Everyone knows the importance of traffic to your website. Due to this, there are tons of techniques being taught about traffic generation, some of which cost money while others are free. But when you’re first starting out in Internet Marketing, money is often in short supply. This means using more free traffic generation techniques than paid ones. Again, there is a plethora of free traffic generation techniques taught online. But in each of these techniques, there is a certain twist or two that the gurus don’t disclose. It’s in these twists that real money is made.

Everyone who has been in Internet Marketing for any length of time knows that one of the most popular free traffic generation tactics is writing articles. Every guru teaches you to write keyword-centric articles in a properly chosen niche and submit them to article directories. This is a tremendously effective technique that creates backlinks to your website. The effects are basically two-fold. Firstly, your website increases in Page Rank and propels up the search engines and secondly, the articles you wrote also gets indexed by the search engines thus providing another way for people to find your website. All this is well and good and has become common knowledge. But here’s the twist to this technique.

Instead of only submitting your articles to article directories, it is more effective to submit them to website or newsletter owners in the same niche. Offer your articles to them for free and request that they publish them. Chances are high that they will if your articles have good content, thus giving you lots of article exposure to targeted readers. This is more pro-active than submitting articles to directories.

Next is the forum marketing technique, another popular free traffic generation method. Every guru teaches you to scour the forums in your niche and make comments, ask questions, offer solutions and attach a link to your website in your signature file. Once again, this is a great tactic to generate backlinks which will ultimately draw traffic to your website. Here’s the twist to this tactic that most gurus don’t teach.

When you join a forum in your niche, take time to read every category therein. Get to know the problems faced or questions people ask in each category. Compile these problems and questions and create a report with solutions and offer this for free to the forum members. Inside this report you put links to your website or blog. Once again, this is a far more effective method of generating traffic than just making a comment or two in forums.

Lastly, there are the free social bookmarking sites that can be used to generate traffic. What gurus teach you to do is to bookmark your webpages or your articles in article directories so that they get linked by social bookmarking sites like Digg or Stumble Upon. Here’s how to tweak this strategy.

Instead of just bookmarking your webpages or blogposts etc, look at what’s highly ranked in the social bookmarking sites first. Search for something related to your niche and if found, then write an article for your blog and bookmark it. Then go to the existing highly ranked post and add a comment to it that includes a link to your blog. That way, you get another quality backlink to your site and draw the visitors reading the highly ranked post to your website or blog. Hopefully, they will vote for your article, too thus pushing your post up the social bookmarking site’s favorite list.

These are the little tricks about free traffic generation that the gurus hardly teach you in their coaching lessons but they use these themselves to earn the big bucks. Now you can do the same.

Tags: Article Marketing, Business Success, Forum Marketing, Internet Marketing, Social Marketing