Advertising is the key to success for any home business, as people can’t turn into customers if they don’t know you exist and don’t know how you can meet their needs. Traditional advertising, such as print media has been around since the invention of the printing press and broadcast media soon came after the birth of radio. But despite all the years of using these types of advertising, the internet has cast a new light on how to successfully market a business without spending a fortune.

While the cost of Internet advertising may seem cheap considering the number of potential customers it can reach for businesses that only offer a local product or service advertising globally just may not make sense. If your business is located in Iowa and your advertising appears in England or in Africa, chances are the return on your advertising investment will not be what you expected.

While internet businesses can gain tremendously from internet marketing, it can get expensive over time depending on the type of advertising venue you choose. The best advertising you can hope for is to have others send your message to their friends, free, without being asked and without complaining. This is known as viral marketing.

The use of viral marketing has been growing and simply involves having internet users distributing your advertising message of their own free will. One of first and most successful uses of viral marketing was when companies such as Yahoo began offering free email accounts. A brief advertising message appears at the bottom of every Yahoo email sent, usually including a link for the advertiser. Then whenever people signed up for the free email service, every email they sent out contained an advertisement.

Talk about viral marketing! Unfortunately your business probably doesn’t have the capability to give out free email accounts but you can come up with other great ideas to virally get your message to the masses. Try giving away an eBook you write that shares useful information about your product, service or industry and of course has your advertisement tagged throughout the copy. Another idea is to create an online ezine that people could subscribe to and share with others.

Whatever idea you come up with just remember that people love free stuff and if what you give away has value then your prospects don’t mind recommending others to your business or website. This means massive exposure for your business and you don’t have to spend a dime.

So you decided to start an online business. The website is up and you’re ready to rock but seem to be missing just one thing… Traffic! While there are many ways to drive traffic to a website, some of the best techniques don’t require a deep pocketbook and can bring your website some incredible results.

Discover 5 easy to implement strategies for increasing your website traffic on a small budget:

1. Offer free reports, eBooks or videos.

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. All you do is write some useful short reports that someone coming to your website would be interested in reading (of course the reports will link back to your website). Then you offer your freebies on your website where your visitors must leave their email address and name before they are able to access your materials. This strategy not only builds credibility with potential customers but also helps you build a targeted opt-in mailing list that you can market to in the future. I suggest using an auto-responder service like Aweber to easily ad opt-in forms on your website and capture your prospects information.

2. Blog.

Blogging is an awesome way to bring traffic to your website. On your blog, you can discuss your products and services as well as answer any questions your potential customers may have. Of course, since it’s your blog you can also add banner advertisements and text links back to your website too. By blogging regularly, you will have fresh content that will get your website indexed by search engines which is a free source of incredible traffic. The best part is that blogs are free and anyone can easily set one up using applications like Blogger or WordPress.

3. Publish your own newsletter.

Having your own newsletter where you offer free tips and content on a regular basis can help to not only bring in new visitors but also keep people coming back for more. Your newsletter will contain quality content and news about your industry as well as links to your website. If your content is good enough your newsletters can easily spread all over the Internet. (Again, I suggest using an auto-responder service like Aweber to publish and manage your newsletter.

4. Join forums and message boards related to your niche or website.

Forum marketing is quite possibly the best free way to drive massive amounts of targeted traffic to your website. All you need to do is find online forums that relate to your product or service and then join in the conversation. While you don’t blatantly make posts advertising your website, you are allowed to create what’s known as a signature file that will go at the bottom of every post you make. It’s this signature file that you can put a link back to your website, along with a catchy ad about what you offer. The more posts you make the more exposure and back links your website gets.

5. Exchange links with other websites in your niche.

To execute this strategy all you need to do is go to your favorite search engine and conduct some searches for keywords related to your website. If you can find some top rated websites that compliment instead of compete with your product or service, send them an email or give them a call and ask to do a link exchange. If the services compliment each other and don’t compete you should be able to form some quality partnerships and links back to your website.

In closing, there are literally hundreds of free and low cost ways to start driving traffic to your website. The most important thing is to start executing one of these strategies today and not put it off until tomorrow. With a little bit of work, anyone can turn their website into a high traffic selling machine if they are consistent about executing new traffic strategies on a daily basis.