One of the biggest challenges facing web-based businesses is trying to generate website traffic. Advertising on the web can be expensive. For some small businesses, advertising expenses can eat up a large portion of profits. Some website owners find it too cost-prohibitive, particularly in the beginning stages of a business. However, not to worry, there are a number of ways to generate website traffic for free. In fact, the opportunities for free advertising are almost unlimited.

Here are four of the best ways to generate free traffic:

1) Composing and publishing articles. There are a few benefits to writing, posting, and distributing quality articles. Firstly, generating traffic via search engines is free. Search engines level the playing field and allow every website owner an equal chance at garnering web traffic. The secret is posting articles that are abundant with keywords that are in line with your website. Secondly, the Internet is rife with article distribution sites. You can write keyword rich articles containing links to your site and then distribute them to article distribution sites. Your article (s) is then made available for anybody on the web to post for free on their own sites.

2) Social bookmarking. While these sites are fairly low traffic, this makes them inexpensive to use. It works similarly to the bookmarking feature on your browser's toolbar. The main difference is that using a social bookmarking site allows other Internet users to see your bookmarks. You can create an account with one or more of the various social bookmarking sites online. Then you bookmark pages from your website. You can add your own tags to each bookmark. This allows users to see what a particular bookmarked page is about with one glance. Most sites allow you to use multiple tags for each bookmark. When a user wants to find a page related to a particular topic, he can search through tags to locate relevant pages.

3) Ezine advertising. Contributing to an ezine is another way to draw free traffic to your site. Ezines, the cyber same as printed magazines, usually focus on a specific niche or interest. By contributing to an ezine that is centered on the area of your business, you target web surfers with an interest in your product/service.

4) Join an online forum. This is another great way to target the specific types of customers who might be interested in your services/products. There are thousands of these on the internet devoted to a variety of subjects. There are also online forums that are social in nature but may have sub-forums relevant to your business.

Some website owners feel overwhelmed with the task of submitting articles to directories for linkbuilding for linkbuilding such as Ezines or trying to find relevant online forums. However, just a few hours of work can actually lead to a big payoff when it comes to driving free traffic to your website. In fact, you may notice that you end up creating a snowball effect: the more links that you place, the more people that will locate your site. At the same time, the more links that you post, the easier it is for the search engines to find your site. The quicker the search engines find your pages, the faster they'll be indexed and ranked.

Once you're ranked, you'll be exposed to even higher numbers of potential visitors and customers. For a start, since submitting articles for generating traffic via search engines costs nothing, why don't you try it today? The potential for web traffic is practically limitless as the published articles to directories are building quality backlinks to your websites.

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