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There are several ways to drive high-quality traffic to your website without you having to spend anything. Here are 10 strategies you can use:

1. Optimize your site for the search engines.

You'd have to be a fulltime search engine optimization expert to keep up with all the changes the major search engines make, but there are a few basic things you can do to help your site come up for relevant searches. Here are some to get you started:

a)      Define your keywords - this is how people will find your business online. The trick is to find keywords that are highly relevant to what you offer and popular enough that they will attract decent traffic to your site, but not so competitive that you can't rank well using them. Use your keywords in your web page copy. To get started with keywords I recommend goodkeywords.com. They have an excellent tool which is free.

b)      Create your Meta tags - this is how the search engines "read" your site. Put your keywords in your Meta tags in the source code of each page of your website.

c)      Don't use lots of graphics or Flash, frames, or "alt" tags in HTML for pictures - search engines don't like them because it makes it hard for them to "read" your site.

d)     Get links to your site - create a page in your website and call it either resources or links and add good, relevant links. Or you can sign up with links-exchange.net and have them create a links page for you with one link from your site. Linking is the second biggest indicator of how your site is ranked.

2. Submit your site to the search engines.

Why wait for the search engines' robots or spiders to find you? Submit your website at addme.com, dmoz.org/add.html, submitexpress.com or ineedhits.com

3. Use pay-per-click advertising or PPC

Google Adwords or Yahoo Overture both offer pay-per-click advertising options. You can create a PPC campaign for a very small investment, and because you have complete control over your budget, you can set it for whatever amount you feel comfortable with. It's very difficult to get to the top rank in the search engine, but it can be very easy to get on the first page of results with a PPC, bringing targeted traffic to you. The best part is you only pay when someone clicks your ad that takes them to your website. Adwords and Overture are both easy to learn.

4. Place or swap ads with other ezines in your niche.

Seek out other ezines in your niche whose publishers might be interested in swapping ads. They can either be normal ads, or just a recommendation within the content of the ezine itself.

In addition to or instead of swapping ads, you could also purchase ad space in an ezine in your niche that has a large circulation. If you pay to place an ad, I usually suggest running it for a minimum of three consecutive issues for the best results.