How can newbies drive traffic quickly (and affordably)?

submiting their webiste's link to social bookmarking is a good way, they can use the website socialmarker wich helps a lot. This is good for exemple with review websites since the competition is normaly not so big.

There is no quick way that doesn't cost money unless you spam facebook and twitter or some other shady type of black hat trick. If you want it quick look for cheap keywords and do PPC or CPV.

There are many affordable ways you can quickly drive traffic pretty quickly. But it all depends on the amount of traffic they expect to drive and how fast they want it.

You can get quick traffic from stuff like Press releases and articles at directories, getting your site listed on popular news sites like google news, create a good video at one of the video sites, guest blogging at a popular blog in that niche.

All of these can provide you quality traffic pretty quickly and that is just touching the surface it all takes work just like anything else.

Anyway good luck to you.

Zac

You don't want any old traffic, you want targeted traffic.
even if you don't have your own webpage, you'll still want to cloak your affiliate link.

Articles, blog postings, Yahoo answers, forum trolling, and press releases are all amazing and free ways to get a ton of traffic.

Just depends how much "time" you want to invest instead of money

@ gabo77: Trust me you won't see much traffic with bookmarking as a newbie. It's great for backlinks, but traffic don't make me laugh.

Bookmarking works great if you already have a reputation in a market or a great following, perhaps a blog that gets a large amount of views. That way your visitors get the chance to bookmark your posts and get you on the first page of Digg.com for example.

But with a little bit of luck, your bookmarks can show up at Google's frontpage, though they don't stay there very long either.

Here are the things that I would like to suggest for a newbie. There's no harm in trying anything at all. As long as there is a goal and determination and besides these are for free.
1) Article Marketing - post to website, Publish to EZA, then submit to other Article Directories
2) Video Marketing - post to YouTube and even to blog
3) Social bookmarking - yes this is good for backlinks and can help you be on front page on Google. This is what we are really looking for, right.. so still give this a try!
4) Press Releases
5) Lead generation - Go for your optin-box. You can offer free ebook or special reports for your leads
6) Social Media - Twitter/Facebook
7) Blog commenting - related niches
8) Forum Posting

BTW, for the keyword research - market samurai. =)

You can create a blog for free. Then write articles. You can also submit the articles to good article directories like EzineArticles,GoArticles,etc.

To get some quick traffic you are gonna have to get your hands dirty, regardless of any "holier than thou" responses you may get on here. That means stuff like dropping your URL casually into relevant forum discussions, answering yahoo questions just to drop a link and a recommendation etc etc.

CPV isn't exactly a very cheap way to drive traffic, it might seem that way because of how they advertise but you actually pay around $20 CPM even at the lowest bid possible. Not saying you can't make it profitable tho.

Social media optimization is one of the best ways to improve traffic to your website without costing you any penny. You can do social bookmarking, article submission, press release submission and also video submission. These strategies can create backlinks to your site which is essential in traffic rankings.You just need to sign up and do the postings for free....Although there are still some websites that lets you do all of these for a fee, most or many are still offering for free.


rankings.

If I had to drive traffic, and had no money to spend, I would concentrate my efforts on classified ads, article marketing, and forum posting. Those 3 methods have the ability to bring you a lot of targeted traffic when used correctly.

1. Article marketing. It is a bit of a slower process, but when you get the right keywords you can start seeing traffic daily with just 10-20 articles. However, your keyword research will indicate your success!

2. Classified ads. I know many people say that Craigslist no longer works, but it works just fine if you don't expect the world from it. You can easily get a couple hundred visitors per month with a targeted advertisement, effective ad copy, and a clickable image. Putting an image in my classified ads has gotten me a lot more traffic!

3. Forum marketing. If you are going to market your products or services on forums, make sure that you contribute and do not just spam the forums with one-liners. It is not about how many posts you have, but the value that you bring with each post.

Article marketing is a great way for traffic as well as getting to really know the arena you are in. As far as a paid keyword tool, Market Samurai is my preference.

I think a lot depends on how much time you have to devote to the different methods, it's all about exposure and, as in all sales, it's really a numbers game.

Great input, folks.

Here's a list of other keyword tools:

FREE:
1- Google Keyword Tool (free) - adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2- KWbrowse.com (free) - Gives keywords from lateral markets
3- Quintura.com (free) - Similar to KWbrowse.com. But with visual results.
4- AdLab.msn.com (free) - Will help you understand your market
5- Spacky (free) - Searches Google, Yahoo & MSN.
6- Google.com/insights/search (free) - Compare search volume pattersns

7- KeywordExtend.com (Generates adword variations for your list)
8- Gorank.com/analyze.php - Determines relevancy of your web pages based on certain keywords. Necessary for natural SEO traffic to CPA offers
9- ci.Trellian.com - Monitor competitor's sites to see their traffic sources
10- tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook - leverages google insights
& other sources

FREE & PAID:
1- GoodKeywords.com (free & paid) - includes misspelled words
2- TrafficTravis.com (free & paid) - free almost as good as paid!
3- WordPot.com (free & paid) - gives related search terms & synonyms
4- SpyFu.com (free & paid) - Steal your competitor's keywords
5- Nichebot.com - Search all major KW tools in one spot. Monthly fee after trial
6- WordButler.com (free trial, then $20/month)
7- KeywordElite.com ($174 one-time cost) - 5 tools in one
8- KeywordSpy.com ($90/month) - shows you what keywords the competition is using
9- Nichebot.com - Search all major KW tools in one spot. Monthly fee

PPC traffic (example: Google Adwords) which is very highly targeted

Make sure to submit your link to as many directories/search engines that you can

Also paid traffic is a great idea for starting websites to establish a visitor base

When it comes to driving traffic, one of the things noobs need to realize (and are seldom told) is that time and money are on opposite ends of the work continuum. You can do free stuff, but it's gonna take a lot more work & time. There are paid solutions that will cost you $$$, but will save you tons of time & work.

First thing to do is setup a free blog of some sort - blogger is just as fine as anything, and then set yourself up w/an autoresponder and opt-in form so you can capture email addys.

Before you write a single article for your blog, spend your time doing your KW research. Find good 'buying' KWs that are long-tail, as these will be easier to rank well for in the SEs. Cross-reference in the SEs to see what kinda competition you have. The less competition, the better. Some will say to check your KWs in quotes ("keyword" vs keyword), but it doesn't matter. "Keyword" will give you the number of pages optimized for your KW, where as Keyword will give you what anybody that is typing that into the SEs is gonna find.

Once you find a good balance between a long-tail KW that gets a decent enough amount of traffic, but doesn't have crazy competition, write articles for your blog centered around that long-tail KW. Throw some backlinks at it - RSS, social bookmarking, etc.

You can then crank out some articles for the article directories for more backlinks and hope that those submissions get picked up by other blogs and such, but this is a slower process that shows little in the way of immediate results unless you're really cranking out the articles in terms of volume.

A best-case scenario would be that you're writing / promoting in a niche that you know well, so you can construct good, content-driven articles that others in the niche would wanna see. If so, then hit up authority sites / blogs in the niche, and see if you can submit articles / content for publication on their site. This is the best kinda traffic b/c it is HIGHLY targeted, and generally is pretty good in volume as well (depending on the size of the authority size of course).

It's the sage old trade off time for money. If you don't have the money you'll have to trade the time and it will take time (and alot of effort) to start getting free traffic. I would try froum post, yahoo answers and also craigslist advertising this is free and gets a huge amount of traffic. Inexpensive traffic might be contacting a u tube video owner which is getting alot of views say 80,000 or more in the last year and asking them if you can place an ad on their video for a small fee.

Why not try to find some low cost pay per click keywords? It's a good strategy at first.

S