I've been marketing online for almost 10 years, and generate the majority of website traffic to most of my sites for free. Today, I'll share with you how to create and maintain an endless stream of highly-targeted website visitors for free.

The secret to generating all of the free website traffic that you can handle is - understanding why your visitors are online in the first place.

Many of your visitors are NOT online looking for items to purchase... they are looking for information. Even people who are planning on making a purchase soon, often research the item online - but PLAN on buying it locally.

People go online looking for information. They go online looking for answers to their questions, or solutions to their problems. They go online looking for an easy way to find the information that they need. If you provide this information, and give your visitors a pleasant experience, then they will often purchase related items from your site.

Understanding what your visitors are looking for should also convince you that "content is king." Fill your website with quality, accurate, current content, and it will attract lots of visitors.

While articles are the “content” that most often comes to mind, if you want to totally dominate your niche, you need to employ content in multiple formats.

Articles are a great place to start. Write, or have written, 500 - 1500 word articles that focus on a very specific topic, and they will be natural search engine magnets. In addition to your own unique articles, use content written by others to round out your site.

There is a science to using articles which many beginning Internet marketers seem to struggle with. The key to making articles work for you, is making them so valuable that other websites and publishers actually search for more of your material. They read one or two of your articles, and gain so much value, that they want to offer their readers and visitors MORE of your content.

At the same time, people who read your quality, helpful articles will follow links to your sites looking for more of the same.

Once you have a few articles, you also have all the material you need to create viral traffic magnets in other formats. My two favorite formats are PDF special reports and short Camtasia videos.

You can take the same topic/material that you've developed an expertise on, and written articles on, and turn it into a "special report." To turn an article into a PDF special report, you just expand upon what is covered in the article. Then you use software to convert the text file to PDF. There are numerous pieces of software that allows you to do this.

One free tool for converting Microsoft Word ® documents to PDF is called PDF995. You can find it offered from numerous websites just by doing a search on it at any search engine. Microsoft Word treats PDF995 as another printer. So you just tell MS Word to print your document, and you choose PDF995 as your printer. In a few seconds, you have a PDF document ready to distribute.

People place a higher value on PDF documents than they do on articles. Perhaps it's because the PDF documents appear to take more work to create. I just showed you that it really doesn't take more work though. Still, PDF documents have a longer "shelf life" and get passed around a LOT!

When setting up your PDF special reports, include links back to your sites. Make these live hyperlinks. Then give people a reason, or an incentive, to pass your PDF document on. If it contains lots of useful information, or is brandable and pays an affiliate commission, the PDF will soon "go viral" (spreading without any additional effort on your part).

A step up from the PDF, is using Camtasia videos as viral traffic generators. Take the same material that you used to create the articles and the PDFs, add some pictures and sound to it, and you have a video.

Camtasia is a piece of screen capture software that records whatever you have on your computer screen. You'll find it at: http://techsmith.com/

Using Camtasia, you can demonstrate using a piece of software, or show some slides that you've created. AS you step through your presentation on your computer screen you record the whole thing. At the same time that you’re recording the video portion, you can add narration, simply using your microphone plugged right into your computer's microphone jack.

The really powerful feature of Camtasia is that it allows you to specify what webpage, or where, the viewer will be taken at the end of the video. You can take them back to the beginning of the video to watch it all over again if you're teaching something challenging. You can also have it take them right to an online webpage or order form for a product that you're recommending. This is a way of driving traffic to a target site without requiring any action on the part of your viewer.

If you'd like to know more about how to use articles or multi-media content to generate website traffic, I recommend going through the tutorials at Content Propulsion Lab. You are taught how to generate and use content in all of the formats covered above. You're also taught the secret to making your multi-media content "search engine friendly." You'll find Content Propulsion Lab at: http://CashThroughContent.com

A final way to generate an incredible amount of website traffic is to create a website that, just by its very nature, creates "buzz." Cute, creative, inspirational, or information-packed sites can develop a following just because they are that “good!”

An example of a site that's fast-developing into such a “buzz” site that you can model is at: http://TheBestCatHouseEver.com The url for the site is a play on words, and is one of the factors that is causing the site to take off. Another factor is the fact that the site focuses on cute, cuddly cats... man's second favorite pet. People will flock to this site just because of the cute cat photos, and then they'll tell their friends about the site.

Create a site like http://TheBestCatHouseEver.com - tell the world about it through articles and press releases - and before you know it, you'll have a flood of free traffic. If you choose to, you can then redirect some of this traffic to your other sites.

You can also set up the viral site so that it's your main profit center. For example, http://TheBestCatHouseEver.com can earn money from Google AdSense, sponsor links, affiliate products, and a store selling novelty items related to the theme of the site.

I've just shown you ways to generate a FLOOD of highly- targeted, responsive, free traffic to your websites. The methods seem fairly simply, but they are proven. I use them everyday. Incorporate them into your marketing mix and you'll soon find your website traffic rapidly increasing. Get started today.