The idea of getting website traffic for free is always appealing. After all, you should be able to make money out of the average website visitor, whether that’s by them clicking on adverts or (better still) paying you for products or services that you sell directly or via a commission program.

Of course, apart from the air we breathe, nothing in life is really free. Which means that you’ll probably be trading your time to create whatever it is that is getting you the free traffic. But that goes for anything.

Videos

If you’ve got a webcam, you can create a video for free.

You don’t need any special software to do that – the option is there in your YouTube account when you press the “upload” button, even if you’ve never spotted it before.

Or if you’re too shy to appear on camera you can choose the option to create a photo slideshow instead.

Either of those work well for creating content that can drive traffic to your website.

A third option that you may or may not have (but can almost certainly enable somewhere in the depths of the YouTube account settings) is to use Google Hangouts.

Hangouts will allow you to record your webcam in much the same way as you’d do with YouTube but it also offers the option of capturing sections of your screen and using those for the video instead.

That means that you don’t need to buy any screen capture software – it’s built in to Hangouts.

Once you’ve recorded your video, make sure to give it a good title that includes your targeted keywords and a good description so that Google and the other search engines can rank it.

Written content

Written content – articles like this one – has been around for a long time: the idea of the printing was invented almost a thousand years ago and the modern printing press was invented in 1450.

When search engines first started, they were only able to analyse written content and it’s still the thing they do best – you only have to do a quick image search to check that out. I just did a quick image search for Daniel Radcliffe and it didn’t take long before pictures of his fellow actors and actresses showed up in the results. With less precise searches the results go astray even faster.

With written content the search engines are very good at working out what people have searched for.

They also have enough information to be able to work out the context of the words used.

That means you can use synonyms and they’ll still work out their meaning.

For instance, a search engine will know that things like cappuccino and latte both refer to coffee.

It will also know that words like “grande” in the context of a caffeine-laden page also refer to the popular brew.

That means you can – and should – write your words as naturally as possible.

This has several main advantages: it lets your personality show through in the words you write, it makes your written pages more varied (rather than being stuffed with keywords in a vain attempt to rank higher in the search results) and as almost a side effect it helps you show up for lots of related keyword searches near enough automatically.

Do your best to add new, original, written content to your site on a regular basis and you’ll start to pick up website traffic over the coming weeks and months,

If you’d like help writing good quality articles fast, check this out.