Before any website can get sales, it must get traffic. The whole “build it and they will come” doesn’t work with the internet. I used to own the domain name “vwbus.com” and it got about 40 to 50 visitors a day by people simply typing that in to see what was there. That is the exception to the rule, however. Most sites have to leverage other sites with existing traffic in order to get started. Here are a few ways that you can get some free traffic and leverage these sites that can get you the traffic.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get free traffic, but like any other website, you still have to get traffic to the main blog. However, blogs have a major advantage over regular websites because they have an RSS feed built in. Also, depending on which blogging platform you use, there are some instant advantages because if you use wordpress.com, the domain tends to rank very well with the search engines. Also, Google owns Blogger.com and has a tendency to “hang out” on their own properties looking for new updated content.

You can use social bookmarking sites to get both links back to your site for the search engines as well as direct traffic from people visiting these social bookmarking sites and clicking on the links in your bookmarks. You can use sites like socialmarker.com to get a list of social bookmarking sites that can be used to bookmark your blog posts, pages on the site and also use the profile options with several of these social bookmarking sites that allow you to put links in for your websites into the profiles.

Some other sites that can help you get traffic and rank well on their own are sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. If you have done your keyword research and know what keywords are getting searched for, you’ll have an easy time finding keywords that are getting searched, but have very little competition. Using these keywords in the title of your Squidoo “Lens” or your Hubpages “Hub”. Using the keywords in both your title and again throughout the page you create then doing some additional social bookmarking links back to your “Lens” or “Hub” and watch it get ranked in the search engines.

Next to pay-per-click, articles are the best way to get your website ranked and get traffic back to your website. The main reason these article websites are so good is because the pages on which your article shows up are very relevant and the links that are allowed in the author profile or resource box. Many of the good article sites also have a lot of “authority” with the search engines and their article pages rank very well which also means that the link values passed along from these types of sites are very high.

What would probably be considered the original “Web 2.0″ would be forums. Anything where you can interact in a community type setting with something topical or niche specific. Many forums will allow you to add a signature to the end of each of your postings. Depending on the forum, you can put a link back to your website, usually using whatever keywords you want to. Depending on your contributions in the forums as well as the call to action in your signature, you’ll get visits to your site as well as the search engine benefit of having those keyword phrases linked back to your website.

Many blogs get a lot of traffic and with the comments you can add on a lot these blogs, you’ll get people clicking through to your website. There are also what are called “dofollow” blogs that will help you with your search engine optimization as well.

Getting free traffic, or even paying for traffic is just the start to making sales and making money. These techniques can be used for non-ecommerce related sites as well.

Brian is an internet business coach that specializes in Bluehost Coupons. Brian also coaches people on how to get started with an affordable web host.