program works best for you. You can choose to use StatCounter.com to check your stats and also use multiple 'landing pages' to check where the visitors come from. Then you can focus your energy and time into that effort. For example, I would create a page called ib.html for InstantBuzz, and in IB, I would point my ad to that site. On ib.html, I would put the StatCounter and also put a Javascript redirect to my index.html. Then I would do the same for TrafficSwarm, Squidoo, and each individual forum.

Implement these free ways to get more visitors. They will NEVER work if you never use them. Don't say 'I'll use them later' either. Use them NOW.