Allan Tan’s Internet Marketing Resource Centre

Here?s something you can count on. At least one every two weeks or so, someone will boldly announce that article marketing is a dead art. They?ll give it credit as one of the best free traffic driving strategies in history, but they?ll claim that it just doesn?t work anymore.

Their evidence? It usually involves their own little tests featuring content of questionable quality or the use of strategies that deviate from best practices. And while some will buy the naysayers? stories hook, line and sinker, many of us will just go quietly back to generating a consistent and impressive flow of traffic via the very practice everyone else is burying.

Article marketing will last. That?s because it?s not based on a hole in the system, an algorithmic shortcoming or a new fad that Google hasn?t caught up with. Article marketing is based on a solid, logical model.

Which is why thousands of people can use it every day to generate free traffic.

Even though it just died for the umpteenth time!

One of the easiest ways to facilitate the sharing of your site URL is by providing links for readers or visitors to ?share this site? with others. These links are usually in the form of little favicons or buttons–basically a recognizable image that is linked to a social network, a feed reader, or a link aggregating service. Examples of these types of sites include Stumble Upon, Delicious, or Google Reader.

If you post regularly on a company blog, it makes sense to have these buttons automatically inserted at the ending of every post. If a reader likes what you have to say, they can choose the button that is appropriate, and send a link to your blog post to other via a tweet on Twitter, a link on Delicious, a Digg, or even by email.

There are almost unlimited sites through which you can share, though you need an account on whichever ones you personally want to share through. To post the buttons on your blog post, you do not need to have an account with each site.

If you use a self-hosted Wordpress site, consider adding a plug-in that will automatically add these sharing buttons to each post. Your readers can then easily share your site with the click of the mouse, and giving them this convenience helps bring in more consistent traffic, at no cost to you.

There?s an easy little way to drive free traffic to your website and, if you?re like most people, you probably aren?t doing it.

You should have the URL of your site, in the form of a clickable link, as part of the signature attached to every email you send. It takes about 5 seconds to set up and it can deliver extra traffic to your site.

You?re probably thinking that the traffic production will be limited, at best. And you?re right. An email signature isn?t going to lead to any server overloads.

Over time, however, it?s significant. Think about how many emails you?ve sent out in the last several years. What if you would have spent those five seconds fixing up your email signature back then?

How many sales did you miss? How many new clients did you accidentally avoid.

Five seconds. That?s all it takes. And in the long run, it does matter.

Put your link in your email signature right away.

If you want to snag free traffic for you site, you have a variety of options at your disposal. You can do the Twitter thing. You can get involved in the social bookmarking and networking scenes. You can find busy forums filled with people talking about your niche. You can find relevant blogs and comment on them.

All of these options have something in common. If you?re going to make them work for you, it?s essential to understand the cultures involved. We?re not talking about the national or ethnic heritages of participants in these groups, we?re talking about the way the groups themselves operate.

They?re all little semi-insular communities. They have their own mores and conventions. They have unwritten rules. There are expectations.

If you hop right on in trying like mad to sell, sell, sell, you?re probably going to find yourself an outsider, on the wrong side of the cultural divide. Do your homework. Learn the lay of the land. Find a way to exist within those communities and then (and only then) can you hope to generate free traffic via your participation.

A great way to get your site noticed by people who are specifically looking for information relevant to your site is by listing the URL in a niche directory. A niche is a specific area of interest or demand. If you are selling a tangible product, different niches can include books, movies, cleaning supplies, food, and much more.

Your site?s area of interest may be very specific or extremely broad, but either way you are sure to find a niche directory where you can be listed. A simple search of your product type may bring up locations where you can list your website. More than likely however, you?ll just bring up competitor?s websites. Try a search using your product and ?listing directory?.

The main advantage to using niche directories to add a listing is that you are already reaching your target market. Advertise your barbeque business in the ?Memphis Area BBQ You Can?t Miss? directory, and you know your URL is going to be seen by people ready and wanting to try your barbeque.

It takes little time and no expense to list your website in directories, so there?s no reason not to take this simple step to free marketing. It?s like listing your business in the yellow pages–for free.

Twitter has been hailed as one of the easiest and most versatile way to connect with people in an easy to use platform. Ask anyone on Twitter and they will tell you that?s not only true but the potential to use twitter to gain traffic is enormous.

What most non twitter users don?t realize is that Twitter isn?t being used to talk about your lunch plans or the guy who cut you off in traffic. Rather, twitter is a means for getting your voice heard and your website known. Influencers all over Twitter share their posts, and the posts of other people with their followers.

A look at any blogger?s traffic will tell you that their traffic has increased by using Twitter. When someone clicks on the twitter link you post, they are taken directly to your page. From there they are free to search and retweet anything on your site that they may like.

While people are still just discovering the power of Twitter, one thing is known for certain; this is just the first step to taking social networking to the next level. By interacting with a network of people (your followers) you can share a variety of news and information with them in an open forum.

Run a contest on your website and give away a product such as a book, e-book, kid’s toy or something related to your niche. People love contests and will follow links to any contest just to see what you are giving away. Have them leave a comment to be entered and guaranteed that they are going to keep coming back to see what you have every day.

Now, to use contests on your website, you have to get the word out that you have a contest. You use Twitter and other social bookmarking sites to spread the word. You may have noticed by now, that social networking plays a big part in generating free traffic to your website. You not only want to use the social bookmarking yourself, but you want to get others to recommend your website as well.

You need readers and by offering a contest where someone can win something just by leaving a comment or even writing a short note about the contest on their website or blog is the way to do it. Backlinks to your site helps with the search engines and again helps with traffic. All of this is free and can drive traffic to your website.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to draw traffic to your website is through the regular use of commenting on blogs. There are many good reasons to participate in the discussions on other blogs, and no apparent drawbacks except perhaps a small initial investment of time.

Taking advantage of other blog owner?s readership is simple. If you have a website about gourmet food, for example, you will want to find a handful of blogs that have to do with cooking, food preparation, or recipes. Those would be the most obvious topics, but you can think outside the box as well. A blog that focuses on family life or the life of a mom may have the type of readers who would love to find out more about gourmet foods.

Try subscribing to a few of these blogs, hopefully finding ones that already have a stream of steady blog comments. This way you know there are enough readers to make it worth your while, as it does take some time to leave a comment in response to a blog post.

Most importantly, do make your comments meaningful. Becoming a trusted blog visitor is important, and eventually the other visitors will be interested in what you do–and click through your signature to your site.

If you?re looking for a free and relatively easy way to draw free traffic to your website, offering goodies to your readers is always a good choice. Visitors love getting freebies–whether they?re a newsletter, a free report, a mini-series, or something of the like. Offering a free report is a common way to gain subscribers and get readers and one-time visitors to return to your site.

You can outsource the writing of the free report if you are better at running your site than writing. Many freelance writers can put together a quality report for you in as little as a few days, depending on the length, at a fairly inexpensive price. Once you have the report to offer, there are a couple ways you can distribute it in exchange for an increase in website traffic.

Perhaps the most popular way to use free reports is to offer it to your readers if they sign up or subscribe to a mailing list, through which you then try to sell your product or service. These mailing lists are managed through service such as AWeber. You solicit signups through the offer of this report, and you instantly add to your list of potential customers. Though readers may eventually opt out of the mailings, many find it too cumbersome, and you?ll most likely enjoy the benefit of a large mailing list for quite some time.

You can use Facebook for social networking to drive free traffic to your website. Facebook has taken over where MySpace failed. It has many features that make your marketing strategies pay off. You can use the notes feature to write a short blurb about your website and post a link back to it. This is a good way for every one of your friends to see it and pass it along to their friends.

Do status updates periodically daily to direct traffic to your website. You can make as many updates as you want and keep everyone updated with your latest news. You can also use the application from Twitter to post your tweets if you don’t want to spend time posting on each one separately. You do have to make friends, but fortunately, Facebook has a search feature for finding people that is so much easier to use than MySpace.

You can browse people in your area or make friends in one of the hundreds of groups. Join the groups and get you will find hundreds of groups that you can join. All it takes is a little time from you to make friends, get your voice heard and get free traffic to your website.