When people are starting their online businesses, they need to drive traffic to their websites. However, in most cases, people do not have the money to pay for advertising.

There are many ways to driving traffic to a website, depending on your budget and the time you have available to work on building your online business.

This article lists the most powerful and low cost ways to generate traffic to your website.

1. Offer free reports and content. Giving away some freebies and including your website URL in those freebies is an effective and low cost way of building traffic to your website. You can write some useful short reports with your website link in them and offer those reports for free on a website where you ask visitors to leave their email address before they download the free reports or articles. This means you can give away the report with your URL and also build a list.

2. Blog. Blogging is a very effective way of building traffic to your website. On your blog, you can discuss your website’s products and services, and add some links to your website. You can also answer any questions your prospects and customers may have.  By blogging regularly, you will have fresh content that will get your website indexed by search engines and rank high on these search engines. This in turn increases traffic to your website.

3. Publish your own newsletter. Having your own newsletter where you offer free tips and content on a regular basis can help to increase traffic to your website. Your newsletter will have links to your website, so many people who will read your newsletter will also visit your website.

4. Start a forum related to the products or services you sell on your website. By having a forum on your niche, you establish yourself as an authority in your topic. By answering questions and helping people in your niche on your own forum, you drive traffic to your website since you will have your website URL in your signature in the forum posts.

5. Exchange links with websites that have high popularity (PR) rank. All you need to do is to find websites that are related to what you offer on your website and exchange links with these sites. This is particularly effective if the websites have high popularity rank on search engines. By doing this, some traffic will come to your website through the websites you are linked to.

These are the low cost ways you can use start driving traffic to your website. More traffic means more sales and profits for your online business.