The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to take advantage of all the content you have written on your blog. You can literally multiply your visibility across the internet with this simple, yet powerful, method. I use it often. I'm talking about making your blog posts available to millions of people by posting them in Article Directories. Focus on your posts that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day. Best of all, it's Free!

When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. Most importantly, you include a link to your blog! This is where you can truly leverage for Free traffic! Once you get the hang of it, do a Google Search for "Article Directories". There are literally hundreds of them. I personally post to over 350 Directories on a regular basis. If you go to my blog (see Author Box) I will show you how I do it.

Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that are based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter “the name of your niche" + "forum”, without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.

When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to add a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affilliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.

The next strategy we’ll discuss is word of mouth. Let’s say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, saying that if a certain visitor can refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to you! There is one problem with this if you have a blog on Blogger.com. You cannot upload your report to their server so you will need to find a separate webhost to upload your gift to. Then, when a reader wants the gift, they click the download link which takes them to your webhost where the gift can be had.

Since I am on Blogger.com myself, I am currently looking into Free and paid webhosting as I have a number of Free eBooks I want my readers to download.

Whatever you do, be sure to use the “blog and ping” technique that everyone’s talking about. I use this everytime I post on my blogs. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping a lot of portals at once by using pingomatic.com or the one I use, pingoat.com. These are free services. When you ping it's like telling the search engine spiders you have something good to eat and they will come running and index you.

Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads. If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely. I know that sound like common sense but, believe it or not, people throw away thousands of dollars cimply because they do not know how to track the performance of their Ads.

Personally, I have not purchased Ads or links. Until you master traffic generation by Free methods, hold onto your money and learn much more about it. It is definitely a gamble for a novice. It is sophisticated stuff in spite of claims to the contrary.

Yours for success in life.

Jim DeSantis

P.S. - Please forward this article to someone who can use it.