Top 10 internet marketing techniques revealed

1. Optimise your site for search engines

Search engines are the greatest way to attract traffic and SEO is the most powerful way to attract free traffic from search engines. One needs to do their homework and optimise the website to rank for certain keywords.

2. Frequently update the contents of your website

We all know by now that 'content is king', so the obvious approach would be to add in as many articles in your niche as possible. For SEO, this is great, as each article will be optimised for certain keywords pertaining to that article and this will positively affect your rankings. If your content is good and frequently updated you will not only build a loyal audience of recurring visitors, who will often come to see what is new, but search engines will also love your site.

3. Get links to your site from similar websites

This is a good way of getting free traffic from other websites within your niche. It is also very good for SEO especially if you manage to get links without the famous 'nofollow attribute'. But even if the links are nofollow (i.e. they are useless for SEO), they still help to get traffic to your site. Coupled with this, you will need to do some research and get a list of sites within your niche where you could get backlinks from.

4. Social bookmarking

Take advantage of social bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, etc.) as these sites offer an abundance of quality free traffic.

5. Social networks: Facebook and Twitter

Social networks are also a way to get traffic for free. If you are popular on networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, the traffic you get from there can easily surpass the traffic from Google and other search engines. It is true that building a large network of targeted followers on Twitter and supporters on Facebook takes a lot of time and effort but generally the results are worth it. There are tons of social sites out there, so get networking.

6. Create a free product or service

When creating a free product or offering a free service it must pertain to your niche market and in doing so - when this product or service becomes popular and people start visiting your site, chances are that they will visit the other sections of the site as well.

7. Free online promotion

Any free online promotion is welcome, so don't neglect it. There are many ways to promote your site for free and some of the most popular ones include free classified ads, submissions to directories, inclusion in various listings, etc. It is true that not all free ways to promote your site work well but if you select the right websites (highly ranked) to promote your site for free, this can also result in tons of traffic.

8. Use viral content

Viral content is called so because it spreads like a virus - i.e. when users like your content, they send it to their friends, post it on various sites, and promote it for free in many different ways. Viral content distributes on its own and your only task is to create it and submit it to a couple of popular sites. After that users pick it and distribute it for you. Viral content can be a hot video or a presentation but it can also be a good old article or an image.

9. Leave your URL behind

URLs in forum signatures for example are also a way to get traffic for free. There are forums that get millions of visitors a day, and if you are a popular user on such a forum then you can use this to get traffic to your website. When you post on forums and people like your posts, they tend to click the link to your website from your signature. Another way to leave your link behind is via blogs. This seamless process also applies to blogging.

10. Offline promotion

Offline promotion is frequently forgotten but it is also a way to get traffic for free. Yes, computers are everywhere and many people spend more time online than offline but still life hasn't moved completely on the web. Offline promotion is also very powerful and if you know how to use it, this can also bring you many visitors. Some of the traditional offline ways to promote your site include printing its URL on your company's business cards and souvenirs or sticking it on your company vehicles. You can also start selling T-shirts and other merchandise with your logo and this way make your brand more popular.

Getting traffic for free is a vast topic and it is not possible to list all the methods. However, if you know the most important ways and you apply them properly, it is guaranteed that you will be able to get lots of traffic for free.