In reality, website traffic is almost never free. You either pay directly for the click or you spend some time doing something that generates clicks. But – ignoring the fact that it costs you time to get free traffic – I’m going to talk about some methods that can help generate free traffic to your website.

Usually that involves some kind of content that includes a link (directly or indirectly) to your website.

Depending on the type of link and the site it’s placed on, the free traffic may be almost instant or it may take a while to work its way through the system.

The amount of traffic you get – and the quality of that traffic – will vary considerably.

As a general rule, large quantities of traffic are usually relatively untargeted and the clicks to your site are generally worth less than fewer (but better targeted) clicks.

Short term traffic

Sites like Twitter and Facebook are usually short term.

Sure, your Tweets can get retweeted or your posts can get shared. But most of the time the effect of the traffic is short lived.

That’s OK – it doesn’t take long to compose a Tweet or put up a post on Facebook.

Over time, you can build up followers on those platforms and they will be more likely to see your future posts.

It helps to include hashtags with your Tweets and posts to help other people to find them. Some people search that way, including owners of newsletters and online sites who are constantly looking for relevant content to include on their own site. I’ve had quite a few of my Tweets found by that kind of site and, over time, the traffic builds up.

Much like paid-for traffic, short term traffic dries up soon after you’ve posted it. Which means that you have to continually come up with new things to entice visitors back to your website.

You could also create some kind of giveaway product to encourage at least some of your visitors to join your list and stay in touch with you.

That’s a good idea regardless of how you generate traffic to your website.

Medium and long term traffic

Most other traffic generation methods are medium to long term.

Often you won’t know ahead of time how long you’ll get clicks from a link you’ve created.

That’s partly because you won’t know how long a topic will stay popular and partly because you don’t know how long a third-party site will stay around.

Even popular forums can stop – an active UK forum I was a member of a few years ago changed ownership (that’s not uncommon – it’s not particularly easy to monetise a forum – and all the posts went when the domain wasn’t renewed. In the self help world, Steve Pavlina closed down his forum near the start of this decade and put up quite a long post explaining why.

My gut reacion on forums is that they will stay for quite some time but that their popularity is waning as other ways of interacting with people take over – methods such as Twitter, Facebook and even Skype groups.

That means that you shouldn’t rely on just one method of generating your free traffic.

Content on your own site – one where you own the domain name and hosting – is still the best traffic generation method in my mind.

All other methods should support that – Tweeting, putting up a post on Facebook, etc.

The content on your site should typically be fairly long and detailed. That may not be what you’d like me to say but it is the best way to weave in the long tail keywords that will be responsible for most of the traffic you get via Google and the other search engines.

You can help tip the balance in your favour by making sure to set your page titles, headlines and meta descriptions so that they are in your favour. That’s basic on site SEO and there are plenty of articles on the web to help you – but take them with a pinch of salt as not all free advice is good advice!

After your own site, other popular sites are a good way to generate extra free traffic.

YouTube is one of those sites and it can generate clicks.

As with everything else, it depends on the topic and there’s no direct correlation between a highly viewed video and traffic generated to your site.

For instance, one of my videos shows you how to create links in the video description that point to specific times in the video (basically just put in a time in minutes and seconds with those separated by a colon). That gets a lot of views but most people don’t click through to my site from it because they’ve already got the information they need from the video and have maybe tested whether it works in one of the many comments that get added to it.

So the video is good for the overall strength of the channel but doesn’t directly help my site.

Indirectly, because it helps my YouTube channel, it probably helps my other videos come slightly higher up the results so I probably get a few more clicks than I otherwise would have done.

But without knowing the ins and outs of the various ranking algorithms I’ll never know for certain.

Which makes this a slightly weird “how to” article

Things on the web are rarely black or white.

They’ve got more shades of grey than a popular novel.

In turn, this means that you need to experiment and figure out what works best for you.

Just because someone else claims to have made money – usually very specific figure in a very specific, short, period of time – doesn’t mean that you will be able to replicate that success or even come close to it.

And if you manage to do something that generates a lot of good quality free traffic, there’s also no guarantee that you can replicate that.

Often it’s just a combination of a specific set of circumstances that combine to create the result.

But equally that doesn’t mean you can’t get something close to average results for most things you do.

The time you spend creating content in the hope of getting free traffic is your choice.

I’d suggest an hour a day, most days, is a good use of your time.

As you grow, you can delegate or outsource that work.

But by that stage you’ll know what works most of the time and what doesn’t. And what’s hit-and-miss and almost pure fluke.

If you’d like more help with getting more free traffic to your website and getting money from those visitors once they reach your site, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to start.

It’s relatively straightforward and relatively quick.

Two things that don’t always seem to be the case in a lot of internet marketing.

Of course, you’ll need to put in some effort. But unless you’re the type of person who believes you’ll win the lottery or that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I hope you already understand that.