To succeed in Affiliate Marketing, you ought to know how to drive traffic. Traffic can be classified into 2 types: Paid Traffic & Free Traffic. Some examples of paid traffic are using pay-per-click (ppc) or Google Adwords, buying ads-space, pay-per-post, etc. In this blog post, we will not focus so much on paid traffic… what I am going to share with you are some of the ways that I personally used to drive traffic to my websites - for FREE.

Some people think that the quality of visitors that you get from free traffic is poor, but I do not think so. I feel that if you plan your traffic generations strategy well, you can get tons of quality visitors from free traffic. Now, let me list down the top 5 ways that I always use to drive quality traffic to my websites:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Nothing beats SEO… this is the ultimate winner - hands down. My concept of SEO is not so much about targeting competitive search terms and fighting for top spots with competitors. For me, I focus on the long-tail effect of SEO. To get long-tail results from SEO, you need to have very targeted content on your website. Before you create your content, conduct a detailed keyword research to identify your target keyword theme. Then, have your content to revolve around the theme. Also, do not forget to do the necessary taggings for your Title, H1, Alt, and Meta. Once your have done up your site, proceed on to increase the link popularity of your site by getting more backlinks from directories, articles, social book marking sites, etc.
2. Article Marketing. If you love writing, this method is for you. When done right, article marketing can drive tons of targeted traffic to your site - and it is free! When writing articles, make sure that you provide your target readers with valuable content. Do not try to sell anything within the content of your articles - it will just turn your readers off. The title of your article is also very important. It is the first thing that readers will look at… and within seconds, it will determine whether they click on your article to read it or skip yours and read your competitors’ articles. Therefore, make sure the title of your article is enticing enough to capture their attention. Once you have written some articles, submit them to popular article directories like EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, and GoArticles.com.
3. Squidoo Lens. Squidoo is a very popular information sharing site on the Internet where anyone can create lens (or pages) to share about anything under the sun. The following is an example of a Squidoo lens that i created to market Confession of A Lazy Super Affiliate by Chris Rempel. Why is Squidoo a great way to get free and targeted traffic to your website? It is because Squidoo itself has a large base of readers and with keyword-targeted content, Squidoo lens can rank quite well on organic listings of search engines like Google and Yahoo. Therefore, you should place your website links in your lens so as to divert traffic that your lens get to your site.
4. Participating in forums. You should join forums that are related to the industry that you are in, and participate actively in it. Forum is a great place to build credential, as well as to drive free traffic from your signature links to your site. One thing to note is that you SHOULD NEVER join a forum for the sake of posting threads that advertise your website. This is considered spamming and you will run a risk of getting banned from the forum.
5. Tap on social networking platforms. When done right, you can get some free traffic from social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace. What you can do is to establish your networking persence online by adding and knowing more friends, creating interest groups, sharing of useful information like videos & PDF, etc. As your networking base grow, so will your traffic.

Free traffic is something that you will want to establish strongly for any of your internet business. Usually, the bulk of free traffic will come from organic search traffic. So make sure that your optimization is done properly in order to reap the rewards down the years.

In my next post, we will discuss some of the paid channels worth investing in, so as to drive traffic that buy the products that you are promoting…

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