No matter your topic, whether you’re an affiliate marketer, direct marketer or sell your own products or services, you need to get traffic to your website. But sometimes it’s a pain to do so. Building traffic isn’t really the fun part of the business for most people.

Today I thought I would offer some of the free ways you can build your traffic. Well, not really free. They cost time, after all.

1. Article writing - This one works two ways. Post the article on your site as search engine food. Then again, you can submit it to article sites in the hopes that other webmasters will add it, along with your resource box, to their websites, building your reputation and your traffic.Does it work? Part of your success in article writing depends on you. Are you creating quality content or just typing up junk that makes no sense, offers nothing of value and is nothing but a sloppy ad for your business? Quality content has a much better chance of working.While you want to attract the search engines, keep in mind that it is your visitors you want to keep and sell to. Search engine food does no good if visitors are immediately turned off.
2. Quality link exchanges - The keyword here is QUALITY. Don’t just exchange links for the purpose of getting another backlink to your site. The search engines are getting better all the time at ignoring unrelated backlinks.Give as good a quality as you get. If you can, agree on non-link page exchanges. If you must stick with link pages, make sure yours and the ones you will be placed on are well categorized and have a reasonable number of links. I recommend no more than 25 outgoing links, less if you can manage it.Categorized links really help with keeping things relevant. I do not suggest exchanging links with all kinds of sites and building your own huge directory of unrelated sites, just because the other site owner has done the same. Do you really think someone looking for dog training tips is going to care about a search engine optimization website?
3. Free directory submissions - These won’t generally get you much traffic directly, but it’s a way to get some one way links to your site. I like the list by Vilesilencer best.
4. Now, if you don’t mind irrelevant links, the DigitalPoint Co-op is a pretty good solution for backlinks. Not perfect, but in some areas it works very well.
5. Clean up your HTML - Sloppy HTML makes it harder for the search engine spiders to go through your website and it can increase load time. Try to learn CSS and use external stylesheets to control the layout of your page.A lot of people wonder about meta tags. I say use basic ones with accurate keywords and description, but don’t stress about them. Meta tags were abused so much in the past that search engines put very little value on them. However, some still prefer that you have meta tags, so I don’t skip them either.
6. Participate in forums - I do mean participate, not advertise. Be a member. Give real advice and ask real questions, even if it doesn’t relate to your business. So long as the forum lets you have your signature file you will get some interest in your website.
7. Answer questions at Yahoo Answers - Same as with the forums, or they’ll ban you. I’ve answered a variety of questions there, some with links to one or another of my sites, others with no links, and still others with links to appropriate other sites that I have nothing to do with. Keep it honest.

I hope these ideas get you going on building some free traffic. They’re time consuming, but building a business takes time. Hopefully some of these ideas will be fun for you.