Out of all the advertising and marketing that I do for my business, getting people to link to my site has been the number one traffic generator, and it hasn't cost me a dime. I am constantly getting e-mails from people who are on a very tight budget and need to know how they can get cheap effective advertising. This article is going to explain how.

Content is King
The key to getting a lot of traffic is to provide good content on your web site. If you can offer a valuable resource and provide good advice, people will link to your site automatically. I am amazed every time I check my visitor stats and see all the new sites that have placed a link to my site simply because they think their visitors would find it useful.

Reciprocal Links
Trading links with other sites is easy and can be very beneficial for both parties. Find web sites that have a similar topic as yours but not competitive with your site, and ask them if they would like to trade links. Send a creative e-mail telling them about your site and make them an offer that would be mutually beneficial.

Link and Win
Another great way to get people to link to you is to run a contest. There are many different ways of doing this, but one that we have found to be successful is to award several prizes to the top referrers every month. You can find programs at http://www.cgi-resources.com that will help you do this at no charge.

Award Program
Using award programs to generate traffic has been around for a long time. It is very easy to implement and can generate some good traffic for you in the long run. Just place a simple form on your site where people can submit their web site for your award. If their site fits your criteria, send them a congratulatory e-mail with your award graphic, and nine times out of ten, they will put it on their site and link to you. This method works well, but it does take awhile before your site will get any substantial hits from it.

There are many other ways to get people to link to your site. Set aside a few hours every day and work on this goal. The amount of free traffic you can generate from this is amazing

Brian Welch is the owner of the BizBot Search Engine, a search engine designed to help people do business online.
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