Free traffic tools to a website or blog does cost you something. That something is the time you spend getting it set up!

You set up your website, blog, or both and added your RSS feed and started a monthly submission routine. Now what?

Well, let’s compare this to an off-line business.

What you have done is set up your business “store” and put the open sign in the window.

Now its time to start bringing in some potential customers. If you opened your store in a busy mall then you could naturally expect to receive traffic from mall foot traffic.

But wait, what if you opened your store on a quiet back street? You may have a great product and great parking but no one will find you. This is the situation you are in with your website, no one knows where your website is and therefore there is no traffic and no conversions.

An important concept to keep in mind about traffic generation is to go where the traffic is and where you can redirect the traffic to you.

Let’s look at some ways an offline business would generate traffic that we could apply to our online business.

Offline, business owners will network, join the local chamber of commerce, and other networking organizations to get the word out about them and their business. You will find them with small kiosks in malls and display booths at trade shows and community events.

Now how would we apply this concept online? Online this would be comparable to:

(1) Joining social networking sites. Creating profiles and adding your website url on social networking sites gets you in front of the traffic these sites generate.

(2) Building your own satellite sites. These are high PR (page ranked)sites such as Hub Pages or Squidoo that allows you to add your own content to their site. Creating these satellite sites are much like the kiosks at the mall, all directing traffic back to your website through the content and the links you have placed on your profile and satellite sites.

As an online business owner, you will need to create profiles at high pr social networking sites and create satellite pages directing traffic to your website. Sounds, good so far, but creating, maintaining and updating these off page traffic generation sources, while beneficial to your business can be labor intensive without the right tools.

Use the free tools listed below to redirect traffic from high page ranked sites to your site.

Google Gmail: Create a Google Gmail account. It is fast and easy to set up. Keep it separate from your regular email. You will need it to confirm emails from the social networking sites and to “dump” the occasional or regular emails they send you.

Firefox Browser: Next download the Firefox browser. It’s free. It does not interfere with internet explorer. And best of all, it has many add-ons that you will find useful. You will need its multiple tab feature to jump back and forth between opened tabs to make your online business more efficient.

Roboform: Roboform is a password manager. The trial version is free. You will need this to save you logins and passwords to all the social networking sites you create.

HelloTXT: HelloTXT is a micro-blogging and social networking status updating site. Join HelloTXT.

There is 28 different sites to sign up with inside. Join each one and make sure to confirm the link inside each email you will receive from each site. Add each site to your HelloTXT profile. Now you will be able to update all your social networking profiles from one interface. Fast and easy.

Over time you will build up your website presence and receive traffic, both, from the links inside your profiles and also from the search engines because of the page rank juice of the links leading to your website.

Follow the process above. Do not put this off, schedule it. This kind of traffic is time consuming to set up but very easy to maintain with the tools above and following this traffic generation process will prepare you for the next step.

In a future article we will be discussing how to multiply the power of the traffic you will generate by using bookmarking and pinging. Apply what you’ve learned here and expect to receive more traffic using these free traffic tools..