From the very first post of this blog, i have had one thing bringing the majority of my traffic. And that is my twitter tools. No matter how much of a jackass i am in my blog posts, or how poor my writing skills are. I will always have traffic because of one tiny tool. I guess its easy for me to say since im a software developer, so i could write any sort of crap and start building the traffic. But you can do this too…

If your not a software developer, then chances are your going to have to give out some of your own free work. Ive seen people give out backlink packs, free ebooks, high PR blog lists etc. It doesn’t have to be just software, but it does have to be something that the person can only really get from you. High PR Bloglists are a good example of this. While you can really go to any Internet Marketing forum and find these given out for free, there is an endless amount of blogs out there. So no matter how many people get in on the action, its unlikely to shrink your market share.

Ebooks are a tad different because its hard to write something towards an IM audience that they cant just pick up at DP anyway. Ontop of that, its hard to retain that visitor or keep them coming back. When you are giving out lists, you can turn them into a weekly thing. Meaning that the people will keep coming back, and ontop of that people will likely link back to you. With an ebook, there’s probably a 90% chance that the first person to read it will just re upload it to rapidshare, and share it without a link back to you, or driving traffic towards you.If you think you can make ebooks work, then by all means give it a crack.

Although not recommended for beginners. I have seen people hire freelancers to make tiny tiny tools for personal use, but also hand them out for free. Things like SERP scrappers, tinyurl creators, etc. I wouldn’t say that you should go out and hire a freelancer for the sole purpose of building software for your blog readers. But if you have something built for your own personal use, no matter how small. You can share it and reap the benefits.

IMPORTANT : Almost forgot about this, but make sure you link back to your site within the PDF, software if you are going to give them out. While this wont give you as many visits as giving away a free weekly list, it will bring you a small trickle of traffic that will give you that warm fuzzy feeling inside.