Essentially increasing the number of people that frequent your website can be a reasonably simple task. Purchasing advertising like pop-up ads, in-page ads and bulk email, can certainly help your site expand via the increase in traffic. For those wishing to increase the amount of traffic without having to pay anything for advertisements, there are alternatives. Simply by allowing your site to be placed in search engines you can greatly augment the volume of Internet users that visit your site. This is a little tricky however, as you may or may not notice a dramatic boost in the volume of hits depending on your placement in the search engine’s output. Most people do not search past the first page of the engine’s output and as such having your website appear in subsequent pages may lessen your chances for hits considerably.

Along with the abovementioned methods of amplifying the volume of web traffic on your site you can also build link popularity, that is, increase the number of links to your site. To do this you can contact similar sites via email and ask them to link to your website

Driving more visitors to your web site is just one of the benefits of submitting articles to article directory web sites.

There are other benefits too: Your Google page rank will increase! Your Yahoo and MSN rankings too! Alexa.com ranks web sites based upon web site traffic, so you benefit that way as well.

Distribute articles and establish yourself as an expert. Submit articles to make more sales, to get more web site traffic for free, to increase your website’s Google Page Rank & boost your Alexa score.

In my opinion, article publishing is the greatest free traffic generating “secret”.

But, I am sure you do not have the time available that it is going to take to submit your articles to twenty, fifty or a hundred article directory web sites.

So, what is the best way to submit your article to as many article directory web sites as possible?

Free article submission? No way. Just SPAM machines that can get you banned from article directories. Cheap article submission services? They lack the professional features that I am looking for. The top-notch ones have almost everything that I am looking for but they are too expensive.

Article submission software is the solution to this problem. Article submission software will store your information, your resource box and article body and visit each of the article directories to log you in and automatically fill in the fields (name, article body, resource box etc) for you. After that, you will need to select the appropriate category for your article and hit the submit article button.

Article writing is not a very easy work but it can become very rewarding. Keep it short, about 400 words. Check your grammar and spelling. Do not copy from other articles. Use a catchy title. Don’t forget to include a call to action and a link back to your web site in your resource box.

- Business Blogging. Start a blog for your business and update it on a regular basis. A business blog is an excellent tool to toot your own horn, let the world know about your new products, and tell your target customers why they should do business with you, rather than your competitor. A business blog is also a great tool for attracting potential customers to your blog and your web site.

- Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). SEO is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your web site since over 70% of  people who are looking for products and services use search engines to locate them

- Article Writing and Publishing. This is another great way to drive traffic to your web site. When you write and publish your articles, other web site owners pick them up and publish them on their web sites, while giving you a link back to your web site.

- Newsletter Publishing. Keep in touch with your clients and potential clients by sending out a newsletter on a regular basis. Every time you send out a newsletter, don’t forget to invite the subscribers to visit your web site.

- Online Networking. Mention your web site address in your signature when networking online. Make sure that your web site is prominently displayed on the page, provided to you by every online networking service that you participate in, so that your fellow networkers can visit your web site.

- E-mail Signatures. Every time you send out an e-mail to one person, you have a chance to get an extra visitor for your web site. When you send an e-mail to a mailing list, you have a chance to spread the word to even more potential customers. All you need to do is to append a signature to every outgoing e-mail message. Make sure that the signature contains a powerful tagline that invites the readers to click on the link and visit your site

- Pay Per Click Search Engines. Here you can control exactly how many new visitors you want to get. There is a catch, though — you have to pay for every click to your web site. Make a budget and stick to it an make sure to monitor your account – those clicks add up fast.

- Affiliate Marketing.  An affiliate program is another way to drive traffic to your web site. Your affiliates are your commissions-only sales people who make money when they sell your products. They drive traffic to your web site in exchange for commissions on sales.

Today I have discussed eight different ways of driving traffic to your web site. Which techniques are you not using yet? Take one of the techniques and incorporate it into your marketing plan. You will get a whole new pool of web site visitors coming to your web site.