Finding Free Traffic for Your Internet Based Business

As a start up company on the Internet, the one thing that I quickly learned was that the adage holds true in ecommerce; traffic is the key to any online success.

While this is critical to your success, the traffic you drive to your site also needs to be targeted to the products and services you market; you want visitors to actually buy from you once they find your site.

When I first opened Izzop Gifts, I wanted to launch the store with a bang, drive lots of buying visitors to the site and have immediate success. What I quickly realized was that while this is possible, it was going to be very expensive. Since, I did not have unlimited funding, I set out to find a better (and cheaper) way. So the key question became; how do I generate targeted traffic without breaking the bank.

Following are just some of the ways I have found to help generate targeted visitors, with very little expense. While I am sure there are many, many more, I am still in the learning process and will continue to search out new ways to generate traffic. As I uncover them, I will be happy to share them as well.

Social Networking: Search out and find Social Networking sites that have a common theme to what you market. This is a great way to build a network of individuals and businesses that will be interested in your product or service. Even if they are not, they will be a great source of information to assist you in growing your business. What I have found with these types of sites; stay within the scope of the network and they will welcome you marketing your business to their network. Some of my favorite Social Network sites are:

* Merchant Circle is an amazing site for businesses that want to generate new customers either locally or on a national basis. A key advantage to joining Merchant Circle is, that due to its size, it has the power to rank your Merchant Circle listing high within the search engines thus providing additional exposure to your business. With luck, this exposure will result in additional visitors to your site.

* Ultimate Connections for Small Business Owners is a very robust site which specializes in the needs of Small Business owners and hosts outstanding topics daily to help new entrepreneurs. It is also one of the friendliest sites I have found to date!

* Start Up Biz is a site that drives advertising, marketing and overall education to its members regarding fundamental marketing techniques and methods to grow their business.

Craigslist can not be forgotten. This site has grown to such an immense size, simply posting an ad in the section that best fits your sites message will help you get ranking within the search engines quickly. A must do especially for anyone selling tangible products.

BT Tradespace allows you to set up a personal profile, which in turn becomes your BT Tradespace page. Again this site seems to enable its member’s pages to rank very well within the search engines. Like most of the Social Networking sites, you can place a “Link” back to your website to assist in driving additional traffic via its members.

Kudzu is very much like BT Tradespace in that you can create a business profile which will be submitted to the search engines, usually with very good results.

These are simply a few of the sites and venues I have found to help promote Izzop Gifts. All of the sites have been very helpful in allowing me to market my site and uncover additional visitors…..basically free of change.

If you have experience with any additional sites, at generating low cost or free traffic, I would love to hear about them.