One of the fastest ways to build traffic for a web site is to offer something of value for free. Now lots of people offer free reports, white papers and newsletters. Those are all great tools and I often recommend creating them.

But, once you have those in place it’s time to take your traffic building power up a notch by creating and offering free tools. Essentially, this takes shape in the form of something your target market can use over and over again, preferably by coming back to your web site to do so. Another benefit of a valuable free tool on your site is that often other sites will link to it.

I host a free Press Release creation tool that is one of the most visited pages on my site. (Hint: These free tools can generate some ad revenue too.)

Software, templates, forms, and calculators all make great starting places for the creation of a tool for your site. Screencasts and videos showing people how to do something very specific are also great.

As you consider this tactic keep these thoughts in mind.
• You can borrow tools created by others – here are some great SEO tools that are free to use.
• You can find others to create tools for you to co-brand – Here’s a WordPress template created by Cory Miller with me.
• You can and should offer your tools as widgets for others to easily use – Here’s a way to get my blog posts as content for your site if you like

Use your imagination, go out there and search around a bit and then find out what your target market wants and create it, host it, and spread it.