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.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art of improving the chances of your web page showing up when someone searches for your type of business, a service, or a product. This article cannot possibly go into all the aspects of SEO in-depth, but I do want to give you a few basics to give you a better understanding of how SEO works and what you can do TODAY to improve your web pages for the search engines.

The two most important items of my SEO strategy are to 1) write relevant content and 2) properly code each page. They are both equally important and search engines take both of these into account when ranking pages. You can have loads of great content but if the page cannot be read by the search engine robot, then it is a problem. On the other hand, a page can be properly coded and pass validation, but with very little content, it will not do you any good.

Content is King

“Content” means the words, headlines, subject headers – what is seen on your web pages and viewable by the public. Content is important because search engines crawl your web page and read words and phrases. It takes this information and adds to an index, sort of like a giant catalog. Then, when someone does a search, the search engine returns the results, ranking each page by relevancy. Search engines are not mind readers; therefore, it only makes sense that you need to write the content using words that people (your target market) will most likely search on if you want your page to come up high on the results pages.

One of the first things that I tell clients as they go about setting up their web page is, “do not write website copy for the search engines, write for your audience.” A genuine message from your heart is going to go a lot further than a page that’s stuffed with keywords but not much else. You may think that you do not know what to write, but once you get started, the words will come.

Write about how you got started in the business, why are you passionate about your product or service, how you have helped people in the past… Don’t forget to include as many details as you can about the problems your service will solve, how you deliver the service, who might be the best client for this service, etc.

Try to use the exact wording that someone in your target market might use, e.g., “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘How am I going to finish my newsletter article, answer all of those client emails, and still have time to actually do my coaching work? I need some help with my newsletter!’”

That way, when your prospective client types something like, “Help with newsletters” in to a search engine, this specific page is more likely to show up in the results, and higher up. This is what is called a “key phrase.” Incorporating key phrases into your content is much more useful than relying on single words, which has much more competition.

Quick Start Assignment

Choose just ONE of your web pages and look at the content. Do you give a clear explanation of what the intent of the page is? Do you give enough information about the product, service, etc.? Remember, each page is indexed individually. For example, if you are a virtual assistant offering a variety of services, of course you can list them on your “services menu” page, but also create a separate page for each service. This will go hand in hand with the back-end coding, which I’ll talk more about next month.

During my first year as a virtual assistant, when I didn’t have any clients and lots of free time, I took a free SEO online course and it was excellent! There is a time investment involved; the course requires active participation, and it lasts for a few weeks, but I would still urge you to attend. I literally learned everything I know about SEO by attending these classes and by completing each of the exercises. Find out more at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SEO_Techniques/