What are the easiest ways to obtain traffic?

Paying is the fastest/easiest way to get traffic.

Facebook and yahoo answers are 2 of my favorites (for any niche)

FB requires having a fan page and when you target a niche, building an audience around it is super beneficial, but more time consuming

Yahoo answers is great for highly targeted free traffic and have gotten quite a few subs in various niches

Leveraging social media, this can't be explained in a paragraph (better to learn by doing :0), but a good combination of youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. using the right strategies can help turn your business into a viral sensation.

I was about to say "buy it" but Performance man got in there first!

I see now you've said you mean free traffic, which doesn't really exist - organic search traffic is "free" in theory, but it takes time and effort, and presumably you value your own time? But you've also not specified what kind of traffic you want - and your question, for me, shows that you have a bit of reading & learning to do, else you may end up falling down many of the web marketing pitholes, such as stagnation, procrastination, and investing time and / or money into the wrong things.

What you really need, is TARGETED traffic, people who are looking for what you have got to offer. May seem obvious, but many people miss this out, and they just try to get traffic, and traffic is pretty much worthless if it isn't targeted.

6 main ways you're going to get quality targeted traffic in any decent volumes:

1, Have a great website with lots of valuable unique content and / or features, and to utilize good old fashioned SEO strategies while avoiding the MANY spammy SEO methods that many people seem to think is SEO which are not SEO.
2, Buy targeted traffic, pay per click, display ads, etc. Take care though and ensure you're using conversion tracking, very easy to lose money.
3. Create a ton of decent video's, and use YouTube to get lots of people coming to your site.
4. Go to town with social media, FB, Twitter, G+ etc
5. Have an affiliate program and build a team of great affiliates
6. Joint ventures & product launch strategies

Best route - is to combine all of the above.

If you're looking for some magic bullet for loads of free highly targeted traffic without putting in much effort - join the looooooooooooooooong queue

Forum
PPC
SEO (low terms)
Solo ads
Social media
Blogging

These are the strategy I implore for every newly created site in my custody.

Once the traffic start rolling in, I start building my list from it too (excluded for adsense)..

Here are some free methods you can try:
- Video Marketing (especially YouTube)
- Yahoo! Answers
- do SEO on your page
- submit articles about your topic
- Squidoo and Hubpages
- Blog commenting
- Forum posting
- Craigslist
- email marketing

Paid traffic, you can get targeted traffic within minutes with the option to pause, tweak and resume!

Social good work if you can pump out viral content, but that depends on your niche!

There are many, but for a quick start blog commenting on authority high-traffic relevant blogs works just fine, especially if you get into top-commenters section.

Hi Zakhar,

Bets traffic must be the most relevant to what you do, so if its treadmills then the traffic you gain must be from people who are in the right stage of the buying cycle.

For instance Social media gives massive numbers of traffic but they simply are terrible at converting!

My recommendation is always with SEO - but it MUST be done right! Content is king as they say :-)

Hi have you tried looking at sites like viral hosts and instant traffic generation ?
It's a lot of time spent, but your site will get some clicks

Could give each free method a name, but in the end it comes down to this: Leverage the traffic that other sites already have.

So twitter, facebook, doc sharing sites (scribd, docstoc etc..), youtube (or vimeo, metacafe, daily motion), blog comments, guest posts, forum signatures, directories, ezines (if you provide content for them they usually do it free of charge), price comparison sites (for e-commerce), free press release, JV, LinkedIn, yahoo answers (and a few other answer sites exist with good traffic), blogging platforms with existing traffic (such as squidoo).

Then there's ranking on search engines and traditional word of mouth used offline. Go around with a t-shirt with your site on in high traffic areas, or offer content to relevant offline newspapers, magazines or whatever else you can find.

There are a few more, but if you put this sort of promotion into action, then eventually it becomes a word of mouth thing, if your offer is compelling enough.

However effectively doing promotion with a diverse list of this magnitude really requires you to have staff. I can only do a few of those daily to full effect, at a struggle.

If you say that isn't enough then you really don't understand the power that using each of these daily or even a few times a week/month can bring over the long term

*EDIT* Forgot things like traffic exchanges, if you're desperate.

**EDIT** Some social bookmarking sites provide burst of traffic for every content shared too! However, constant promotion of new content sometimes leads to a winner that brings in a larger amount of traffic!

Where is your target audience hanging out? Who has their attention? What can you do to get your content or ads in front of those people?

Ask yourself those questions and then go to work.

Blog Commenting,
Pinterest
Scoop. it

I get maximum traffic from those source after Google. So, I can tell you to promote you site in those sources.

I like:

• SEO
• press releases
• from my lists
• YouTube (YouTube Adwords is awesome and cheap)
• paid traffic (I use paid traffic to proven profitable campaigns)
• forum traffic

Ranking YouTube videos works well for me

I agree with many that say to use what I call partner traffic. This would include...

1. Joint ventures
2. Your own affiliate program

There is no faster or better way to get traffic.

After all how did you find the warrior forum?

Did you read an article about it?
Did go to a search engine to find it?
Did you learn about it on Facebook?
Did you learn about it on a blog?

Probably not. You were probably on someone's list and that is where you heard about it. So that was probably a joint venture or an affiliate talking about a product on the warrior forum.

So the most effective traffic is what I call partner traffic.

best regards,
Steve Yakim

I am not sure if there is a generic, once-size-fits-all, "easiest" way to get traffic because your particular situation is going to decide that is. Without knowing what you do, it's hard to answer this question.

What should you do?

Testing... testing... testing...

Take the time and effort (since you're looking for free traffic) and try all the methods mentioned on this thread. Make sure you track where the traffic is coming from so you know which method(s) works best for what you're trying to do.

Too often people want to take the short-cut without testing the different methods. They are overly-dependent on what other people tell them to do. This is why many keep on buying wso's. When one doesn't work, buy another one. This goes on and on and on...

You have to be willing to "fail" in your testing, but it isn't really a "failure" because in reality you're scratching something that doesn't work off your list so you're one step closer of finding what the "easiest" traffic is for you.

all depends what niche you are in

if you are in the IM niche then solo ads are great for some fast traffic

if i purchased a solo ad in the next hour the traffic could start coming in the next 6 hours

there really are lots of ways to get traffic but by trying to get some fast traffic to make money you are already setting yourself up for failure

slow and steady wins the race

paul

The easiest way by far is to buy traffic whether through a traffic exchange site or through ads. Social networks is probably a close second.

There's no such thing as free traffic, even if you don't pay money for your traffic you will have to pay your time which is money, writing articles, making videos, etc...takes time. That being said to answer your question, I think PPC is the quickest route to getting targetted traffic, you can literaly be getting traffic within a hour using pay per click advertising.

-Do SEO effectively, including organic and relative content update every now and then.
-Building your own email list and keep good relationship with them. Because money is in the mail list.
-Social Meida, providing value and promotion information to your potential customers. I think you will get more fans if you insist on doing that.
- Article and blog submission
-Forum traffic

Paid Solo Ads and using Safelist sites.

SEO is necessary and is the best way to go about it, there are tons of different ways to get immediate traffic to your website until organic traffic kicks in.Blogging


Forums


Social sites


Press releases


Reviews

Free traffic is free traffic. It's nonsense to say it is not free because it takes time.
If you put an article on ezine articles it is free.
If you take a Facebook ad out it is not free.
Ultimately it all depends what niche you are in or what you are promoting.
If you are in the IM niche for example then Facebook is not going to be the best traffic source for you. If you are promoting South Park products then it probably is.
You can have 100 videos on YouTube, but it does not mean you will get any significant traffic.

The only way to get good FREE traffic is to start writing blogs and articles, basically advertise your product. Social media is the obvious one. We run competitions on Facebook which gets us hundreds of new likes, we then 'drop in' our product information and special offers and find that we always have a traffic boost.

one way to get traffic to your website is with backlinks

paid traffic
facebook
social bookmarking
yahoo answer