Borrowing traffic is one of the most effective ways to get free traffic to your website. It is part of the great power of Web 2.0. Borrowing traffic is the PR of the web. Just as PR gets you attention from people who already have attention, borrowing gets you traffic from someone else who already has traffic.

For example, you are borrowing traffic when:

• … you issue a press release that causes someone else to post a news story on his site or blog.
• … you write an article for someone else’s e-zine, or be a guest blogger on someone else’s blog.
• … you contribute to an on-line forum, or leave a comment on a blog, with a link to a relevant resource on your website.
• … you partner with another website to send traffic or exchange links.
• … someone searches on Google, finds your website, and clicks through.
• … you create a purple cow, and bask in the word-of-mouth.
• … you give a talk on a problem you know how to solve, and someone types your website URL into a web browser.

Of these, getting recommendations from others is the most powerful. Because people will listen to an honest recommendation from a reputable third party. They are much more skeptical of an advertisement or press release.

I didn’t mention it in the above list. But if you have a blog, there’s a way of getting links on other blogs. It’s called a trackback. Not all blogs support trackbacks, but when you link to a blog that does, it’s a great way to get links. Here’s how they work. You publish a blog post that talks about a post on someone else’s blog and links to that post. Using your blog software, you “trackback” to his blog post. (WordPress even does this for you automatically.) Then on the same page as his blog post, a link appears to your blog post, usually with an excerpt of what you wrote.

This trackback link does several cool things for your website. It establishes a relationship with the other blogger, because it helps build up his website. This reflects well on you. It’s also better than leaving a comment on his blog, because readers tend to respect trackbacks more than comments. Linking to someone else’s blog also increases both blogs’ search-engine ranking, making it more likely that new people will find your blog posts.

Another way to borrow traffic is to show everyone you’re an expert in your niche. Since you ran your AdWords campaign well, you know what your customers care about, what they worry about, what keeps them up nights. So you can write articles about these subjects, and use these articles to generate traffic. I can’t go into this subject in depth here, because it’s too deep. But Turn Words Into Traffic, by Jim Edwards and Dallas Edwards, is a step-by-step guide that covers how to write high-impact articles that get attention, and how to get your articles published in e-zines, on websites, in article indexes, and more. Also check out the Turn Words Into Traffic electronic version, which you can download immediately, and which comes with several bonuses and a 60-day money-back guarantee.