Introduction
Greetings Friends!!

So you got your Website Up and Running. Congratulations!!

Now is the time when you have to start promoting your site and getting some traffic to it.

Why is it important to get traffic to your site?
If you have a website or you promote someone else"s" website as an affiliate, you need to drive traffic to it. Without traffic, you won"t get visitors. And without visitors, you won"t make money, sales, get subscribers, etc. So what good is a website without any traffic?

Getting Traffic is not an easy job!!
As you may have already discovered promoting your site is not an easy job. Getting traffic to your site is the single biggest challenge faced by site owners and online entrepreneurs. There are just too many ways both free and paid, to get traffic to your website. Deciding which method to use can be a daunting task especially if you are a newbie.

The next sections describe how you can start promoting your website for FREE.
Getting Your Feet Wet
Initial Steps
Before you start promoting your site, make sure you have optimized META tags of your site. META tags are pointers that describe your website. They are used by Search Engines to narrow down their search results. So if you have defined META tags properly, they will be included in the results fetched by the Search Engines.

In your HTML code HEAD section, the tags look like this:

meta name="description" content="A small description of your webpage goes here."

meta name="keywords" content="The best keywords, phrases for your website/page goes here , separated, by commas."

Define your keywords carefully. They can drive good traffic to your site. Try to include as many keywords as possible that describe your site/page accurately.

To perfect your keywords, visit the following site:

Internet Optimization

Submitting your site to Search Engines
As soon as your site goes live, you MUST submit it to major Search Engines and directories such as Google, Yahoo etc. Most of the search engines have a page where you can add your link. Just search for the words "ADD FREE URL" in Google and Yahoo.

You do not have to submit your website to each and every search engine or directory. But make sure you DO submit your site to major ones. They in turn will crawl your site within a few days and your website will start appearing in the results fetched by these Search Engines.

Why is this step important?

This step is THE FOUNDATION because Search Engines look for links that point to your site. So if you have submitted your site to say 300 Search Engines, there are more links pointing to your site. So DO NOT skip this important step.

If you have time you can submit your site to individual search engines and directories. The site mentioned below contains a massive list of search engines and directories that you can submit your site for FREE.

Search Engine List

Expanding your Horizon
Once you have submitted your site to major Search Engines it will take some time before they approve and list your site. In the meantime you can start targeting traffic to your site by using the following methods:

eZines
Start with submitting articles describing your website to eZines. Ezines can help you in getting some good targeted traffic. Some good sites for submitting your articles are:

Ezine Articles

Ezine Hits

SubmitYourArticles

Go Articles

Article Dashboard

ContentDesk.

Finally Search Google for even more article directories.

Blogs and Blog Comments
You can promote your site by making blogs describing your website and by posting comments in others" blogs. The best Blog sites out there are Blogger and Wordpress.

Forum Marketing
Start promoting your site in online forums. There are hundreds of forum sites hosting thousands of forums. Start with Big-boards.

Then search in Google for forums related to your site topic and start posting messages in them.

The next two sites are important for the sheer number of users they have and if explored properly can bring lots of targeted traffic to your site.

Myspace
Promote your site in Myspace. Start with creating your profile, link your website to your profile and write a few words about your site. Then start making new friends and swapping links thus promoting your site.

Orkut Communities
Promote your site in Orkut Communities. Orkut has thousands of communities on every imaginable topic and these are joined by hundreds of thousands of people. So this method will send some targeted traffic to your site as well.

Squidoo Lens
Create a Squidoo lens promoting your site. Squidoo lenses can send steady targeted traffic to your wesbite. After creation, submit your lens to relevant Squidoo Groups.

Social Bookmarking
Recent popularity of user-defined content has resulted in lots of sites that can be used to share links and promote sites. Start with Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati, FURL and FARK.

Building the momentum
The methods listed above will bring some traffic to your site but you need more ways to bring targeted traffic to your site and track it as well. This section talks about bringing more traffic with Traffic Adbars and tracking it efficiently. Lets start with Traffic Adbars.

Traffic Adbars
These work on a fairly simple concept. Download a small toolbar (similar to Google Toolbar) to your machine and install it.

Next time you start your browser, you will see small Ads displayed in these toolbars. There is NO compulsion to click on any Ads. Continue your normal surfing and if you like any ad click on it to find more about the service being offered. Personally I like them because they do not interrupt my normal work.

You can promote your site by defining Ads for your site. Your ads will be displayed in the ToolBars of other Marketers who have installed the toolbar in their machine.

This method is getting very popular to attract Targeted Traffic to your Website. You can build a downline by referring the Adbars to other people and frequency of your Ads that are displayed will increase.

The most popular Traffic Adbars are:

Instant Buzz

Free Traffic Bar

Use Track that Ad
Track That Ad is primarily a free ad-tracking service. You can create different campaigns to promote your sites(s) for which they generate links that you can use for promoting your site. Then this information can be used to track your ads for effectiveness. They promise to send "500 extra unique targeted visitors to your site each and every day". Here again you can build a downline by referring other people.

Track That Ad

Exploding your traffic
Now that we have basic things in place lets start getting enormous amounts of traffic to your site. We"ll start with Viral Advertising.

Viral Advertising
Viral Advertising is getting very popular as it can direct TONS of Traffic to your website. Basically you earn credits by visiting other sites and your ads are displayed to other people. You can build a downline by referring other people. They in turn will visit your website first, become member and start referring other people. So in effect, you start moving up the chain and the traffic to your website simply explodes.

Some of the most popular Viral Advertising sites are :

FreeViral

Traffic Swarm

My Viral Ads

List Building
You might have heard "The Money is in the List". But how do you build a list in the first place? The answer lies in List Building.

List Builders are services that promote your site to your downline members by sending emails. These are NOT SPAM emails. These are genuine Emails promoting businesses.

After you join, you cannot send mails to your upline. You can send promotion mails ONLY to your downline members. Similarly no-one from your downline can Email you. The more people you refer, the more is the exposure for your site. Again there is NO compulsion to click on any ad or vist any site.

I would recommend that you maintain a separate Email Address for these List Building services because you can expect to get few emails daily from them. I have explored number of FREE List Builders and the next section tells the best List Builders that are available.
Building Your List
This section lists the best List builders. My recommendation would be to join all the services mentioned below. I have joined all of them and my sites are generating a steady traffic because of these List Builders.

The best part is that the first site below, List Joe can be used to send emails to other List Builders as well.

List Joe

List Dot Com

The List Machine

The List Lotto

Free-Ad Depot

Target Ads Depot

Your Lucky List

Bringing insane amount of traffic with Traffic Exchanges.
Traffic Exchanges
Traffic Exchange as the name suggests exchange web traffic. They show you a bunch of websites and for every site you visit, your site is shown to other people.

Traffic Exchanges can be manual or automatic. Manual exchanges bring more quality traffic while automatic exchanges are good for some random traffic.

Traffic Exchanges are not useful if you have monetized your site with Google Adsense. Google may promptly close your Adsense account.

The following are some of the best Manual Exchanges:

Traffic Syndicate

TrafficG

Web Biz Insider

S.W.A.T Traffic

Traffic Pod

Hit Pulse

The following are some of the best Automatic Exchanges:

Click Evolution

5000 Clicks

Five Hits
Final Thoughts!!
To Upgrade or Not

I like to mention that most of the sites/services mentioned in this lens have an Upgrade option . If you decide to Upgrade, you have to pay some joining fees.

My recommendation would be to use the above sites for FREE for few months, see which site or service is promoting your site most effectively and only then decide (if at all) to Upgrade. Upgrading generally results in making your site more visible to others by displaying more ads, sending more emails etc.

Before I sign-off, I have a FREE GIFT for you. Even though I have tried to cover as many topics as possible, there are still many other ways to promote your site for FREE.

Please download The Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising, by Luke W Parker who is an expert on the subject.

You are free to share this E-book with your friends and also distribute it from your site.

Here"s to TONS of FREE TRAFFIC to your site.