by: Ben Chapi

1. Generate Targeted Traffic from Online Discussion Forums.

Online discussion forums provide an excellent way to promote your website without paying any money. Nowadays, you don’t even have to lurk around before you begin to post. Just browse the messages and you can start posting. There are basically three different ways to participate. You can ask questions, respond to requests for help or just post any useful information that fits with the general topic of that discussion forum. To promote your site in online discussion forums, all you have to do is enter your website address or ad in your signature line at the bottom of each message. Every time you post or respond to questions your ad will be displayed. If you post good content, people who read your threads will also check out your website. This is an excellent way to drive targeted traffic to your website at no cost to you. You can take this type of site promotion a step further by identifying the active members in each forum and contacting them for joint venture arrangements.

2. Write Articles or Free reports for other webmasters to publish.

Another effective way to promote your website is to write articles or free reports for ezine publishers and webmasters to use. If you write good content, your articles will be published and many readers who like your article will go on to visit your website. You can also write simple research based articles and allow others to publish these freely on their websites. The traffic from these free articles will come from your byline. The ‘byline’ is the short paragraph that goes at the bottom of each article and describes who the author is and what they do. The good thing about writing this type of content is that it establishes you as the expert and therefore increases the chances of people visiting your website and signing up for whatever you’re offering.

3. Do Joint Ventures with List owners and Webmasters.

If done correctly, joint venture marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote a product or service. A Joint venture can take many forms but it’s generally an agreement for some kind of partnership between one or more parties working together to their mutual benefit. It allows you to leverage highly targeted lists or traffic with no risk. Joint ventures are excellent for new product or service announcements because they allow you to reach a wide customer base very quickly.

4. Leverage the power of your email Signature.

One of the quickest and effective ways to start driving traffic to your website at no extra cost is to add your ad or website address to your email signature. This way, every time you send an email, you’ll be advertising your website. You can take this a step further by asking your friends and associates to put your website address in their email signature. Most people don’t use their email signature facility in their email program so you can easily get 10 or more people to agree to do this. If you and your 10 friends each send out 10 emails per day, that’s 110 exposures of your ad every day without any extra effort on your part.

5. Exchange Links with Other Webmasters.

This is another effective strategy for generating targeted traffic to your website for free. It involves contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange partnership. All you have to do is locate websites that are related to yours but that are not in direct competition and contact the webmaster to swap links. There are various free ebooks and articles available online on this topic.