There are many ways to get traffic to your website. Each of them work somehow but most of the time this traffic is definitely not targeted. Before we go further into what is working well and won’t cost you a dime let us summarize a view ways of getting traffic:

- Traffic-Exchanges
Pros: You receive free visitors when you sign up and you do not have to spend any money for additional visitors. You can join hundreds of them for free, and you can sign up affiliates under you to get some additional traffic. Or you just click, and click, and click, and so on…

Cons: Although this traffic is a cheap one, most of the time it is non targeted traffic. Unless you are a programmer or a company who has something to offer for any webmaster, this traffic will not help you very much. I would say it is almost a waste of your time. There are better ways for traffic generation.

- Safelists
Pros: You can join them for free and most of them allow you to mail to a selected number or all other free members of this list every 5-7 days, some more often, some less.

You can upgrade to Pro and send out an email each and every day. You can make some little money if you sign up some other member trough your affiliate link.

Cons: Oh my god, you get tons of emails. If you join let’s say 100 lists you can expect an avalanche of emails towards your email account. Within a view days you can gather a view thousand emails if you do not delete them each and every day or let them be deleted at your account. Maybe Safelists work for some people, but for most they do not.

With all the automated Safelist submitters everyone is pushing out his mail, but nobody reads it. So another waste of time and capacity, and if you have bad luck you also get troubles with your web-host because of the high numbers of emails.

- Ezines
Nearly the same problem as with Safelists, but maybe more targeted and you have to spend some money to send out your ad to responsive Ezines. This might be a good way for someone who has a good advertising budget and some advertising experience (knows how to write perfect ads, etc.) but for someone who is new to marketing on the internet this might be too expensive and risky.

- Blogblasters, Adsubmitters, etc.
They may have worked in earlier times but today they are almost ineffective as most of the blog owners now activated the “avoid comment spam” option, so the blasted ads land in the nirvana, but not on the blogs. Also the risk of getting accused for SPAM is too high for my opinion.

Now, there are some additional ways to generate traffic like PPC, JV’s (Joint Ventures), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), etc. But I do not want to get into detail regarding these methods now, because I want to show you how you can get targeted traffic almost for free with the help of:

- Article Writing
You might think it is difficult to write an article, but it took me about 15 minutes to write all the above sentences. Some experienced writers may be faster but it does not matter for me, because I do not have to write 10 or more articles a day. So speedwriting is no need for me.

Now I will share some tips with you that can help you to write maybe your first article. I do not pretend to be a copywriting genius but what works for me may also work for you!

- Decide what you want to write about.
This way you will be able to get some focus for any topic you choose.

- Create your headline.
This will be some like the final decision of which topic you choose and also like a start into the right direction.

- Start writing the first part of your content
Do not think too much about how to find the correct words. Just start and write. It is more important to start than be a perfectionist from the beginning!

- Keep your mind open for new inspirations
At some part you may not know exactly how to continue, so take a deep breath and follow your inner voice. This will help you to find the correct words and continue easily.

-Take off all your pressure
As I mentioned above, there is no need for perfectionism in the beginning of article writing. Just start and get the word out! This is the most important thing. With your experience you will be able to write better articles within a short period of time.

- Celebrate when your article is finished
Hey, you did a great job! You can be proud of your work. It may not be perfect, but nobody is perfect! Even the well known copywriters make mistakes, although they are much more experienced than you, because they already have written maybe hundreds of articles!

- Now take a break and let someone else proofread your article.
This gives you the chance to get some valuable feedback. There may be also some mistyped or misspelled words that you did not recognize.
If you do not have someone for this part, write your article within a good word processor.
A good word processor also has a build in spell- and grammar checking engine.
This is something very important. You might not be one of those writing genius but you should cover the basics in writing and that is not too difficult.

Last words:
It took me about 30 minutes to write this article. It may be not perfect but I think I covered almost anything I could do within a personal limitation not to write more than 1000 words. 30 minutes may be long, but for me it’s o.k. as I have to check some words in my dictionary as my mother language is German and not English.

So if a German speaking Austrian can write an article in English You can too!!!! Good luck with your articles. They will help you to achieve a higher Google PR and also some additional, targeted traffic. Write more articles, distribute them to the free article directories and the avalanche of traffic is on its way!

Copyright © 2006 Andreas Obermueller

About the Author:

Andreas Obermueller is webmaster of Hit4Biz.com - Marketing Related Information and recommends Brad Callen's Keyword Elite to find top keywords that drive massive traffic to your website.