How to Increase Site Traffic Without Buying Advertising

In the competition for page views, some news sites use paid advertising to attract traffic. There are a few reasons paying for traffic is often a losing game for news, and I'll get to them in a moment. But first, where can you spend your money to get traffic to your site?

Your content is the big attraction
It's been proven time and again that giving users what they want, consistently over time, and getting links to it will be effective in building traffic. You want to fire on all cylinders -- great editorial, smart marketing that includes social media, and when it works, smartly optimized ad placements -- but if you can do only one thing, the most cost-effective thing to do is create great content and let the world know about it through every cost-effective tactic, from social networks like Facebook and Twitter (see below) to e-mails and search engine optimization.

Partnerships and mentions pay, too
Getting deals with other sites to cross-link (I'm talking about legitimate partnerships here, not the spammy link farms that don't deserve a thought and can hurt your search rankings), and getting mentions and links from other sites can be gold -- for both immediate traffic and longer term. If you can get a link on a big, well-visited, authoritative site like Wikipedia, that becomes a traffic annuity. Every month, you'll see referrals. Often those kinds of links will help your search engine rankings, as well.

Social media is powerful and cost-effective
If you gave me $10,000 to promote a local news or niche content website, I'd probably spend that money to construct and push a social media campaign rather than spend it on paid digital media.

For the amount it would take to have people refine and re-do our paid media, swap and change ad versions, test, reconfigure and refine, I can instead have someone who's probably less expensive and is tweeting and conversing on Facebook, and getting hundreds or thousands of views to the site. Plus, those viewers may turn out to be more loyal followers, and in many cases the social media trail that's left will help search engine rankings, lead to more traffic, and provide useful feedback and info from your social media community.

There are some reasons to advertise
A few atypical news sites attract higher-end advertising or have other ways of making money -- e-commerce, events, etc. -- and can get enough value from visitors that it's worth it to pay for them. The editor of one major financial news website told me of paying to attract traffic to an area of his site that he'd sold to a luxury advertiser at a very high fee. He paid a lot for traffic in order to make even more.

A caution: "unpaid" media Is not "free"
Even placements you don't pay for are not free of cost. The time spent on the above contains the opportunity cost of keeping you from doing something else to improve the site and its performance. There may be some hard costs associated, too, however minimal.

I do believe, though, that for digital media properties targeted to specific groups defined by geography, subject or other niches, being part of the "conversation" online is the best way to attract community cost-effectively, and to make sure that community stays engaged over time.

Doing all this should drive interested people to your compelling content. But if you need an extra push, why is paid advertising often a poor choice?

Display advertising and text ads are not cost-effective if you pay more to attract visitors than they are worth to you. Here's an explanation.

more information :-http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=183404