The reason a lot of people don’t make it online is because they can’t figure out how to get and maintain traffic to their site.  A lot of times people will start out by spending money on advertising and end up spending TOO MUCH money on advertising without making any profit back from this advertising.   Sometimes they will simply spend too much time trying to get free traffic which usually lasts only as long as they are working and goes away the second they step away from their computer.

Before you actually start making enough money to have an advertising budget how do we get the most traffic to our sites without wasting our time and money?

Here are some of the first things you should do to get traffic to your website.  

1. Directory submissions. (In directory submission a website is enlisted with an online directory.)

How many directories should you submit to?

There’s no fixed number of directories that you should get listed in. Work out a 12 month directory submission budget for each site and then do so many each week or month for the full duration.

When you’re building links to your site via directories or any other method, you should do it over time. Submitting to 100 directories in a week and then forgetting about it won’t be as effective as spreading the 100 directory submissions over a 3 month period.

The top 10 directories

Finally, here’s a list of the top free and paid general directories to get you started.
5 of the best free directories include:

• Open Directory Project
• World Site Index
• Domaining.in
• Web World
• Search Sight

5 of the best paid directories include:

• Yahoo! Directory
• Best of the Web
• Business.com
• Aviva
• Ezilon

2. Social bookmarking. (In social bookmarking websites, users create and store bookmarks of their choice. These bookmarks can be viewed by others and that let them know about new services and latest concepts which are making news in the online world. For example del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, My Web, Reddit are some of the most popular social bookmarking websites)

The benefit of social bookmarking your content is so that you gain back links from these authority sites (which is essential for being found in the search engines) but also, if you content is worthwhile and interesting, you increase the chances of your submission being passed around other readers really quickly, which can of course result in a lot of traffic to your website.

 1 | digg.com
 2 | Yahoo! Buzz
 3 | StumbleUpon.com
 4 | reddit.com
 5 | Technorati.com
 6 | del.icio.us
 7 | kaboodle.com
 8 | mixx.com
 9 | Propeller.com
 10 | newsvine.com
 11 | Fark.com
 12 | Slashdot.org
 13 | twine.com
 14 | clipmarks.com
 15 | dzone.com
 16 | faves.com
 17 | blinklist.com
 18 | diigo.com
 19 | simpy.com
 20 | BlogMarks.net

3. Back links.

which are sometimes called inbound links, are incoming links to a web page or the entire website. These inbound links are important to search engine rankings because many different search engines have algorithms that measure the number of backlinks a website or web page has, and ranks those web pages with more backlinks in a higher position. The more backlinks a website has, the more popular it is, and the more pertinent the information is considered by search engine algorithms. Many pages concerned with search engine optimization have mechanisms to discover how many backlinks the web page or website has, so that particular company can not only know the exact number of times that it has been backlinked, but where these backlinks are coming from, and if they are from related sources or not.

    1) Write and submit articles to the top article directories. In each article include a resource box that contains a link pointing back to your website.

For additional keyword relevance try hyperlinking your primary keyword phrase to your site as well. As you begin to develop backlinks to your homepage begin deep linking to sub pages within your site from your article resource boxes too.

    2) Write blog articles and submit them to the top social directories. Search engines love fresh content and your blog articles will be spidered quickly if you submit them to the top social directories. We are talking about sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Propeller, Technorati, and more.

Each article submission creates a backlink to your blog or specific blog article. If you do not have a blog you are missing out on easy traffic and long term quality backlinks.

    3) Utilize social networking to create links pointing back to any web page you have. For example when you create a new web page announce it as an update on your Twitter account.

When you Tweet your followers this way you are creating back links to any webpage or blog post you make. Again the search engines will find these, as well as your readers, giving you more potential traffic.

Other popular social networks to join and create a profile with your website address in include Facebook, My Space, eEntrepreneur, and many others.

4. Collaboration.

Most people want to be the “one person wonder” or the sole entrepreneur in their business, which is fine. However, don’t underestimate the sheer power of teaming up with other well established websites directly and offering your content, help or other services in exchange for some exposure to your own website.

The classic “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” effect comes into play here and trust me, it works like a charm providing you genuinely approach people to help them first.  The more social you become with your website at other sites, the more people will come to your site when you come to tell them about it.