There are a variety of ways to make money online these days.
If you have a website, you can earn a living selling other people's products on your site. Other people make money selling advertising space on their high traffic web sites. But how do you get people to come to your site? How do you drive massive amounts of traffic to your site without using up your life savings?

The focus of this article is to examine various FREE ways to drive traffic to you site.

Link Exchanges

The simplest way to get traffic to your site is to put up a "Links Page" on your site. There are those who say the days of link trading are gone, but I don't completely agree. I think it has lost some of its effectiveness due to people abusing the system, however I think it still has its place. Link trading can be very valuable to those who are just starting out and on a tight budget.

The first thing to do is to make a Links Page and make sure your home page links to this page so the search engine spiders can find it and index it. On the page be sure to tell people how they can contact you if they want their link added to the page.

You may also want to put a linking policy on your page.
On my Links Page I have the following link exchange policy:
"All sites must be acceptable for all audiences. This means we don't accept sites that show, promote, or advertise things such as porn, alchohol, gambling, drugs, illegal activities or anything that we deem to be inappropriate for general audiences."
For an example, take a look at my Links Page:
http://www.freeresourcesonline.com/directory.php

Feel free to ask for a link exchange with us!

Instead of calling it your "Links Page" you may consider naming it something else, something more appealing. I call my Links Page my Online Directory. People are more willing to have their link listed in something like a directory than just another links page.

Once you have a Links Page created look for other people who have a links page and are interested in exchanging links.
When you find someone to exchange links with, contact them and request that they put your link on their site and in return you'll put a link to their site on your Links Page. It's often a good idea to mention a couple things you liked about their site to help butter them up!

Be sure to give them the exact html code for your link. This will make it easy for them as they can just copy & paste the code onto their links page and also ensures that the link to you is formatted exactly the way you wish.

If they deny your request for a link exchange, don't be offended but just move on and ask someone else.
If you get no response from them at all, they may not be interested or they may not be checking that email address anymore. Either way, just move on and ask someone else.

When adding a link, make sure to use the "target" attribute in your anchor tag.

Instead of adding a link that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.some_other_site.com">

Make it look like this:

<a href="http://www.some_other_site.com" target="_blank">

When someone clicks on the link it will open the link in a new browser window. This means your page is still open behind it and the visitor will come back to it when the window is closed.

When looking for people to swap links with, it's a good idea to look for pages that are in your same niche. Say your page is about cat toys. It would be a good idea to swap links with a page about cat food or something related to cat toys. When a visitor at the cat food page sees the link to your cat toys page they are much more likely to follow the link to your page.

A link exchange between two sites is a win-win for both because both get incoming links and consequently a higher page rank.
Each link exchange you do may not seem to help a lot but each little bit does help.
Another advantage of this is you may get an increase in traffic to your site. Say you have a link exchange with 100 pages, and each one sends you 1 visitor a day. That's 100 visitors a day or 3,000 visitors to your site every month. Not bad.

Link Market

There is a site called LinkMarket where people looking to trade links can find each other. It's completely free and worth your time.

Free Traffic Just For Surfing

This new system, called InstantBuzz, let's you surf the web and pays you for it by displaying your ad. The more you surf, the more you ad is shown. Not too bad. The best part is that the service is completely free!

Try it today!

Blogs & Forums 

There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blogs and forums on the net covering every conceivable subject. Find blogs and forums that are in the same category as your website and post a comment relevant to the topic of discussion. Be sure to end your post with your name and a link to your website.

Google just recently unveiled a blog search tool. Check it out!

Email Signature

Put links to your website(s) in the signature of your emails. This is probably the easiest thing to do that has been discussed here. Every email you send will have a link to your sites and may help drive traffic to your sites if you send a lot emails!