Most of the other virtual assistants and online professionals that I know have small budgets when it comes to advertising or promotion. I know that I am always on the lookout for free or low-budget alternatives. How about you? Do you want to get a steady stream of traffic without paying exorbitant amounts of money in advertising? Then read on to learn how to build a high traffic website without spending a dime in ad money.

The #1 Secret to Free Traffic: Consistency

Many beginner virtual assistants want to build a successful business overnight. It just doesn’t happen that way.

The most important thing to getting steady (yet free) traffic is consistency. You won’t get a ton of readers by publishing one good article. You won’t get a ton of watchers by releasing just one video. You won’t rank highly in search engines overnight.

The key to consistently getting high traffic is putting out great content on a regular basis. This builds trust in the eyes of your clients, customers, and even the search engines.

The Most Instant Method: Article Marketing

Article marketing has been around for about five years now. The technique is simple: Write an informative article and publish it to an online article directory like EzineArticles.

The keywords you target are important. Try to pick out keywords with a small to medium amount of search volume with low competing keywords. You can search keywords and keyword phrases at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

A Great Way to Build a Name: Video Marketing

Another great traffic source is video marketing. You can easily create a content video and distribute it to hundreds of websites – literally in just minutes.

Again, consistency is the name of the game. You probably won’t be able to get a flood of traffic by submitting one video. But if you establish yourself as a well-known expert through video marketing, you can easily build yourself a name, a ton of traffic, and a ton of backlinks.

Currently there are not a lot of virtual assistants who are using video marketing as a way of getting clients, so if this is your “thing,” then you don’t have a lot of competition. Also, if you want to specialize in this area as your specialty or niche, then you can showcase your expertise at the same time.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is perhaps the most powerful method to get free traffic. It’s also the method that takes the most time, is the most competitive, and has a certain amount of randomness factor to it.

There are several key factors that play into getting your website highly ranked. Having great unique content is one. Having a ton of backlinks to your website is another. Finally, selecting the right niche, subniche, and keywords can make a world of difference.

If you have unique and innovative content, other people linking to your website consistently and you choose a market with not too much competition but enough traffic to make it worth your while, then you have a good chance of having your website make it to the top of the search engines when people search for your niche or services that you provide.

Social Media

Social media like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon and many others are often overlooked by virtual assistants.

There are two types of social media: Media that will generate traffic, such as Digg or StumbleUpon, or media that will help you get people who are already interested to come back – Such as Facebook fan pages or Twitter accounts.

The key idea behind social media is becoming a part of the conversation of your target market. If you provide services to real estate professionals for example, your goal is to become well-known enough in that community that your name means something. All these social media outlets are tools to help you do that.

How Successful Can You Be With Free Traffic?

There are many examples on the internet of other virtual assistants building popular and sizable businesses online all without paying a dime in advertising.

The secret is producing consistent high quality content and marketing it well. If you apply even just one of the techniques above properly, you’ll get yourself a very nice stream of traffic.

Want to know an easy, inexpensive, and surefire way to get prospects to your site, make your website rank higher, and at the same time be seen as an expert in your industry? You can probably guess what I’m going to say: article marketing!

I am a huge fan of article marketing. Writing an article and submitting to article directories not only brings incoming links to your website and/or blog which, in theory, should increase your search engine ranking, but authoring articles also increases your credibility. Don’t you want to be seen as the “go to” expert in your industry? Oh and did I mention that you can do all of this for free?

Writing an article doesn’t have to be painful. There are many resources out there to help you get started. Check out Jeff “The Article Marketing Guy” Herring’s site, Christopher Knight’s Ezine Articles blog, and Yaro Starak’s blog. These guys are real-life online marketers and I love reading their sites as I always find helpful tips, templates, and advice.

Create a Killer Resource Box

Before submitting your article, there is one very important element that needs to be completed first, the author resource box. The resource box is the brief paragraph that follows your article and is shorter than a biography but longer than your signature. This resource box SHOULD contain your name, website address, and your call to action. This resource box should NOT contain your phone number, email address (or you’ll get spammed to death), your full resume containing every award you’ve ever received, or a bunch of URLs to your other websites.

The purpose of the resource box is to make the reader want to continue learning more about you and what you have to offer, so take some time to craft an inviting and effective resource box.

Simplify the Process
I also recommend using a worksheet, especially if you are submitting your articles manually or having your virtual assistant submit articles on your behalf. You would be surprised how much time is wasted trying to navigate the different sites – each with their own categories, terms and guidelines, field character limits, rules about number of links – and filling out the worksheet beforehand will speed up the process.

Another time sucker is if your virtual assistant either has to ‘wing it’ and guess at what you want to include for each article, or worse, going back and forth via email to clarify your annotation, keywords, category selection, and so on.

Lastly, although there are many free article directory sites where you can submit your articles, I recommend submitting to only a handful of the most popular and high-traffic sites such as Ezine Articles, Self Growth, Idea Marketers, and Article Dashboard. I have found that targeting a few quality directories net better results than submitting to dozens of mediocre sites, not to mention leveraging time and money.

Quick Start Assignment: Go to http://www.virtualassistantforms.com/ and sign up to receive two free forms - an article submission worksheet and tracking log, create an effective resource box (read Christopher Knight’s blog for tips on how to do this), and submit one article to Ezine Articles.  Also, use Ezine Articles’ Author Tools to track your stats

Get writing and share your article tips below!