Having a website without traffic is like having a retail store without shoppers. After you setup and start a website, the next important thing is to focus your energies on driving quality traffic to your website. Like the physical world, in the online world there will be window shoppers and then there will be people who actually spend money on your website. Your efforts should be focused on getting the right kind traffic to your website.

Just to put things in perspective, there are over 1.5 million real estate websites in the world! Other industries have similar kind of numbers also. So let's just say you were in the real estate business and are competing with millions of others for website traffic. You need every tool available to you in order to drive targeted traffic to your website.

There are a lot of very effective free and paid methods to drive traffic to your website and we talk about some of the more effective ones here. First the free ones:

1. Advertise on free sites: You can advertise your website on free sites like Craigslist.org and other similar sites. People who come to your website through Craigslist are generally serious shoppers who are hunting for something. You can list without charge and that makes this a very good option to start with.

2. Submit your sites to directories: There are several business directories maintained on the web and the most prominent is by Yahoo! Get yourself listed in their directory. There are many other directories you can list your site with that are free. If they require a fee, check to make sure if they are getting enough traffic where your listing will be seen.

3. Be active on forums: Join forums related to your website and start asking and answering a lot of questions there. Forums allow you to add a signature at the bottom of your name. You can include your website address there. This helps boost your credibility and when people reach your website through your signature, there is already some credibility that has been built.

4. Put a video on YouTube: Video blogs are fast becoming a very popular way for people to demonstrate their product or service. Make a small video of your product or service and put it up on YouTube. You can use this video to link back to your website and it will drive quality traffic to your website for a very long time.

5. Exchanging links and comments: You can join a link exchange network. These networks will help you exchange your website links with others. So while you put others links on your website, your link will start appearing in other websites. This approach should be followed with a grain of salt. That is because link building is most successful when the links pointing to your website share the same theme as your website and very often if you join a standard link exchange program that will not be the case.

These were some great ways to build traffic to your website organically. But sometimes free won't it and you need to spend money to give your site that extra boost. Here are some ways that will give you the most bang for your buck:

1. Advertise using keywords: Google and Yahoo both have a paid advertising program where you can advertise your website as a banner, graphic or just plain text ad. You can specify which keywords you want to advertise for and if the user searches for those keywords your website will start appearing in the search engine listings. You only need to pay when someone clicks on the ads. This is a great way to build targeted traffic because you know that the person clicking on your ad is really interested in what you have to offer.

2. Conventional Advertising: You can also follow a more conventional form of advertising by just contacting a webmaster of a related site and posting banner ads or other ads on their website and then paying based on impressions.

3. Buying traffic: There are some companies on the web which sell traffic. These companies will send for example 50,000 visitors to your website for a price of $250. Sometimes you just need to boost traffic on your website. An example would be if you are negotiating ad rates on your website. This traffic is good for that, but really nothing more than that. This is because most times such companies use pop-ups and other such forms of advertising which basically trick people into clicking your links. As you can imagine such traffic is not going to generate much sales because most of the time it is not targeted. If you are going for this kind of arrangement just make sure you know how the traffic will be generated and you are comfortable with it.

So there we go, some great paid and free ways to build quality web traffic. Use these methods and see your website traffic increase!

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