For any website or blog, an increase in its traffic will almost be certain to leave you a similar increase of revenue. For websites with low to medium traffic, the difference can be much larger than expected. Although there are many ways of increasing your website traffic, these three methods have proven very effective for me, driving traffic to sites monetized with affiliate programs.

Social Bookmarking

The buzz around the social bookmarking scene is hard to miss, but not necessarily as easy to utilize. Researching which social media can help your site the best, can make wonders for your traffic.

If you are running a blog - or any type of regularly updated site with articles or similar - Digg, Reddit and similar may work very well. Even though inbound links will derive from any success on these types of social bookmarks, the main priority is to increase the traffic. If you see yourself on the first page, you will see a virtual spike in your traffic, commonly known as the "digg effect". Make sure your web host can handle the traffic, if they can't; switch to a new host. This type of social media relies on "voting". If your content is good and interesting enough, you will do well.

If your site doesn't do well on sites like the ones above, you might try to switch to social media more focused on bookmarking than voting, and hope for the best. Delicious, Furl and Netvouz all focus on bookmarking, making those excellent choices for this tactic.

Most - if not all - social media have buttons you can add to your pages, allowing your visitors to bookmark and/or vote. Adding a few of these can drastically increase your website traffic.

Free Website Traffic

There are plenty of ways to get free website traffic if you are not picky with the quality. Autosurfs, Traffic Exchanges, Toplists and banner exchanges all deliver traffic, but of very poor quality.

With toplists and banner exchanges, you won't see a huge increase in traffic, but the quality of traffic will be higher. Every visitor received will have actually clicked your banner or text link. If you make sure your ads are honest and clear, people will know what they are looking for, and hopefully convert.

Autosurfs - and to an extent Traffic Exchanges - will give you a noticeable increase of traffic, but not necessarily any conversions. Autosurfs are just what they sound like; Automated. Traffic exchanges - and their visitors - are at least present, but more often than not, they are only looking to gain more traffic to their own sites.

Never the less, these types of programs can help you increase your traffic, how you handle the visitors gained is up to you.

Free traffic does not apply well to Google Adsense or other contextual ads, simply because they frown upon automated traffic. If you are using affiliate programs - or selling your own products, the visitors may or may not be interested; try it out and see for yourself.