Everybody’s top three traffic generation techniques would likely be different, but likely only in respect of the order in which they appeared. The first two here would appear in anybody’s list, although it is how you use them that matters and not the fact that they are used.  These techniques do not include classical SEO because that is not so much one technique as several.

You might wonder why only three, because most people provide five, or even seven.  The reason is that it is these are the three that will provide you with the vast majority of your non-search engine traffic.  There are many others but what they provide is very little in comparison to those mentioned here.

The first is article marketing. Keep in mind that these are traffic generation techniques, and not how to make money techniques.  You won’t make money without the traffic, and it is once you have the traffic that you employ the techniques that actually make the money.

Article marketing generates traffic in at least two ways.  When you write an article and then submit it to an article directory, it will contain what is known as the ‘author’s resource’.  This is strictly intended to provide a short biography of the author, and a link to his or her website.  However, you can also use it as an advertisement for your product or website, and phrase it in such as a way as to compel readers to visit your website.

This is made easy due to you being allowed to include a link to your site in the resource.  You can make a link to any page in your website you like, including a sales several articles every week and send each to dozens of different article directories for masses of traffic. However, it doesn’t stop there.

Readers are allowed to, and frequently do, copy your article as content for their website, as long as they retain the resource intact.  Your link therefore appears on other websites, and visitors to those websites can also make a click to your site. That’s Traffic generation with a capital T. But there’s more!  Each of your articles on each directory provides you with a link back to your website from that directory page, as does each article copied to another website.  That helps your Google PageRank, which can also increase your traffic.

For these reasons, article marketing is my #1 traffic generation technique. My second is blogging. If you have a website you can have a blog (you can have a blog without a website, but this is about website traffic). That blog should provide information on additions to your site, and also about the products you are offering (if any).  It is easy to start up a blog, and if you make at least one post a week you should attract a regular readership.  Make sure it has lots of useful and interesting information.

Each time you add a post to your blog, you should ping it to as many social bookmarking sites as possible.  Sites such as Technorati and del.icio.us can provide you with masses of traffic through your blog.  Include a link to pages of your website on the blog and you will soon find out why that is my #2.

Number three just has to be pay per click search engines.  Immediately people see the term they think of Google Adwords, but that is not the only PPC search engine around. There are many others such as Goclick, Searchfeed and Miva where you can get excellent keywords for only 1 cent each – that’s 100 a dollar.  If you lead the adverts you write using these to your website then, since you only pay for each click that goes to your website, you can get up to 1000 visitors for $10.

What you do with them once they get there is up to you, but you can word your adverts as to be highly targeted to the content of the pages you link them to.  You can even use these search engines to send traffic to your Adsense pages because the clicks can be very inexpensive.

These are my top three traffic generation techniques, and each has been well tried and tested.  If you use each of these you will not be short of traffic to your website, and not only that, but to any page on your website you choose since each enables you to provide a link to a page of your choice. That should take care of the traffic, and now it is up to you make use of it when you have it.