No matter how good a writer you are, or how creative your site is, without any traffic it does not matter.Fancy graphics and flash do not matter if no one actually comes to your website to view them.  Traffic is always the end game for anyone trying to publish ads or sell anything on the web.It may seem like a mystery to a lot of people, because so many products focus on SEO or PPC or web management products, with not much time devoted to the nuts and bolts of getting links and traffic.  Very few actually work on where the heck you get traffic from.

The number one source of free traffic will come from natural search engine ranking, and the consistency is hard to beat.  Why?  Once you build your site up on a few keywords that get decent search volume, this traffic will be consistent.  PPC or other methods are fine, but are also subject to other risks that must be managed.You really just need links and content as the keys to getting higher ranking on Google.

One way to get links is through  submitting niche articles related to your site to an article directory.Once your site topic is decided, you will want to write at least 20 articles that are 300-500 words in length.Make sure you have signed up for an Adsense and Adwords account before you write any articles, even if you have no plans to use them.  Google has some terrific free tools for researching keywords and how often they are searched.  You don’t need to spend days researching keywords BUT you really need to pick 3 or 4 keywords to focus on for your articles that get decent traffic in the search engines and are related to your topic.  Another tool you can use that is free is PPC Web Spy (just google it) – it allows you to see what keywords people are bidding on for their PPC ads on Google – again, they have probably done extensive work since they are paying for the ad clicks – no reason you cannot just benefit from their work and use some of those keywords.

Once this is done, make sure you write at least 5 articles per keyword grouping (2 for each article) with links to your site using those keyworeds.  Do not try to tackle too many keywords at once – you need about 200-300 links realistically for each keyword to move up – depending on how popular they are it may take more.  This is where any article directory comes in handy.You then submit your article which is then redistributed for you by the directory to others looking for content or to learn about a subject.  This makes getting links much easier and faster, but does take a bit of time for it to propagate.  In addition, you may want a tool to help rewrite your articles so that many different versions are distributed to thousands of sites.  This is a key to quicker ranking on the engines as the same thing distributed over and over just does not do the trick.

In addition to article writing, you will want to submit your site linnk to all the major social networks like Digg, Facebook, StubleUpon, MySpace,and others.  The more the better.You will need to create an account at all of them – this can be time consuming but only needs to be done once.  You can search on Google for a list of the major ones.  Once this is done, there are of course tools that will automate a posting to all of the accounts at the same time – again most of these have a fee to use per month BUT save you a ton of time.

Most stuff you want to do on the web can be found for free, but the key is free vs time saved by paying for tools to help automate stuff.I usually opt for the time saving tools – in the long haul its really worth it as you can accomplish so much more.There is always a trade off of time saved vs paying for this saved time.  Some stuff I do with free tools, some stuff I pay a monthly fee to use because it saves me so much time I could not achieve any goals without them.

Assuming you write articles and then submit to social networks, you should start to see some results in about a month.  Longer term, even once you get ranking, you need a plan to continually feed articles to directories – not as often as the beginning, but you really want to do at least 1 per month per keyword to keep fresh links coming into the search engines.Over longer periods of time, the existing links that get distributed disappear as sites go offline or content is replaced.  Once you get a stable of articles written, often you can just do a complete rewrite of an older article and then submit that again – its often faster than rewriting a new article.