Ever wonder how to get traffic to blogs for free?  Or maybe how you can promote your Squidoo lens and get some traffic rolling in without paying for PPC (pay per click)?

Well these steps are by no means exhaustive but they are 7 of the best steps you will find online to getting free and unlimited amounts of traffic to your blog, article, or Squidoo lens.

These are usually the steps I take to get my Squidoo lenses off the ground and running and it applies to blog posts as well.

Step 1:  Social Bookmarking

Sure, we have all heard of Sumble Upon, Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us, but are you using these tools properly?  You cannot just submit your site and hope that people poor in through those links. And in case you don’t know what social bookmarking is, it is simply submitting your website url, title, and some tags to a website where people can vote on your link and share it with others. (in a nutshell anyway)  I get a ton of traffic through these sites.

Here are some tips

• Write a Catchy Title when bookmarking.  If people do have their attention grabbed by your headline then they will never know how great your article is.  At the same time, do not mislead your readers by using a title that promises  something your article does not deliver.  Your title should also be keyword optimized.
• Use popular and yet specific tags.  If you use use tags that no one in their right mind will ever search for then you simply won’t be found.
• Write a Great description.  Yes it will take more time, but summarize your article in the description and kind of leave the reader hanging a little, so they will want to click on the link to read more about what you have to say.  Intrigue will bring in much more traffic than boredom every time.
• You can bookmark ALL the sites with the push of a button!  If you don’t mind something a little more shady you can use a program called Bookmarking Demon.  It has a horrible name but this program will submit to ALL the social bookmarking websites automatically (once you have all the settings as you want them anyway) without getting you into trouble.
• Or use the free but limited website SocialMarker.comto submit to several sites at once.  The only problem is you will have duplicate content issues unless you change the description and title every time.  Bookmarking Demon solves that issue.

Step 2:  Posting in Forums

If you do this right it can be a huge source of traffic for you.  Join forums that are related to the topics you discuss in your blog or Squidoo Lens.

So you can simply leave 1 or 2 word comments and put a link in your forum posts right?

Wrong!  First of all, this will probably get you banned and you can say goodbye to all your hard work on that forum OR people will not use your link because you did not offer anything to the conversation.

Be informative and helpful in your posts on the forums and don’t be pushy with your links.  Always make a contribution to the conversation and you will see more people want to find out more about you that way, and they will follow you to your blog or article.

Simply spamming forums will always be counterproductive in the end.  After all, you want your visitors not to just visit you once, but coming back over and over again.

Step 3:  Join Some Related Groups

Groups about specific niche topics are all around us on the web.  If you are promoting your Squidoo lens check out sites like Squidu.com.  On Squidoo you can do a search for groups and join the ones that are similar to your interests and you will get traffic from those groups.  Or you can always make your own.

Do some searches on your blog topics too.  Find the people that are talking about what your blog is talking about.  You already know they will be interested in what you have to say, so you simply need to introduce yourself and be active in the community.

You can find groups in social media sites like Facebook, Myspace, and even on Twitter.  And again, the more you contribute to the conversation the more hits and the better quality hits you will have to your blog.

Step 4: Article Marketing

Ah yes, those dreaded articles.  You write enough on your blog right?  Why bother writing MORE to an article directory?  Because you will get a flood of traffic from them…. that’s why.  I at first did not realize how article marketing could really bring me that much traffic, but people that have found me in one of my articles on Ezine tend to stay with me much longer.

So how do you find time to submit articles to Ezinearticles and Goarticles?  Well one way you can do it is to re-write one of your posts and make it unique and submit it, OR you can just take a paragraph of a blog post you have written and dig a little deeper, turning it into an article.

You would be surprised how fast you can write articles when you take away distractions and lay out the skeleton of the article before you write it.

The results from article marketing are 2 fold….

• You will get direct traffic from them, since they tend to rank very high (Ezine is a PR 7 last time I checked)
• You will be building do-follow backlinks which will help your blog rank higher down the road.

I will often write an Ezine article and link it straight to my Squidoo lens to help it rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).  This little boost can do wonders.  Give it a shot.

Click Here for Part Two of This article. Steps 5-7

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