Website Building Guide Part 4: How To Get Traffic To Your Website For Free

So you've started your site, got it setup and you've started to publish content. Your well on your way but guess what? None of that matters, at least not without traffic, yup that's what it's all about. Everything you've done up to this point was so you can focus on getting traffic, it's the most important and even if you completely screw up the part 1 through 3 you'll still be OK as long as your successful at getting traffic. Trust me I've seen really sh*tty sites completely dominate because they have mastered promoting their website.
In this guide I'll break down all the sources I've used to get my sites to where they are today, some of which get over 1 million people per month. Here's how to get traffic to your website for free.

Free Traffic Sources

Don't confuse free with useless, because that's not the case when it comes to getting free traffic. Most of the money I make online is from free traffic.
Forums / Message Boards
You might be thinking, hey it's 2012 who in the hell still uses message boards anymore? From my experience millions of people still use them everyday, even with the emergence of Blogging and Social Media, message boards have stood the test of time and remains a great traffic source.
The way to get traffic from message boards is not to blast a bunch of messages across hundreds of forums, that's a sure way to get your ass band. What you should do instead is pick 3 of the most popular forums available for your niche or topic and actively participate on those boards, many forums have different requirements to participate in their boards. When I just started forums were the only source of traffic I had before search engines started paying attention to my site, before word of mouth got out, before Twitter or Facebook became the giants they are today.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia and other sites like it have been my best kept secret to getting none stop traffic, I'm still getting traffic from links I posted years ago on Wikipedia, in fact my newest site Video Game Player, it has been receiving consistent traffic from Wikipedia 12 months straight from just one link. There is a science to marketing on Wikipedia, I've written a guide on how to do it correctly and get long lasting traffic.

StumbleUpon

I'll be honest with you, I get allot of traffic from StumbleUpon but I've yet to figure out exactly how I've been doing it, all I know is users have been submitting my links to my sites and they've been doing very well. I'm in the process of working on a guide on how to get traffic from StumbleUpon, that will provide a more clear and precise way of getting traffic from the service. I'm currently doing tests, so stay tuned. For now my advise is submit all your links to StumbleUpon and get more followers, unlike most of the other sites like StumbleUpon that started out before the social media explosion StumbleUpon has become a service that users find very useful and it continues to grow. This isn't something you should overlook.

Twitter

Twitter drives over 10,000 visitors per month to my sites and it continues to grow, it's really a no-brainer that this service would drive traffic to your site, since pretty much everyone has a Twitter account for their website. I have quick little guide I wrote about getting traffic from Twitter, so check it out.

Facebook

The biggest of the biggest when it comes to getting traffic and keeping them coming back. Just to one of my websites (iHipHopMusic.com) I receive over 30,000 visitors per month. With the help of a Facebook fan page you can market to the users that “Like” your page over and over again, it's literally like having social media mailing list. Checkout my guide on how to get 1,000 visitors per day from Facebook. Also I've been doing some really cool things with Facebook lately and I have a few tutorials coming up.

Yahoo Answers

This site along with it's competitor AnswerBag.com and few others can be really resourceful, but it's a hit or miss with these type of services because you have to answer the right questions within your niche, but the thing is you never know which answers will drive traffic, for more on getting traffic by answering questions, I have a definitive guide on how to get traffic from Yahoo Answers. It's quite the guide.
One of the best ways to get traffic from these answer websites, is to ask the same questions you find on those answer sites on your own website and then answer them. They would then show up in the search engines when people search for the answers.

Mailling List

The last but definitely one of the most important things for getting long term traffic is having a mailing list, even though I have over 40,000 Facebook fans and and over 5,000 Twitter followers for my various sites, in reality that's not my list. You never know what can happen your account, you could get banned for whatever reason, these sites can change their policies and terms of service at anytime and you could end up loosing that entire list.
That's not the case if you have your own mailing list hosted by a email marketing service provider, you can contact this list as much as you'd like and send that traffic to wherever you want. Everyone of my major sites have a mailing list which I blast out a email to at least once a week.
This is the end gold, you should be using Message boards, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Answers and any other traffic to ultimately drive traffic to your site so they can sign up to your mailing list.
They don't say “The money is in the list” for nothing.
I personally use Madmimi for my email marketing, it's the most affordable and has allot of cool features, but I also highly recommend Aweber and GetResponse as well which are two of the biggest and oldest in the Email marketing industry. There is over 70 email marketing services to choose from, check out our other site AllEmailMarketing.com to see them all.
That about raps it up for how to get traffic to your website, everything I mentioned above is something you should be working on daily. You never stop trying to find new ways to get traffic to your site and when you find news ones, add it to your list of traffic sources you already have.
It's a system and you need to work at it consistently.
Thanks  for reading, stay tuned for more.
….Chozen.
Part 1: How To Start A Website Or Blog
Part 2: How To Setup A Blog Or Website Without Technical Skills
Part 3: Publishing Your Content To World
Part 4: How To Get Traffic To Your Website
Part 5: Ways To Make Money With Your Website