Traffic and how to get it… the challenge of having a website. But getting traffic does not guarantee you a successful online business, whether it’s free or not.

That might surprise you but it’s true.

You don’t actually need to get loads of free hits - you just need to get a reasonable amount of QUALIFIED hits.

By qualified I mean people who are already interested in the subject of your site. Getting hits is easy peasy - all you need to do is sign up for a free traffic exchange, surf to earn credits and assign them to your website.

But you won’t make many sales that way.

To get free hits that are worth getting you need to promote yourself in places where your potential customers will be spending their time online. Try social networking sites, forums and chat rooms. You can also find them by attracting them in other ways - use SEO techniques to make your website search engine friendly, build a page on Squidoo to attract them and make more money as well, and create a blog that links to your website.

All your efforts will be rewarded but it does takes time. I set up a web page on Squidoo which gives advice and links to websites concerned with online writing. I also promote some writing related products on that page. By paying attention to my tags, links and keywords I pull in a lot of search engine traffic without even trying to promote my site elsewhere (I do, but the stats are good just for the search engines).

What’s more, because this traffic is already interested in the subject of my web page I get a very high take up rate for affiliate programs, products and so on. It’s a win win situation - and my customers get loads of free information and advice even if they don’t buy a thing.

Lots of people come back time and time again as well, as I keep the page updated and up to the minute. This alone brings more free hits.

Perseverance and experimentation are the best ways to get closer to free hits, and the methods I have described above will get you plenty of extra hits over time.

Good luck, and remember, you’ll get there eventually. Just keep going!