4 low cost ways to get website traffic

Image by kevinzhengli via Flickr

When people start their blogs, websites or online businesses, they need to get traffic to their websites. However, in a lot of cases, people don't have the money to pay for advertising.
For luck there are many ways to get traffic to a website, depending on your budget and the time you have available to work on building your online business.
This article lists some of the most powerful and low cost ways to generate traffic to your website.

1. Offer free reports and ebooks!
   Giving away some freebies and including your website URL in those freebies is an effective and low cost way of getting traffic to your website. You should write some useful short reports with your website link in them and offer those reports for free on a website where you ask visitors to leave their email address before they download the free reports or articles. This means you should give away the report with your URL and also build a list.
   
   
   
2. Use Twitter to promote your blog posts
   Twitter has emerged to a powerful tool in generating traffic to blogs and websites by tweeting your blog posts to your follower each time when you publish a new article. There are several tools available which use your RSS-Feed and push the title and/or a part of the post directly to Twitter (Twitterfeed is one of the most popular ones and easy to setup).
   Remember that it's important not only to promote your blog posts but also to interact with your followers, otherwise it will be difficult to get them to click on your links ;-)
   
   
3. Publish your own newsletter
   Having your own newsletter where you offer free tips and content on a regular basis can help to increase traffic to your website and blog. Your newsletter should have links to your website, so many people who will read your newsletter will also visit your website.
   
   
4. Exchange links with websites that have high popularity (PR) rank & traffic
   All you need to do is to find websites that are related to what you offer on your website and exchange links with these sites. This is particularly effective if the websites have high popularity rank on search engines. By doing this, some traffic will come to your website through the websites you are linked to.

Which ways do you use when you have only a small budget for promoting your blog, website or online business?