It is no accident that the highest value businesses on the Web are not necessarily the ones with the highest annual profits, but rather the ones with the most website traffic. This is because consistent website traffic presents unlimited opportunities for conversion into profits. Businesses that have the capital to do so concentrate for years on building website traffic before they even try to make a profit. However, those of us in the real world with small online businesses need to be more balanced. We need to increase website traffic and make a profit early on in our business pursuits.

This article is an overview of the key methods the pros use to increase website traffic without breaking their budgets. After reading this, you should either have some new ideas about how to increase website traffic or have reinforced your drive to use these ideas to increase your website traffic.

If you are like most of the small businesses on the Web, you’re scratching and clawing for every site visitor you can get. The Web is the most competitive environment in the world because everyone with an Internet connection can do business on the Web. However, the Web is also the greatest business opportunity in the world because there are about a billion people surfing around. What other marketplace can match that? Of course, none of those people do you any good unless you find a way to drive them to your website.

So, enough talk about the obvious importance of finding ways to increase website traffic. Below is a list of 7 important methods the pros use to increase website traffic without breaking their budgets:

1. Take part in online communities and forums. You can establish expertise, credibility, goodwill, and friendships with potential customers when you provide help to others in these communities and forums. You can also learn more about your customers and the needs people have that you can fill. You will increase website traffic for the long-term by being helpful in forums in many cases because these forum postings could be available on the Web for many years and help many people.

2. Offer a helpful or interesting newsletter related to the content of your business website. This is another way of gaining credibility with potential customers. If you make your newsletter very interesting, it will also provide a regular advertising medium to those with an interest in your products. So you will be increasing website traffic from those likely to buy from you.

3. Write articles related to the content of your business website that you can publish and/or make available for other sites and newsletters to publish. You will gain credibility as an expert for the contents of your articles and from the willingness of others to recognize your expertise by publishing your articles. You will also gain exposure, as your name and website will appear at the bottom everywhere your articles are used.

4. Swap links with websites related to your business website. This will help establish credibility for you because you are cited by other websites. More importantly, it will increase website traffic from people interested in your type of website. A further benefit will be that search engines will recognize links to your sites as an endorsement of your credibility on the topic and thus put you higher in search results.

5. Make sure the content on your website uses more nouns than pronouns. Search engines don’t know what objects pronouns refer to when they see pronouns. And, the people doing searches use the noun objects themselves for their searches. So your websites should include the nouns for which they are searching. And you thought learning objects, nouns, and pronouns in school was useless?

6. Consider spending most of your advertising budget on search engine advertising. This advertising not only will increase website traffic, but you only have to pay for website traffic from people doing a search for words describing what you offer. This increases your chance of closing sales directly off your advertising budget.

7. Offer things to your customers for free that improve your brand image or contain advertisements that your customers will pass around to others, increasing your exposure. This is often referred to as viral marketing because the marketing spreads from one person to the next instead of from you to each customer. The best way to achieve this is to offer something unique that is either extremely useful or entertaining. It is a definite plus if what you offer appeals specifically to your target market so that you will increase website traffic from buying customers.