There are many varied ways to increase website traffic. Offering a free course on a topic you are knowledgeable about to your visitors in exchange for their email address is a good way to build traffic and your list at the same time. Your course should be based around the topic of your website, and can be on any subject related to your niche.
You will want to create between 5 and 10 lessons for your course and try to keep to a single subject in each lesson. At the end of each lesson you can summarize the lesson, this works well on instruction courses where they are required to carry out a task before the next installment.
For example if you are delivering a course on setting up a blog you might have them find a theme for their blog. You can also leave them a teaser about the content in the next lesson.
How will you deliver your course?
Well it can be delivered in pdf format for download, via an autoresponder, from a website or on video.
Autoresponder - This is the most common way to deliver courses online, once set up they can be delivered automatically with little additional effort. There are several services that offer free 30 day trials to get started. Do a search to find a service that meets your needs if you don't already have one.
You can add links to useful products and services within your lessons, this can work very well when these are free, and you might make a commission on any upsell the product owner has.
PDF - You can write your lessons out and convert it so you can deliver it in pdf format, this allows Free Paid Courses you to include pictures and diagrams within the content to show examples or explain the subject better when required. You can let others give it away as well in this format, if you do make sure that you have a link back to your website in your pdf.
Web based- You could have your course hosted on your website, either as HTML pages or on a blog such as Wordpress where you can password protect the pages. You then just need to deliver the link to your students and the password if it is protected. You can boost your traffic by getting others to refer visitors to your site by publishing it on the web.
Video - Video courses are becoming more and more popular today. You do not need to have fancy software to produce your course in video format. If you are using a PC you can just use movie maker and create slides to deliver your course. Then use a free program called Audacity to produce a voice over and import it into movie maker.
There are many varied possibilities for delivering a free course that will increase website traffic, I have only covered a few of the most common ones here and I am certain that all these methods are easily achievable by anyone.