What are the best ways to drive traffic to your site?

If you are like me you don’t have a lot of money to spend on products that might help drive traffic to your site. You also might not want to spend any money on ads. So how do you drive people to your blog?

1) Write good content-Google likes this and so does your audience. I don’t think it takes too long to write a great post. I have heard the longer, the better but not quite sure how true that is. I like to have my posts between 500-700 words but sometimes I go over that. It is always best to write original content. Never steal from another blogger and if you do use an article spinner, make sure the post makes sense.

2) Blog Commenting-This has been a great way for me to drive traffic to my site. I can see by checking my stats that this really works. If you are leaving comments on another blog make sure they are good and relevant. Make sure you are not going to get labeled a spammer. I think both Dofollow and Nofollow blogs will help drive the traffic you want to your blog. You can do a search for Dofollow blogs that are similar to what you are blogging about. You can also join forums and groups to find other bloggers to follow.

3) Forum Commenting- This is another great way to drive traffic to your blog. With forums you need to make sure that you are not just creating a bunch of spam posts. Make sure when you write on a topic it is relevant. If you join a forum and find you can’t do that, it probably isn’t the forum for you. A lot of forums won’t let you leave a link to your blog until you hit a certain amount of posts. This is to help keep out the spammers. A great forum I would encourage you to join is Dofollow Forums.

4) Facebook & Twitter- Social media is a great way to get your blog out there. You can share your latest work and re-share others work. You can talk with people and get to know your audience on a more personal level. Google+ and Linkedin are also some great places to connect with others.

5) Yahoo Answers-This is a new method I just heard about and have been trying out. Yahoo Answers is a place you can answer all types of questions on all types of topics. After you hit level 2 you can leave a link in your profile. I know this works because by just answering about 10 questions I have already gotten many hits from Yahoo Answers. Again, you want to make sure you are not coming across as a spammer and make sure you only answer questions you know the answers to. I was leaving links about Amazon Mechanical Turk and a few of my answers were deleted so I would also be careful with leaving links, even if they are not your own.

6) Networking groups-I am apart of a few groups on Facebook to network with others about our blogs. There are also groups on sites like Ning or Yahoo Groups that will help with networking with other bloggers.

7) Knowing good SEO practices-Knowing good SEO and how to use it will really help with your traffic. You want to come up in the search engines because that brings more traffic and to do that you need to know how to optimise your site. This is something I am still learning and working hard on.

What has worked for you?