"Free traffic" is never free. You may not lay down hard cash for it, but you earn it nonetheless. Today, a lesson in what it takes to earn that elusive targeted traffic!

First off, get your mind around the fact that there are thousands more scams on the web when it comes to getting targeted traffic than there are legitimate systems.

Everyone with a site at some point wants more traffic so bad that they find themselves making choices they'd never make under normal circumstances.

Below are some of those bad choices:

*Spamming *Paid advertising you really cannot afford *Paid advertising that doesn't work *Paid scams like guaranteed traffic *Scams dealing with guaranteed search engine rankings *Pay per click advertising without knowing anything about how to do it properly

Everyone with a site will go through a bitter deal with one of the above or any of the myriad other choices streaming through their inbox on a weekly basis.

It is almost like you cannot go forward without being taken for a ride so you know what it really feels like.

Then you get serious. And things change in a heart beat.

No longer are there 1001 ways to promote your site. Once you have your bull crap filter on, the world of internet marketing becomes uncluttered and much more simple.

Here are some of the top ways to earn free targeted traffic:

Extremely high quality article syndication...

This has nothing to do with spam articles or the vast majority of the junk we all see on the web trying to pass as real content.

Extreme high quality article content is content that grabs a target market by the cahones and gives them a real, expert scoop on something.

It is the kind of content that earns visitors for the author who sign up for newsletters, click on ads, and flow through the links in resource boxes like no other form of article content on the web.

It is also the kind of content that gets picked up and run on the sites most dear to your market. The people whose sites you most want to be on.

Getting your article on a bunch of article directories is NOT the point. The point is to be PICKED UP by publishers FROM those directories and chosen out of thousands to be featured on their sites.

High Tech Blogging...

This form of marketing takes full advantage of RSS syndication of your blog content and tons of different linking strategies such as tagging or social bookmarking, posting your "stories" at places like Digg.com (there are tons of sites like this one now), and doing RSS feed exchanges with other bloggers and website owners in your niche.

Blog promotion is so deep and so multi-faceted that it is impossible to get into it in an article like this.

But it is a massive mistake to try marketing anything online without taking advantage of blogging and RSS technology.

I'm not talking the basics here. I am talking about serious study and mastery of some pretty high-end stuff most people on the web know nothing about.

It is an easy way to blow competition away, especially if they, like everyone else, are focused on search engines.

Search Engine Traffic...

Search engine traffic is not something to worry about for most people. Most people will never get any more than 15% of their traffic from engines for the life of their sites.

Enjoy passive search engine marketing. Post to your blog frequently and let the engines come to you. It is a far less stressful way of life.

Believe me, aggressive search engine marketing has given more people more ulcers and empty bank accounts than anything else online.

If you are relevant, post plenty of original, topical content to your site regularly, and you actively market everywhere BUT the engines, they WILL come to you and reward you for putting your visitors first.

Finally, find some good quality partners to exchange articles, RSS feeds, and even text links with. And no, reciprocal linking is not dead! It just doesn't impress Google anymore.

So what. Links are for targeted traffic, not search engines. The engines didn't invent how the web works and can lay no claim to how a person should drive targeted traffic to her site.

The only thing you should worry about is if you are going to straight up trade links, you need to make deals where your link (and theirs) go on high traffic pages and not in some link directory.