Paid traffic is a smart part of a serious online entrepreneur's marketing plan. You control every aspect of traffic when you pay for it. Ad campaigns with:

make it possible to laser-target your advertising to the exact demographics you want to reach.
However, paid traffic can cost you a lot of money, delivering little to no results, if you don't know what you are doing.

Even if you do eventually develop a successful paid traffic marketing plan, it doesn't happen overnight. You have to pump a lot of revenue into buying traffic each and every day, spend your time and testing and retesting, and there are no guarantees that you will get the results you're looking for.

Sexy free traffic! If you think the reference to free traffic as being "sexy" is a little overboard, you
are incorrect. Free traffic is beautiful, sexy, attractive and desirable. Why is this so? The answer is simple ... because it's FREE! :-)

In many cases this just means being free financially. A lot of methods you are about to learn require a little bit of your time on the front end, but then they just continue to deliver free, targeted traffic to your site or blog with little to no upkeep on your part.
Other methods will require regular input by you, but since your financial outlay is zero, and the Internet never sleeps, you can employ these free traffic methods anytime of the night or day, whenever you have a few minutes or hours of spare time.

List Building
Ok, lets start with the first traffic source or to be more accurate potential traffic source, this will take some effort on your part but the rewards are what all major six figure marketers rely on a continually work at, that is, building a list.
You absolutely, positively must be building a list. This is true if your business is off-line or on, and technology makes it easy to do so when you have a blog or website. Whenever you need some free traffic to your site, to introduce a new offer, unveil a new blog post or for any other reason, you simply send an email to your list.

There are 3 components to building your list. They are some type of opt-in freebie, a squeeze page to collect email addresses, and an autoresponder sequence.

Opt-In Freebie
Lists of resources work well here. A short PDF that answers one big problem your audience has is another winner. Compile a short report, list of helpful resources, e-book or some other freebie, save it in PDF format, and you are ready to go.
Don't wait days, weeks or even months figuring this out. Make something that is easily digestible, short, and provides a quick win for your audience.

Squeeze Page

so-called because it is intended to "squeeze" the email address from a prospect, in return for your opt-in bribe or free report. Don't ask for much information here. Studies continue to show year after year that simply asking for an emailaddress provides the highest conversion rate for squeeze pages. This example asks for 'first name' or 'name' and 'email address'

You want minimal distractions on this page, and be sure to make it as simple and straightforward as possible. If you don't know how to create a squeeze page, also called a landing page, there are a number of 'page building' software (which are not free) optimizepress, instabuilder, leadpages.net are the most popular. All very capable of creating squeeze pages and more, the cheapest option in instabuilder and the most expensive is leadpages.
There are also free squeeze page widgets and plug-ins for popular website platforms like WordPress All initial traffic should be driven to your squeeze page. Every page of your website or blog should have an opt-in box that also offers your free report in exchange for someone signing up to your email list or newsletter.

The delivery of your free report or newletter etc is handled by an Autoresponder. The two most popular services are GetResponse and Aweber Here is the sequence of events and how your autoresponder works.

These days most people are aware of social media and many of us have at least one social media account.
Social media can provide a lot of free traffic. However, there are so many worthwhile social media websites out there, you have to be careful not to spend the bulk of your time chasing this traffic across the gamut of social media sites and just concentrate your efforts on a few, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn are the main ones but don't forget instagram and snapchat.

People go to social media sites to hang out. They are socializing. Make sure you approach them in a social manner. Don't ever attempt to sell on Facebook or the other social media sites. Engage. Show funny videos. Ask people to share their favorite recipe or movie. Then whenever you have a new blog post, share it on your social media accounts. It should be noted that some entrepreneurs do a really good job turning Facebook Groups into a steady stream of free traffic.

Create Your Own Memes for Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Memes are those graphics and pictures you see on Facebook that have funny or interesting text, quotes and comments overlaying the graphics. You will be ahead of your competition by miles when you use a free meme generator to create your own, one-of-a-kind, customized memes.

The following meme generators are free to use, you can create original content literally in seconds, and posts on Facebook and other social media sites with graphics or images drive engagement more successfully than posts that only have text
• MemeGenerator.net
• Imgur
• QuickMeme
• DIYLOL
• Meme Center
• Make a Meme

SEO, in case you don't know, that stands for search engine optimization. This means making your website, content and webpages attractive to Google and the other search engines.
Search engines don't "read" like human beings. This means that you have to do certain things differently than what may be visually appealing to you and to web surfers. Of course, your website should also be attractive to human beings.

On-page SEO keeps the search engines happy and sending you free traffic, and it is not as hard to optimize your site as you may think. Google is insistent that as long as you provide a lot of helpful information and include words, keywords and phrases that let Big G know what your webpages are about, they will send you traffic, and it will not cost you a single cent.

That being said, make sure your are using short and long-tail keywords andphrases in your image captions, your domain URL, your headlines and sparingly throughout your content.

Content
Yes, it keeps cropping up, Google also love great content. Time and again the big G tell bloggers and online entrepreneurs to focus on providing consistent, original content published regularly, that helps your audience solve problems

Let's say you have two websites you frequent that are almost identical. They solve the same problems, talk about the same things, and they even look the same. If one website provides incredibly valuable and helpful content once a week and the other site does so once every 6 weeks, which one do you think Google and the other search engines are going to send the most free traffic to? Publish original, helpful, valuable content regularly for the best chance at free search engine traffic.

Vlogging is the act of combining video with your textual blog post. While doing this, you can take the audio and turn it into a podcast. Some people are not comfortable videotaping themselves. If you are, vlogging and then posting your vlog to your blog and video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo expands your reach and drives engagement.

Host Surveys and Giveaways, Contests and Quizzes
Zoho Survey, SurveyGizmo, FluidSurveys and Survey Monkey allow you to poll your audience and find out just what they are looking for. They are also great for quizzes. If you want to run a giveaway or contest, Cool Freebie Links, ContestGirl and Freaky Freddies are just a few of the many contest sites where you can post your contest.

Web entrepreneurs frequently forget that the "real world" is a great place to advertise their products and services. The following strategies can help you get the word out about your website, and once you make the initial investment, they can drive targeted traffic to your little corner of the web.
Attend Live Events
There are seminars and live events held around the world that relate to the niche or market you are in. Attend some of these live events if you can, and offer to speak or provide some type of valuable freebie. Always make sure you have plenty of business cards for live seminars and conferences, complete with your contact information and web address.
Car Magnets
You've probably seen a car, truck or SUV with a professional looking decal or magnet on its door. While not truly qualifying as a "free" traffic source because of your initial investment, once your magnet is up on your car, while you are tooling around town and going through your regular, daily routine you are advertising your website.
Flyers
Printing up flyers requires a very minimal investment. You then distribute those flyers around town, outside crowded shopping centers or other high-traffic areas. Make sure you check with the appropriate authorities in your area so that you don't run afoul of any local marketing laws.