If you are involved with marketing on the Internet, you'll realize that getting visitors to your web site is one of the major problems. To have any chance of success and making sales on the Internet, you need to drive massive traffic to your web site.

TRAFFIC = SALES

There are many ways to bring visitors to your web site. However, there are three main problems:

(1) Paying to get traffic to your web site is Costly!

(2) The traffic generating strategies that you are using may not be effective.

(3) The traffic generated is not 'targeted visitors' and as a result the sale conversion rate is very low.

Traffic is the key ingredient to succeed in your online business. But not every type of traffic is right. It must be targeted meaning people must have a specific interest in your website's theme or topic. There are many ways you can drive targeted traffic to your site and I've listed 5 among the most powerful ways and they are FREE.

1. Search Engines

Search engines have always been popular for driving FREE targeted traffic. So it should not be ignored in any way. It does take time to get good search engine rankings but the long term rewards are worth it.

Building your link popularity has always been a fundamental aspect in attaining top search engine rankings. Google, the pioneer of link popularity and which generates about 35% of all searches made on the search engines, places a lot of importance on this, so you should work on it.

This 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. Personalize if possible. It creates a better impression.

First and foremost, you need to build a link directory with a theme more or less related to your site. If your site is about "Web Hosting" - create several categories like Internet Marketing, Internet Business, Home Based Business, Web Design, Web Hosting, Search Engine Marketing, Webmaster Resources. You could also add a category called Miscellaneous in case you find link partners that you don't have a specific category.

You can do reciprocal link exchanges the manual way which takes more time or you can use a service called Linksmanager at http://www.linksmanager.com to manage your link activities and it gives you a FREE trial. After that, there is a monthly fee to use this service. But it does make your task easier.

A sample letter to request a link exchange can be:

First include an interesting subject line eg:

Subject: Our Partnership or Link Exchange Request

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi [[firstname]],

My name is [[firstname]] [[lastname]] and I came across your nice website http://www.domain.com the other day. I am emailing you for a reciprocal link exchange.

For your convenience, I've already added your site info at
http://www.domain.com/web-hosting.htm

I would appreciate if you can reciprocate back thus helping both our sites in terms of traffic and automatically our link popularity which as you know is becoming increasingly important for good search engine rankings.

My site info is below:

Title - Alpha Web Hosting Services
Description - Provides affordable and quality web hosting
URL - http://www.domain.com

Notify me when you are done with my link and send me the url. Thanks for trading links.

Best Regards,

[[firstname]] [[lastname]]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Keep the letter short. Just mention the most important things. Be aware that not all webmasters will accept to trade links with you. This is normal and expected for various reasons. If you don't get any response in about two weeks to 1 month, remove the link. But before check out whether that site has really not reciprocated. Sometimes some do, but they don't tell you although you did specify in the letter to notify you.

Now go to the search engines like

http://www.google.com
http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.msn.com
http://www.altavista.com

and type the keywords relevant to your business. And try to contact the webmasters appearing in the top 50 results or so. Check whether they have a links page. That's very important. If they don't, you'll just waste your time.

The Linksmanager service I mentioned earlier should ease your task for many things are automated.

2. Write Articles

Another effective way to promote your website is to write articles 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.

Write articles related to your target audience and submit the articles to appropriate online publications. A nice ezine marketing software that allows you to market your articles as well as your ezine itself is Ezine Announcer.

With it, you'll be able to blast your article to hundreds of ezine publishers automatically at a click. So you may get your article picked up by a few instantly. That's massive exposure if you consider an ezine publisher having thousands of subscribers.

Ezine Announcer can also submit your articles to 30 article directories and 12 article announcement lists automatically. And your ezine to 100 ezine directories and 70 ezine announcement lists.

You can download a demo of this software. Visit Ezine Announcer at http://www.zineguru.com/ezineannouncer

At the end of the article, include your Web site URL in the bio and make it a condition for publication that the article appear with bio and business link.

The bio simply gives information what you and what you do plus a link to your site. This can generate many links and can also help promote future business.

A good eBook where I started learning about article writing is Ezine Writer at http://www.zineguru.com/ewriter

It's really an effective way to market on the Internet. And did I told you it's FREE. And the traffic is targeted in general.

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. This builds your credibility and brand your name which is important on the Internet.

3. Joint Ventures

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 can be an ad swap either classified, top sponsor or solo ad or article swap. These terms are used for doing joint ventures between ezine publishers. Or it can simply be a reciprocal link exchange.

Also, 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. The traffic is FREE and very targeted.

If you want to know how to master joint venture marketing, check out Roy Oron's JV Profit Power at http://www.zineguru.com/jvprofitpower

This guy really knows his stuff and has these techniques down to science and generated $500,000 with them. I decided to send him a testimonial for I had some success with JV Profit Power.

4. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are one of the most powerful ways to drive massive traffic to any website. You have a product and you recruit tons of affiliates to promote it for you. Imagine having an army of affiliates doing all the work for you and bringing you truckloads of traffic. This will skyrocket your sales.

But not only quantity counts but quality too. You can have a bunch of unproductive affiliates who can NEVER give you a single sale. On the other hand, just having a few very good affiliates also known as "Super Affiliates" is enough to give some good sales. The traffic is FREE and targeted in general.

5. Opt-In Email Marketing

This is another very lucrative strategy for generating laser targeted traffic to your website instantly. Having a list of subscribers with whom you keep regular contact is one of the most valuable assets for any marketer. Your goal is to help them by providing them with valuable content and useful resources.

When you have new products, services or resources that you think will benefit your subscribers, let them know about it. Of course running and managing a newsletter without the appropriate tools can become a nightmare.

I make use of an autoresponder service called Getresponse at http://www.zineguru.com/getresponse

It's very effective. It takes care of adding your subscribers automatically in your online database, managing unsubscriptions and bounced emails automatically. There is also a nice feature which allows you to broadcast your newsletters on the server.

Also you can add sequential email messages in your autoresponder. Remember, automation is critical when building, running and managing a newsletter or ezine. You can try it for free but you won't get the majority of the features I've pointed out. Only adding subscribers and providing sequential messages.

Consider these 5 powerful ways to get targeted traffic and you'll drive loads of them to your website.

There are tons of other ways you can get traffic to your site. If you want to learn more about traffic generating techniques, check out http://www.zineguru.com/traffic101

You'll get 101 ways you can direct traffic to your site. There are top 12 traffic generating strategies and 89 others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook "Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed", a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster - available now at http://www.top-ranking-strategies.com

Subscribe to "Web Biz Secrets" and learn how to start, build and grow your own profitable Internet business. All new subscribers receive a special report of entrepreneurs earning $100,000+ per year PLUS 2 PDF eBooks "3 SureFire Ways To Start An Internet Business & Strategies To Promote It" and a sample copy of "Marketing Rampage With Blogs & RSS" First Name: E-Mail: Your e-mail will NEVER be given away.