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There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your blog(s): A steady flow of online traffic. If no one is aware that your blog(s) existed in the blogosphere which contains millions and millions of other blogs, then nobody will go to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating any income.

In the business world, it takes money to make more money. The same rules apply to making money online, it takes money to maintain an income generating site or blog.

But of course, with the versatility and huge resource the Internet offers, there are many ways you could find that could help optimize the potential of your site or blog in generating traffic

Big subscriber base and constant stream of traffic to those high earning, big hitting websites and A-list blogs were not built up or generated overnight. Most of them had or are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have the monetary resources. There are many ways to generate free online traffic without having to spend a single cent in advertising. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it. All you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent. After reaching the 100 days of consistent blogging, here I present to you the Top five ways to generate free online traffic(unless you count the many man-hours required as a cost) that could help your site a whole lot in terms of exposure.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many bloggers are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their blogs. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your blogs from other blogs or websites.

The Technorati Fave Train had kick-started link building of this blog and certainly created awareness of this blog’s existence and generated a whole lot of free traffic. Just 1.5 months of boarding this link train, this blog was fortunate enough to break into Technorati Top 100 most favourited blogs. Besides bragging rights, the many blogs that link to you also increase your Technorati Authority. There have been many follow up link train after the success of the Technorati Fave Train.

Only 3 weeks into joining ViralTags (another new link train) had propel this blog to #8 on the first page of Google with the search term “earn income online”!

Exchanging links will also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Review Exchange

Similar to the vein of exchanging links, Review exchange services are the mutual review of one another’s blog or specific blog post. This is done vice versa and based on mutual trust. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. Both of you can come to an agreement to use certain preferred anchor text linking to your blog’s homepage or any other specific page which you would wish to direct more traffic to. The other blog’s readers can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your blog’s existence is boosted.

The process of searching for blogs that are similar to your blog niche and are willing to do review exchange is a long and tedious process. Until I found out about a review exchange website called ReviewBack.com. This site was a god-send to me as it has a ready pool of bloggers wanting to do review exchange. And it provides a common market place where bloggers of similar interest can link up with convenience to exchange review!

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when others read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has. Include a link or a brief description of your blog, when people find interest in your articles, make sure they know where to track the origins of your article. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, there’s a great probability readers will go to your site for more.

Join Social Bookmarking Communities and Forums

This requires your extended man-hours and your PR skills to be put to great use for networking. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities, so as to brand or build reputation for yourself as well as your blog. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site. The advantage is that you know the interest of those in the communities and forums and can prepare yourself to engage them to maximum effect.

Social bookmarking is not a new phenomenon, with websites such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon available for bloggers network, promote their blog and to submit articles to. Bloggers are seeing and harnessing the power these social sites offer. Bloggers have come to find that if they can get their blog on the front page of one of these social bookmarking sites (digg, netscape, reddit), thousands of visitors will flood to your site within minutes. Unfortunately, this phenomenon has not happened on this blog yet!

Content is KING

This may sound like a cliche but writing good content drives traffic to your blog. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases in your blog posts and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your own but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality. As words gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build a huge subscription to your feed.