There is one component all people strive for when trying to make an online business successful and that is creating a steady flow of web traffic. If people don’t go to your site, it will hardly have any chance of generating any income at all. It takes money to maintain an income generating web site.

Ever wonder how successful, revenue earning online businesses succeed? Most of them are spending tons of money to increase traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and researching different forms of marketing schemes.

You don’t have to do all the above to create revenue for your site if you don’t have the resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing everything they own over it.

Below are the top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that I believe can help your site become successful. Even if you only generate a small percentage of successful visitors to client ratio, you will still see revenue, especially if you get high website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method in the online business world. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites when you start to use this method.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites, is having the same niche or content as the other site you are trying to exchange links with. Both sites should share a common subject so that there is continuity in providing service and information to what interests your target visitor.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks sites that have inbound theme-related links. With a good rank position in the search engines, you will generate more web traffic for your site without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is similar to exchanging links, but on a different and higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links, but could be made cheaper because you have the chance to earn more revenue. Traffic exchange services is the idea of viewing another person’s site or page. This is done by the other person as well. This makes it so a site can use the contents of your site and vise-versa. This makes it so that you both benefit from each others efforts to generate web traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your site’s existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias on the internet which provide free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can write the articles yourself or there are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee. Although, if your aim is to save money, it is wise to write the articles for yourself.

Write something that you have expertise on so that when people read your articles, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site more and more. It is also a great idea to include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Make sure you write a little about yourself and your site in the resource box. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more which will create more web traffic and revenue for you.

Make a Newsletter

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter, but on the contrary, this is not the case. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in your newsletter someplace. As your newsletter gets passed around, you can widen the public awareness of your website and maybe build an opt-in list for reader when your site becomes more successful.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. This lets you share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities that are populated with people. You can also get free advertising when you visit forums that have the same subject or niche as your site. Make sure you share your two cents with everyone and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your website. Making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

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If you know anything at all about marketing online then you will no doubt have heard about article directories.

There are hundreds of these all over the internet, but that doesn’t mean it is worth submitting to all of them. If you get to know what the best article submission sites are and you submit your articles to them regularly, you can expect to get a lot of exposure and a potentially huge number of people reading your articles and clicking on your link to visit your website too.

So which sites should you be going to? Here are the top three:

Ezine Articles
This is a huge article directory and it is easily known as being the best one of the lot. At the time of writing it has over one hundred and twenty thousand authors who have realized its benefits, and that number is set to keep rising.

There are plenty of reasons why you should submit your articles to this site, but the main one is definitely that Google loves it with a passion. If you look up almost any subject on that search engine, the chances are very high that you will find at least one article from Ezine Articles ranking somewhere on the first page.

There are also plenty of good categories to post your articles in, and you will find the member’s dashboard is full of information and very easy to use as well.

Buzzle
Despite the rather strange name this site is a definite hit with anyone wanting to increase the traffic to their website.

It looks a lot more polished than a lot of article directories, and each author gets their own profile page which they can fill out with some information about themselves. This page also contains an author widget which should encourage some of your ardent readers to tell everyone about you on their web page!

And you can of course also link through to your website, to get that much needed traffic you are after. You can do this from your profile and also from the end of each article you write.

As with Ezine Articles there are plenty of categories to post your content to, and the process is made as easy as possible. This should definitely be on your ‘to do’ list to join if you are not already a member.

Search Warp
This site promotes itself as a writer’s community, and it certainly is. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that you won’t get plenty of exposure and traffic from posting your articles here.

The author’s dashboard is a great place to start, with lots of data and information on all the articles you submit. Not only can you see how much traffic each article is getting, you will also see whether each piece is getting search engine referrals. You can also generate a fan club at Search Warp, so if people like what you are writing about, you could benefit in more than one way.

Area219.com
This site calls itself a content directory, and takes article submissions on almost any topic. One of the advantages of using Area219.com is that they allow you to insert your Adsense publisher ID into your profile and then shares the ad impressions on your article pages with you 50/50.

The site is fairly new but will undoubtedly grow exponentially once people start seeing the benefit of sharing the Adsense revenue with the directory.

These are some the top article directories online today, so make sure you are a part of all of them.

American Idols

Technorati Tags: Article Directory, Article Ezine, Article Submission Sites, Dashboard, Directories, Ezine Articles, Google, Increase Traffic, Lot, Marketing, No Doubt, Passion, Profile, Search Engine, Strange Name, Web Page, Widget