Getting traffic to a website can be one of the most challenging issues a webmaster may face. Many people believe by putting a website up people will simply just turn up, by the masses. This just simply is not true. It is the equivalent of opening a water shop in the Sahara desert. Although I'm sure people would love the water, if they do not know about it they won't find your shop. Ok this is a slightly silly example as there are not that many people there to be potential customers but I hope you get the message.

So we have identified people don't just turn up at websites. So how do we get them to visit? You have several options:

Paying for advertising

This can be very expensive and may not deliver the type of traffic you want.

Reciprocal link exchanges

Another technique is to exchange links with other sites. This provides virtual roads into your site, while many will not exactly be freeways they will still deliver you a bit of traffic. Also as you gain more links, the search engines will start to increase your rankings so you will start to get free traffic from the search engines

Article marketing

This is a technique that is really starting to be in fashion now. The idea is you submit an article about your sites' topic to various article directories. They publish the article with a back link to your site and this article is picked up by lots of sites. This gives you lots of back links and have the benefits of reciprocal linking and more. As you are not linking to the sites that link to you the links are one way. It is thought that one way links have much higher values in the search engines.

Through my tests I have found article marketing to bring me the largest benefits for the least effort and cost. Let's face it, time is the one thing we cant get more of so anything that gets us the most gain for minimum effort has to be the winner!

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