How to Get Traffic, Part 1: Links

Today I figure I would go over how to start getting traffic if you're just beginning in this business. First of all, you will need traffic no matter how you make money online. Second, you need to consider the quantity and quality of traffic.

Quantity and quality? Yes. In general, the more traffic you have, the better. The more targeted the traffic is, even BETTER! You want high volume, high quality traffic, however, you can sacrifice one over the other. If you're getting maybe a few hundred hits a day or a week or even a month, if it's very highly targeted you can make money. This will become even more clear when I discuss how to find a niche in another post.

So how do you get traffic? Depends what you're doing. For almost any kind of full-blown website you can submit to many web directories and get your site listed. Here is a short list of directories you can submit to:

http://www.dmoz.org
http://www.siteranking.com
http://www.mostpopularsites.com
http://www.lii.org
http://www.illumirate.com
http://addaurl.info
http://www.7cd.us
http://www.999pro.com
http://www.a1directorysearch.com
http://www.bhanvad.com
http://www.searchsight.com
http://dir.yahoo.com
http://9ug.com
http://www.360webdirectory.com

They are all free to submit to, but there is usually an option to pay for a faster listing or to give your link a higher priority over the others (leading to higher exposure and more traffic). Do a Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live search for more directories. There are literally hundreds!

If you have a blog, you can submit it to these special blog directories. They only accept blogs so don't submit your other sites!

http://www.bloggernity.com
http://www.blogcatalog.com
http://www.blogarama.com
http://www.addurlblog.com
http://www.globeofblogs.com
http://www.bloguniverse.com
http://www.blogsearchengine.com
http://findingblog.com
http://emarketingblogs.com
http://www.bloggeries.com
http://www.blogexplosion.com/directory/
http://www.blogoozle.com
http://www.bloggapedia.com
http://www.blogtagstic.com
http://www.blogbunch.com
http://theblogresource.com
http://www.myblog2u.com
http://www.bloghop.com
http://www.lsblogs.com
http://blogcarnival.com

These are all free. The last one, blogcarnival.com, is a directory of blog carnivals. At these blog carnivals, bloggers get together and submit their articles on a particular topic, not unlike a publication where you have various articles by contributing authors.

Another way you can get traffic is by trading links with other webmasters. Go around on forums where there are other like-minded webmasters or even contact site owners directly and see if you can put each other's links on your websites.

So this concludes Part 1 on how to get traffic. I'm already working on Part 2, which talks about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.