Here's what your website must have to get lots of traffic - links pointing to your site. The more you have, the more traffic you get.

But how do you get links pointing to your site? Well you could email webmasters and ask them to put a link on their site (reciprocal links). But that's rather slow. You need something that will get other people link to your site.

How do you get other people linking to your site? Here are some ideas:

Content

People want content. If your site has lots of good fresh content try providing free content feeds. You get links back to your site, and they get free updated content from your site.

Articles

Write good quality and useful articles and put a link to your site at the bottom. Allow people to freely publish them. The better and more useful the article the more people will publish it and the more links back to your site you will have.

Services

For example on my website Crossword Heaven (http://www.crosswordheaven.com) I have a service where webmasters can add a crossword to their site. On my site PerkyPup.com (http://www.perkypup.com) I provide quotes that other webmasters can link to by means of a dynamic image.

Another example is a "recommend this site" service. That is you have a page on your site that people can use to recommend a website. People get to the page through a link on the website that they want to recommend.

Or how about a service that let's people "brand" images with some text?

Affiliate links

I like to think of affiliate links as "paid for" links. Basically you're paying someone to link to your site. Do they work? Yes! You win because you only pay the affiliate when a sale is made (ok, there are exceptions) and the affiliate wins because they get paid.

eBooks

People love eBooks. Create an eBook with links to your site in it. The more popular the eBook is the more links back to your site you will get. Plus eBooks go hand in hand with affiliate programs.

Of course there are many more ideas than these. The thing is to think about ways of getting people linking to your site. It doesn't matter how crazy the idea sounds. In fact sometimes crazy is good. Remember all those times someone sent you a link to a wacky web site? Just think about how much traffic that website must get!