NetMarketZine

There are many ways that you can leverage the internet, including several free resources to get traffic to your website. If you don’t have a website yet, you’ll need one for some of these processes to work most effectively, but there are still options included in this article for those of you without a website yet.

Articles like this one are great means of getting traffic to a website and also an easy means of getting your business contact information out to the masses. Assuming you produce good content, there is no shortage of opportunities to get your articles published and read. Be sure to have a strong call to action.

Google has a service where it will list the local businesses in a specific geographic area based on searches as well. For instance, if you searched for “Salt Lake City plumber”, you’ll get a list of plumbers including a map listing of where those plumbers are located in SLC. Inclusion in this directory is free if you meet the criteria. This is a great way to get a number 1 listing in Google for a regionally specific keywords.

Google has yet another service that is very friendly to merchants which is their database of events, products, services, and just about anything else you can think of. This database is a huge source of product listings that merchants and use to submit their products, services and pricing along with relevant links back to product pages of their websites or appropriate contact information.

Craigslist and other online classified ad websites can help also with generating traffic to your business or your physical location. These classified ad websites can get some significant traffic and I’ve used them many times to both list items for sale as well as purchase services. Coupon codes work very well on these sites because people are more likely to visit a site knowing that they have some “secret” coupon code for a certain percent off, or free shipping, or a flat dollar off coupon.

Social networking has grown significantly in the last few years online and you may have heard of this as “Web 2.0″. You can use a lot of these social networking sites to develop contacts who can benefit from your products and services. Just like the name implies, however, you’ll need to network with other people. The benefit to you if you’re a bit more on the shy side, or not usually extroverted, the internet provides a bit of a buffer and will allow you to get out there and form some relationships and get some additional business to your website.

Blog commenting is another way to get some traffic to your site. I personally will read several blogs per week or month and depending on the conversation, I’ll contribute or also if the comment provides especially good value or insight, I’ll usually click through and find new websites this way. People are doing this all the time and your comments will also generate traffic to your sites. Find blogs that typically get multiple comments on any given post and use those for traffic by leaving good comments and adding value to the conversation.

There are dozens of ways you can get free traffic to your website or ways that you can leverage the online world to drive traffic to your physical store as well. These are just a few of the many ways that this can be done. The main thing that is required for long term success is consistency. If you aren’t consistent with these methods, you won’t gather enough data to find out what works and what doesn’t work. If you don’t know that, you’re spinning your wheels.