Online marketing can be a daunting task, especially if you’re on a tight budget. Fortunately there are a few ways you can drive traffic to your website without having to spend any money.

Never underestimate the power of word of mouth. The first thing you should do once your website is completed, and ready to be shared with the world is tell your friends and family about it. Be sure they’re clear on what niche your site serves, and let them know that you’d love it if they recommended it to anyone they knew who might enjoy it. Depending on your niche, and the size of your circle of friends, this can actually bring in more traffic than you might expect.

Using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote your site is very similar in nature to the word of mouth marketing mentioned above. The first goal of your Twitter or Facebook account should be to make friends. Once you’ve got that down, it’s time to start showing those friends your site, and encouraging your new internet friends to pass that site along. Keep in mind the part about making friends. If you just fire your link off to random strangers seconds after sending them a friend request, you won’t get very far. Take the time to send messages, and reply to theirs. It really doesn’t take as much effort as it sounds like it does, and the benefits are worth the investment of time.

Social bookmarking sites are another great way to spread your link around. Start an account on a social bookmarking site, and fill it with sites you like. Include plenty of things from your niche, but don’t be afraid to include other things too. Over time, throw in links to your own site, and as your account gains attention, so to will your website. Take some time, and send friend requests to people with similar interests, and you’ll be on your way to more traffic.

All of the above mentioned ways to build traffic are completely free, but they all require an investment of time, but it’s worth the effort. That investment of time will yield quality visitors to your site that are interested in your niche. These methods are highly effective at reaching your target audience, and at the end of the day, that’s what really matters.

Facebook and Twitter have become a part of the lives of a great number of people, so it only makes sense to try and use those services to get your message out to your target audience. So all you have to do is sign up for them, and put up a few links to your website, and the traffic will just pour in, right? Wrong. There are a lot of things to consider before diving into marketing your site through socian networking services.

The most important thing to remember whether you’re thinking about a Facebook or Twitter account is that there has to be an actual human being running the account. There is plenty of software out there that will post updates about your website to either service automatically, but that software should be used alongside a person making regular updates, not instead of a person making regular updates. Just remember, the key word in social networking is “social”. People use Facebook and Twitter to connect with other people, and giving them that connection is a big part of using social networks effectively as marketing tools.

When using Twitter, make sure you take the time to talk to your followers. If someone @ replies you, be sure to answer their question or address their statement. Same thing goes for direct messages. If you have a healthy number of real tweets crafted by a real human being, your followers are way more likely to click on links to your site when you tweet them.

Facebook works a little differently. When you’re setting up a Facebook page, you should take a minute, and think of something elated to your niche, and create a page about that rather than about your specific website. For example, if you have a website that sells luggage, start a Facebook page about travel. Once the page has a good number of fans, start throwing in some links to deals on your site in between posts about travel. That way you’re certain to reach your target audience in a meaningful way.

If you’re careful to give your social marketing campaign a friendly, human feel rather than just letting software post updates to Twitter and Facebook for you, you will drive more traffic to your links, and get more attention from your target audience. With no sign up fees or other costs involved, Facebook and Twitter can be affordable, and powerful marketing tools if used correctly.

Facebook can be a great platform to market your business or products on if you do it right. The biggest thing to remember is that Facebook is a social network where two way engagement is important. People who spam Facebook with links, and information that looks like spam are going to be classified as such and potentially ignored or even shut down by Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is that you need to have a very engaged audience in order to be profitable through the social media part of it. That is what we are going to talk about today – the social aspect of Facebook, not the advertising platform.

On Facebook you have two real ways of marketing for free to individuals. The most prominent now is through Facebook Pages as they are called. The other is through Facebook Events.

Facebook Pages are the best way to promote and connect with your readers or fans online, except through mailing lists. Facebook pages are a great way to promote your content because you can easily share links to your website, interact with fans and hold contests and more.

It is important to remember that your Facebook page is only a compliment to your site, not your only site. Due to the interaction levels being so high, it can be easy to use Facebook Pages as your only source of interaction and content creation. Spread the love around to other social networks such as Twitter and see your brand grow even more so.

The best way I have found to get my Facebook page numbers up (right now it is around 1,400 for a pretty small community’s website) is to hold a “fan drive.” A fan drive is simply a plea to get people to “like” your pages in order to achieve a goal. My goal was 1,000 fans in one month and I would donate $150 to the local Hospice. Within two weeks my page had over 1,100 fans and I was writing a check.

Those 1,000 fans are worth so much more than $150, and the cost was well worth it.

Depending on your situation, there are other ways to get people to join if you are not working on such a local level. For example, giving away an iPod or something to a random fan is a great way to get people to join, even small things like books and gift cards are a huge motivator.

Be creative when using Facebook to market your product or page, but remember, don’t be a spammer or you will lose fans a lot faster than you gained them.

Site flipping is quickly becoming a viable way to make money online for people interested in creating websites.

It used to be that you would create website properties, manage them and nurture them into something that is a long term business idea. That still exists, but a new way of doing it has come about, it is called site flipping.
Site flipping is much like house flipping if you are familiar to that. You can start a new website, build some traffic, backlinks, and profit from it, then sell it on the marketplace.

So how do you go about doing that? The first thing you need to do is find a popular niche that you enjoy writing about. I say this because if you hate the niche you are working on, you are never going to make any money from it. A lot of people can write about random niches and be just fine, but for me, writing has to be about something I enjoy or else I will burn out really easily. So the first thing is to pick a niche, after that, you must find keywords relevant to that niche that you can be the most competitive in, then write great content around those keywords.

After you get your content going and your niche picked out, it is a good idea to get a great domain name. Having a great domain name will be a very attractive part of your offer, especially if it is zeroed in on your niche of choice.

When your site is up and running successfully, the real work begins. I recommend writing at least one great post per day of original content. You can intermix PLR (private label rights) articles as well, but having some great unique content is very important.

Promotion is definitely one of the most important areas as well. Starting to build quality back links on other websites, through blog commenting, forums postings, social media such as twitter, Facebook, and Delicious, are all very important to the success of the blog.

Once you start getting some good traffic and start making some profit from your affiliate offers or Adsense, it is time to start gearing up to sell your site. Make sure you use a reputable site, such as Flippa.com and Escrow or Paypal to ensure safe payment and transaction. There is no real timeline on how long you should hold a domain or property, but depending on the revenue and growth it could be 3 weeks or 3 years.

Good luck!

Facebook is a great social network site to use to monitise and drive traffic to your website.  Watch the following video by Jeff Johnston for tactics by using viral marketing.

When your trying to get backlinks for your website there are a number of ways you can do this which are:

1) Write articles and submit them to article websites

2) Build a blog on your website and write very useful articles and submit these to social network sites like twitter, digg, facebook, delicious

3) Submit your website to classified advert websites like craigslist, gumtree,hotfrog and loads of others

4) Write comments on blogs with a link back to your site on a blog that is in a similar niche to your website

5) Join forums that is in a niche similar to your website and write a number of posts with your anchor text keyword link in your signature

6) Answers questions in yahoo answers with a link back to your website

7) Write a squidoo lens, hubpage and wiki page linking back to your website

8.) Create a facebook group and get all your friends to join and ask them to ask all their friends to join.

Take a look at our system that generates 1,000 backlinks a day for your website on autopilot -

CLICK HERE TO GET BACKLINKS 

Google and Bing (Microsoft) have signed a deal with Twitter which will allow tweets to be made available via search results.  This means that users searching online will get access to live results instantly via Tweets on Google and Bing.

Twitter has created a new type of online search in that in gives users real time information from users tweeting their information to their followers.  These tweets will now be available to Google and Bing which will make the online search experience more realtime in the information that is presented to the user.

Microsoft has announced that a potential deal will soon be struck with Facebook in that user status updates will be made availabe to Bings search results.

Google’s Marissa Mayer said: “Our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world.”

 ”In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged – real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.”

Internet experts are predicting that with this new invention of real-time search this will be the next big money maker for webmasters, allowing companies the opportunity to advertise alongside the popular information in real time.

Microsoft’s Bing service has already setup a Twitter search page specifically to search for Tweets and Google will soon launch a Twitter search service within the next few months.

Social networks are now becoming a vital method to drive traffic to your websites as Twitter in particular is used as a search tool by some users to look for information.

If you have a website that needs more traffic then you should take advantage of the free media that is out there.  One way to get more traffic is to

1) Setup a wordpress blog and link this to your website. 

2) Sign up to Twitter and create an account.

3) Follow as many people as you can that are related to your niche, just run a search for your main keywords

4) Download the wordpress twitter plugin and upload it and active it on your blog.  Fill in your twitter details and set it up so everytime you create a new post, it automatically submits a link on your twitter account

5) Setup a facebook account and become friends with as many people as you can related to your niche.

6) Install the Twitter facebook application and link in your twitter account to your facebook account.  Everytime you create a new tweet via your blog, twitter will also update your facebook status with a link to your article automatically.  So you will get traffic from both Twitter and Facebook automatically when you create new posts in your blog.

To get more followers on Twitter CLICK HERE

To make money from Twitter CLICK HERE