I imagined that people would arrive on my website, as if by magic, purchase goods, and perhaps come back again for more.

A week or so later I came down to earth with a big bump.

I realised that it would take a bit of time and effort to see results that I was dreaming about!

Since my reality check, I have learned all about weird and wonderful ways of internet marketing.

In this article I will tell you about my top 5 free ways of increasing website traffic. All these methods are completely free and if you spend some time on them you will find that they work consistently.

(1)Writing Articles

Writing an article on a subject related to your website and getting that article published has two major benefits:

- People who are interested in your article will read it and often click on URL in your resource box find out more. This gets you another free targeted visitor. Targeted, because that reader wants to find out more on subject of your article, which is hopefully related to subject of your website.

- Every publisher of your article must also publish your "resource box". Adding a resource box with your URL to all of your articles will increase number of links leading back to your website, which in turn helps to increase your search engine position

You will find a list of article directories to submit your articles to here.

(2)Forum Networking There are many discussion forums on internet, on every topic you could possibly imagine.

Most discussion boards allow posters to attach a "Signature" with their post containing additional information about themselves, such as their name, URL and sometimes even an advertisement.

By visiting a few forums regularly and participating in discussions, asking and answering questions, you can build up trust with other forum members, whilst at same time getting free exposure for your website.

Just try to make a useful contribution to forum - be sure to read forum rules and don't spam!

(3)Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking has two main benefits for you.

Firstly, more links that you exchange, more chance there is that someone will follow a link from another site and land on your website.

Secondly, your website will be perceived more importantly by search engines.

The more links you have from other sites, greater your chance of getter ranked more highly by all search engines.

Here are some Dos and Don'ts to help you get more out of your link exchanges.

These people have not failed because they are not smart. Heck they are more rocket scientists out there than you can imagine.

Their internet marketing is not successful simply because they've failed to recognize two critical facts.

Yep. Just two miserable, but critical facts about net.

The first fact is that internet is an improved version of telephone and not of television. That means that in your internet marketing you should use web more like most advanced telephone on earth. Read full article at either of these links;

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=24807

or this one:

http://www.ideamarketers.com/library/article.cfm?articleid= 34087&wherefrom=LOGIN

The other thing is that you must be aware of heavy defences prospective clients on net place against any internet marketing aimed at them.

Use yourself to do some extremely important research that could be worth a fortune to you. How do you react to following offline situations?

How do you react when a stranger approaches you and tries to sell something to you? How do you treat door-to-door sales people?

Hold on to your answer and let us go to next part of this important experiment.

How do you react in two cases above even when you need particular product being sold?