For beginners in the internet marketing industry, generating free traffic is a really appealing concept. There is almost no start up cost to making a living online and that is an excellent perk to running an online business.

Yes, you can promote your website for free,but then why do so many people prefer to pay for their traffic?

One of the huge, negative downsides to free traffic is that it often requires a lot of time. You have to set up different accounts under various services, create content, make value, submit links to social bookmarking sites and so much more. It can take so much time it ends up not even being worth it in the end for some people.

If you are a beginner and literally do not have a dollar to your name it makes sense to invest your time and create free traffic. If you have a twenty dollar bill in your pocket and you can afford it, drive your traffic with that cash!

Cost per click programs can be set up in a few minutes and start driving traffic in no time. You will want to make sure you have some idea on how to operate the service you are paying for and know the best ways to optimize your ads so you get the most out of your money.

Never just set up an advertising campaign with a twenty dollar budget and leave it alone. You will be throwing out your money. Always keep track of your ads and optimize them the best you can.

However, if you are a beginner to internet marketing and do not have the money to spare you should do everything you can to generate free traffic. Set up Squidoo pages and add great content that is informative and well written (make sure to link keywords in your pages back to your site to generate good backlinks!), make a MySpace page and start adding friends, go on Yahoo! Answers and respond to questions with links back to your site.

There are so many ways to generate free traffic you can stay occupied for weeks at a time doing this.

As previously mentioned the only cost any of this will amount to is your time. If you have a few hours a day you can really hammer out a lot of good stuff do it! You can drive free traffic if you have the time and many people do not so they opt to pay for their traffic.

No matter what you decide to do you should always choose the best way to generate your traffic. Never spend money you do not have unless you really can afford it. You would be much better off just spending your free time generating free traffic instead.

If you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to create free traffic by setting up tons of accounts then do not worry. Simply get a good guide or lesson on creating free traffic with a good service (Yahoo! Answers, MySpace, etc.) and become a MASTER at it.

In conclusion, get really good at generating traffic with one service and then move onto the next while applying things you learned along the way. This will prevent you from becoming overwhelmed.