The sad truth is that traffic doesn’t just show up at your website without some planned, consistent effort on your part. They aren’t knocking your front door down just because you have a fantastic looking website.

Someone once said: “Running a business without advertising, is like winking in the dark. You know what you are doing, but no one else does.”

If you are needing more traffic to your site, here are three specific approaches that are guaranteed to work:

BUY SOME TRAFFIC-

One of the fastest ways to get some traffic is to buy it. Google AdWords is one of the better known and largest place for you to throw some money at this traffic issue.

You pay only for actual clicks on your Google ad to your site or affiliate link, but you need to be careful and watch your advertising budget. It can get quite expensive if you end paying for clicks that aren’t producing sales. Be sure to track your ads to determine your return on investment for your keywords and search engine.

As a note there are several other places beside Google to buy PPC traffic. Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, MSN.com and dozens of other places provide the option of PPC traffic. They all operate about the same way. You only pay for targeted visitors to your site who have clicked on one of your ads.

BORROW TRAFFIC FROM OTHERS-

Locate those who have mailing lists related to your area and ask them to post an ad in their list in exchange for a link on your site.

If you have your own mailing list, you could propose an ad swap. “I’ll run your ad in my list; You run my ad in your list.” You might have to offer a commission to the publisher to induce them into running your ad. That way they make a profit on it too.

You can locate these prospective publishers at a good search engine or publications like the Directory of Ezines.com. Be sure to target publishers who readers will be receptive to the type of offer your ad is offering.

If you are selling something to do with internet marketing, your targeted readers should be those interested in marketing on line.

BUILDING YOUR OWN TRAFFIC-

One of my favorite and time-tested ways to promote and market on line is to write and publish original articles. Other newsletter publishers will sometimes reprint my articles and send them out to their readers.

To save a lot of work and aggravation when sending these articles out to publishers and article directories, you may want to consider a distribution service like iSnare.com . For a nominal charge you can have your articles widely distributed in a very short time. You get what you pay for and this is one service that has proven its worth.

Be sure to include a resource box at the end of your article so that interested readers may follow your link to your site or your affiliate link you are promoting. Ideally your article has prepared the reader and motivated them to be receptive for the type of offer you are making in your resource box.

Write many articles. Publish and distribute lots of articles.

If you will consistently apply there three traffic tactics discussed above, You will benefit from it with lots of traffic and permanent links (more or less) to your site which can benefit you for years to come.

Everyone who has been in Internet Marketing for any length of time knows that one of the most popular free traffic generation tactics is writing articles. Every guru teaches you to write keyword-centric articles in a properly chosen niche and submit them to article directories. This is a tremendously effective technique that creates backlinks to your website. The effects are basically two-fold. Firstly, your website increases in Page Rank and propels up the search engines and secondly, the articles you wrote also gets indexed by the search engines thus providing another way for people to find your website. All this is well and good and has become common knowledge. But here’s the twist to this technique.

Instead of only submitting your articles to article directories, it is more effective to submit them to website or newsletter owners in the same niche. Offer your articles to them for free and request that they publish them. Chances are high that they will if your articles have good content, thus giving you lots of article exposure to targeted readers. This is more pro-active than submitting articles to directories.

Next is the forum marketing technique, another popular free traffic generation method. Every guru teaches you to scour the forums in your niche and make comments, ask questions, offer solutions and attach a link to your website in your signature file. Once again, this is a great tactic to generate backlinks which will ultimately draw traffic to your website. Here’s the twist to this tactic that most gurus don’t teach.

When you join a forum in your niche, take time to read every category therein. Get to know the problems faced or questions people ask in each category. Compile these problems and questions and create a report with solutions and offer this for free to the forum members. Inside this report you put links to your website or blog. Once again, this is a far more effective method of generating traffic than just making a comment or two in forums.

Lastly, there are the free social bookmarking sites that can be used to generate traffic. What gurus teach you to do is to bookmark your webpages or your articles in article directories so that they get linked by social bookmarking sites like Digg or Stumble Upon. Here’s how to tweak this strategy.

Instead of just bookmarking your webpages or blogposts etc, look at what’s highly ranked in the social bookmarking sites first. Search for something related to your niche and if found, then write an article for your blog and bookmark it. Then go to the existing highly ranked post and add a comment to it that includes a link to your blog. That way, you get another quality backlink to your site and draw the visitors reading the highly ranked post to your website or blog. Hopefully, they will vote for your article, too thus pushing your post up the social bookmarking site’s favorite list.

These are the little tricks about free traffic generation that the gurus hardly teach you in their coaching lessons but they use these themselves to earn the big bucks. Now you can do the same.

Here are 3 traffic exchange tips that will make a difference in your traffic if you use them.

1. People actually do pay attention to part of the ad. Usually the title and maybe a couple of sentences or graphics. I know I did. The ads can be quite interesting. You certainly can get ideas for ads of your own.

So what does not work. Long sales pages are boring. So are pages that immediately blare out sound or someone’s voice. I am playing music on my computer and will not even let those ads finish. I just leave and go to another page.

What does work is landing pages or as they are sometimes called, splash pages. Just a short hard hitting ad with a sign up form to receive a free gift in exchange for your contact info for future follow up. These work great.

2. Surf several traffic exchanges at one time. If you are after credits then you can not wait for one ad to end and the next one to come up. You need to load up 4 or 5 traffic exchanges at a time. Work your way from one to the next until you make it back to the first one.

Although this is not as fun as actually reading the ads, if you treat it like a job then your job is to get as many credits as possible and this one way to do it.

3. Read your emails and see which traffic exchanges are running specials. If one has double credits spend most of your time on it. Make the most advantage of your time.

4. Upgrade as soon as you can on your favorite traffic exchanges. This only makes sense. You earn more credits, more impressions, more text link ads, or whatever that exchange offers. When you surf each click can be worth 2 or 3 times as much as well which really makes a difference in your exposure.

Depending on the exchange you can upgrade for anywhere from $5 a month to up to $30 a month. Upgrading is up to you, but I advise it if you can afford it.

This is 4 traffic exchange tips that I know work for sure because I have tried it first hand and saw a definite spike in my traffic from it.

vinegar”.

This same positive approach works as well on the Internet as in face-to-face situations in real life. Complimenting or flattering a person about anything they have done on line

is a great way to get your foot in the door and put them in a receptive mood for your proposal.

Here are six ways to go about doing this on the Internet:

(1) Surf the Internet for sites which are complimentary but not competitive with yours.

Let them know what you like about their site and information they have there. Personalize a brief proposal to the webmaster and offer to exchange links in order to build traffic and search engine rankings.

(2) Locate and subscribe to newsletters or ezines which are appropriate for your area or niche.

By subscribing and reading the newsletter or ezine you will become familiar with the author and the significance of his publication. When you find something useful and helpful, let

the publisher know. If you also publish an ezine, you can offer to do an ad swap which can bring you a lot of free traffic.

(3) Write and distribute articles inviting others to join you in joint ventures and to exchange reciprocal links.

Writing an article a day and distributing it to directories and other publishers is a great, free way to get some exposure and free traffic.

(4) Place links on your site.

Just a simple link on your site can gain you some needed and valuable exposure in a passive way. Offer a free report or other valuable resource like a software download to induce them. You just need to work on creating traffic to your site so visitors can take you up on your offer.

(5) Use email signatures.

Simple email signatures that are well created can have a great impact. Set up your email program always to add them to any messages that you send out. Out Of Office replies can be set up to include your signature response also.

(6) Respond to email offers.

Your positive response to selected email offers by others for more information can be the beginning of an on line relationship that will allow you to locate a joint venture or

other valuable resource.

Promotion of any site or service on line takes consistent and determined effort. It is of primary importance to the success of your site on line. Each day should begin with a re-doubling of your promotional efforts and a search for discovering new effective promotional resources and methods.

The use of positive statements and compliments when approaching a webmaster or newsletter publisher for an ad swap, link exchange or joint venture will have far greater impact and success than almost anything else to improve your response rate and traffic.

Here are eight methods you can implement today to start building some traffic to your web site or service that you offer:

(1) Search engines:

Basic promotion requires that you optimize your web site and

submit it to the every search engine and directory you can locate.

The major ones like Google and Yahoo are important, but be sure to include the ones which are not as well known too. Your search engine rankings will benefit based on the number of sites on which you are listed.

(2) Visit Selected Forums:

Posting in forums is a good free way to gain some exposure. Simply answer questions and soon you can appear to be an expert. Be sure that the forum rules allow postings and sig files.

(3) Use Signature Files:

It’s easy to create an email signature file and a short promo line with the main benefits of your web site. You can even set up your email client to add automatically your sig file to every email that you send out.

(4) Post To Blogs:

Commenting in appropriate blogs is similar to posting in forums. Be sure your comments are welcomed and that you are allowed to leave a short sig file. Most Blog operators will welcome your comments and input.

(5) Traffic Exchanges:

Your investment of time visiting other sites will pay off with

reciprocal visits to your site. This is the basis of most all traffic exchanges. You can locate several them by doing a simple search for “traffic exchange” at any of the major search engines.

(6) Link Exchanges:

Trading links with other non-competitive sites that are in a

somewhat related area is a great way to build some free traffic.

By creating a links page and exchanging links you will benefit as well as the linking site. You can do all this manually or with software. Additionally, there are some linking services available online.

(7) Ad Swaps:

Contact the publishers of other newsletters and ezines. Offer to swap out some advertising space with them. Included in your ad is your resource box with a link to your site.

(8) Write Articles:

Write articles on topics related to your website and include a link in your resource box together with some author biographical information. Distribute your articles to article directories and ezine and newsletter publishers.

You can increase the distribution rate by using several services that are available online. For a small fee they will send your article out to several hundred publishers and article directories greatly increasing your exposure.

The result is that people will read your articles and will come to think of you as an expert in your area. This will increase the likelihood that they will buy from you.

Publishers will re-print your articles and many will upload them to their websites which will give you a great deal of free promotion and publicity.

When it comes to free traffic, search engine optimization (SEO) is the main strategy to tackle. You want to get your site ranked on the first page of the search results for terms that you are targeting. Having a good ranking for a select few highly searched terms can bring you loads of free traffic but technically, the traffic is not free. You have to put a lot of effort into link building, optimizing your site, etc. This takes time and as the saying goes, time is money.

For this article, we will focus instead on paid sources of traffic. This is the fastest way you can generate a lot of traffic to test your sales page for conversions. The most effective paid traffic is that generated through pay-per-click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter. These three platforms get the lion’s share of PPC traffic so you should focus on them. Master them and you will be on your way to creating streams of traffic on demand.

It is important, however, to be constantly testing new sources of paid traffic. Social media advertising is another option to advertise your business. MySpace and Facebook have recently launched their own self-service advertising platform. With the ability to target a certain demographic that corresponds to your business, you may see some high conversion numbers. There are a large number of social media and social networking sites that you can test.

Media buying through banner networks is another option. Most of these companies have easy-to-use platforms where you can easily upload your banner to create an ad campaign. Then you can specify your ad budget and also target the categories of sites you want your ad to appear on. Alternatively, you can also approach individual site owners to advertise on their sites. Think of sites that your prospective customers tend to visit, such as forums or blogs.

As you branch out to other traffic sources, be sure to keep track of the results of your tests. After a period of testing, gather all the data and analyze them to make a decision whether the traffic is profitable. If it is not, drop it and move on to the next traffic source.

Another thing you can do is to set aside a portion of your profits for the purpose of testing. This is akin to reinvesting your profits to grow your business. Having a disciplined approach to continuously increase the traffic to your site will reap massive benefits in the long run.

Traffic exchanges work as follows: you surf for credits, usually having to spend 20 seconds at each site, and the exchange company will post your ad for others to see. Your credits will normally come on a 3:1 or 4:1 basis, meaning that you need to surf four sites for every one that they will show. Many exchanges will also offer bonuses for referring friends, often several layers deep and those bonuses can add up quickly.

Most traffic exchanges have categories available where you can post your ad. This is a very nice feature as you will get targeted prospects that might be interested in your product or service.

While many of the traffic exchanges can produce great results, often times many people do not use them correctly and fail miserably. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your traffic exchange experience.

The first thing you need to do is offer something for free. It doesn’t matter if it’s an ebook, a video or a sound clip. People are on the exchange because they have to be there, not because they want to be there. They are seeing pitch after pitch every 20 seconds and quickly put their credit card away. So, be different and be nice and send them a free gift for visiting your website.

The next thing you must do if you want to be successful is to collect your prospect’s email address. However, leave the selling for a later time. Your point of being on the exchange should be one thing and one thing only: getting subscribers.

Many people are using traffic exchanges to promote multi level marketing and affiliate programs. This can be a great way to recruit, but keep in mind that many programs will saturate quickly on the exchange. Always ditch the corporate opt in form and make your own. There are many products that will make creating your own opt in form a breeze.

Try to find a traffic exchange that allows you to run multiple ads so you can split test. Take advantage of this. Your responses will improve significantly.

In conclusion, if you want to make money online, then traffic exchanges are welcome additions to your online arsenal.

The thing about running your own business at home is that you can never have too much traffic. You should always be looking to increase your traffic volume so that you can increase your income. Typically you want to find a few solid marketing techniques and stick to them as opposed to using several different techniques. But you may have to try out several before you find the most effective method for you.

One technique to raising your traffic volume with Internet marketing is submitting a site map to search engines. What this will do is give your site a better chance of being examined by the search engines. With more visits to your site from the search engines spiders, your sites will gradually climb higher on the search engines thus increasing your traffic.

Most people are aware of affiliate programs, but few are familiar with how they can benefit the site they already have. If you set up your own affiliate program for people to sell your product or service, you will have a business within a business. Not only will you have other people selling for you, your traffic will increase as well because of two separate businesses.

Perhaps the easiest method of increasing your traffic volume is posting in forums. There are literally hundreds of thousands of forums to choose from. The key is to post in forums with a lot of people that are all interested in the niche you are involved in. After spitting out some fresh and enticing information, you can reel people in to your website immediately.

The last method is one of the best on the Internet right now: article marketing. Article marketing can do a number of things for your site. First, it allows you to write fresh and enticing content that readers will be astonished by. Second, you can promote or write about whatever people are looking for here. Lastly you can place a bio box with your URL in it to direct customers to your site after submitting the articles to article directories.

Traffic is essential to having success with Internet marketing. It can be difficult having your own business at home, but using a few of these marketing techniques can make life much easier for you.

1. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Almost all article directories provide a form field to include you copyright notice and the resource box. You should use the resource box not just to talk about your self but also to entice readers looking for more information. The resource box for your articles should be used to offer a freebie e-book or a report or even an attention-grabbing headline to attract the readers to click the link and visit your web site.

You can also end the article with a question and link to your web site to find the answer. Since web masters looking for free content on their sites also use the articles you publish in article directories, it creates a viral affect with your site getting traffic from varied sources. You also gain credibility as an expert with articles. Your article displays your knowledge and shows readers how much you know, about a specific topic.

2. Creating and distributing a free report on a specific subject also helps to get free traffic without putting in much effort. You should include a link to your site or link to a squeeze page to capture readers name and email. Having a link to a squeeze page automatically builds your own list of readers who can be contacted later with affiliate programs in the related subject. You should send your paid traffic to download this free report and allow them to redistribute the report. Giving the report for free attracts readers, and by allowing them to distribute freely ensures that your web site gets free traffic, long after the report was distributed.

3. You should regularly post on forums related to your site. This is perhaps the easiest and quickest way to get free traffic. You should use these forums to make useful and interesting posts, and include a signature file that allows readers to click through to your site. If you are not an expert in any niche and are unable to have a discussion around a topic, you can always post questions. Asking for help will get your site noticed and get you some good incoming links.

4. Another option to explore for free traffic is to find link partners and exchange links. This will not only get you direct click-through traffic from other sites, but it will also get you search engine traffic once those sites are indexed and your site is given credit for the inbound links.

5. If you maintain a blog on your site, submitting your blog feed URL to various RSS sites also helps getting exposure to your site very soon. You should consider submitting feeds or sites to blog directories with a high PR to make sure you are getting quality incoming links. You should also not ignore submitting to sites with low PR in the later stages. If these web sites “make it big” you do not want to be left out. You should not submit to millions of web sites or directories using some software. Trying to submit your site to millions of other web sites may just work against your site.

6. You should look at submitting your web site to the social book marking sites like Squidoo, del.icio.us etc. This helps in getting good exposure to your web site.

Whatever the way you choose to get the visitors to your site, you need to be careful to do it naturally and never stop your hard work on your web site. After all Patience really pays!!!

What is Targeted traffic? It is simply visitors to your website that are interested in what your website is about. For example, people interested in buying jewellery will find jewellery websites interesting.

How do I get targeted traffic I hear you ask? The following are tried and tested methods:

Forums: Subscribe to forums that discuss your topic. Answer questions and join in the debates there. Become an expert in the field. Then with each article reply you write have a discreet link to your website in the signature file. What can be placed in your signature is often determined by the forum moderators. Do not spam the forum or you will be stopped from posting. This is one of the most productive ways of getting free traffic as those who click your link have already read and liked your style.

Linking from/to other websites: Contact website owners that have similar but not competitive websites to yours, ask them for a reciprocal link from their website to yours. Be sure to select your link partner to match closely your customer profile. Software programs such as Arelis are very helpful in this process.

E-Zines: Contact e-zine owners that have your target readership and buy advertisements from them. Be sure to have a test run to see that the return on investment is sufficient to cover the costs involved. If you are buying an extended run of advertisements haggle with the e-zine owner over price. You may save a considerable amount.

Newsletters: When people visit your website offer them something of value for free if they sign up to your newsletter (like an e-Book). Your newsletter should be written tightly geared towards your topic. It should be published regularly at weekly intervals.

E-Books: Often used, these are usually free informational books for your clients and for others to give away free if they leave your links in the book itself. You can place links back to your website in the books you sell or give to your clients.

Joint Ventures: Contact online marketers looking for new products to sell. They often have large mailing lists with eager to buy customers. Normally they are willing to email their list for a cut of the sale price. This works particularly well with informational products. It has several advantages. It can give a very sizeable boost to both your sales and mailing list within a very short period.

Buy Traffic: This is probably the cheapest in terms of time and most expensive money wise. It gives a traffic boost normally within 30 days. What are you buying? You are buying traffic from expired domain names which the company selling the traffic has bought. They are domain names still registered on the search engines which get a considerable amount of traffic. The previous domain name owners have either lost interest in the name or simply forgot to renew the registration. This means that the traffic from the expired domain name is simply redirected to your website. This is usually high quality traffic as only websites with traffic such as you want is redirected to you. As always, a test run to see if this traffic is suitable should be undertaken.

When you combine these techniques and apply them consistently over time you will find a rich source of targeted traffic coming to your website. This, combined with quality products will ensure the success of your online business.

Targeted traffic involves enticing visitors to your site who are actually interested in the content of your website. If people are interested in buying tropical fish they will find websites about buying tropical fish interesting.

There are a number of methods for obtaining targeted traffic.

Forums – If you are an active participant in a forum you can obtain targeted traffic through the link to your website that you are usually allowed to add to the signature. If you spam you are likely to get banned. However, if you add value by joining in debates and answering questions you may even come to be known as an expert. If others like your style, the quality of your posts or even the promotional text in your signature you can generate targeted traffic that doesn’t cost you anything.

Reciprocal Linking – For most product websites there are usually many other related websites which aren’t direct competitors. You can contact the owners of these websites to ask for a reciprocal link. While a number of them will simply ignore your request, you will start to build up some useful links over time. Again, this can provide a source of targeted traffic.

E-zines – E-zines are ideal because the readership is targeted. Nevertheless, not all e-zine advertisements result in a good conversion rate so it is best to start slowly with a new e-zine to see it is worth the investment. If you do get good conversions then you can ramp up the amount of advertising with that particular e-zine.

Newsletters - As well as using other web owners e-zines, you should consider starting your own newsletter. In this way, you can build up your own list of targeted people and when the size of the list grows you can start selling your own advertising as well.

E-books – People like to receive things for free. You can give away e-books which contain useful information and are valued (and read). The trick is to include links back to your site. If the information is really useful, the books tend to be passed on from one person to another creating a viral effect.

Joint ventures – Successful internet marketers are always on the look-out for new opportunities. If you have a good product which converts well, don’t be shy in contacting them to offer a joint venture. You only need a few well-connected partners to see a large expansion in your traffic.

PPC – Pay per click will cost you money, but it is the quickest way to get targeted traffic. If you write your ads well and select your keywords carefully making sure to include negative keywords, such as ‘free’, you can end up with a positive return on investment. Of course, if you choose poorly you can burn through a lot of cash quickly.

By applying a number of these techniques you can increase your level of targeted traffic which, in turn, can increase the profitability of your website.

Every online publisher needs traffic to their site, but how do you get a steady increase of traffic each month? How do you even get traffic started coming to your site?

Blogs automatically get traffic coming as soon as you make your first post. With a good ping list, each time you make a post to your blog dozens of sites are notified and traffic starts coming in. Therefore the first step in getting traffic to your blog is to post regularly. Posting once or twice a day is fantastic.

Article Syndication

Writing articles and syndicating them to article directories is a powerful technique to grow your traffic. Try to write at least one article a week (or have a unique article written for you), post it to your site, wait a week for the search engines to index it, and then submit the article to article directories. For a nominal fee SubmitYourArticle.com will submit it to hundreds of article directories, saving you a lot of time and effort.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is another very powerful tool. It takes less than a minute to submit your article to OnlyWire.com. Once submitted they take it and submit it to about fifteen other social bookmarking sites.

Imagine if you bookmarked one article a day and submitted each to fifteen social bookmarking sites for one year. That would add up to over 15,000 backlinks for your one site! Incredible! But there’s even more you can do.

Pay Pay Click and More

Pay per click, email marketing, viral marketing, and commenting in forums are all great ways to get more traffic. For instance, Answers.Yahoo.com is a site where people post questions and wait for an answer.

For instance, if you have a site about dogs and someone asks about what to feed their puppy, you can post an answer and include your URL in the signature. As people read the question and your answer, some will click on your URL to see what else you might say about taking care of dogs.

Tracking and Statistics

Track the visitors to your site by using tools such as MyBlogLong.com, Google Analytics, and the tracking tools found in your site’s cpanel under Stats. Google Analytics is a plugin for Wordpress. It takes a minute to set up and gives you vital information to help you focus on what your visitors want.

By looking at your stats a few minutes a week you can see what articles are most popular, what topics are most popular, how long people are staying at the site, and what links they click on to leave the site. You can use this information to make changes to your site, increase the number of posts you make on popular topics, and anything else that will encourage people to stay longer and to come back.

It is not hard to get traffic to a blog. Set aside some time each day to write an article or to post to your blog, submit it to the social bookmarking sites, and submit your articles to article directories. Follow these basic tips and traffic to your site should increase significantly each month.

Different websites have different goals. One may be to build a brand, another may be to sell a product while yet another may be to build a list from leads. No matter what the goal, tracking should be done to see whether the traffic generated from various sources is actually helping to achieve that goal.

In some cases, it is easy to see the difference between various traffic sources. For example, it is usually much cheaper to buy Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for a content network than for a search network. On a content network, ads appear on related web sites while on a search network they appear as the result of a user keying in specific search terms.

People who click on ads on the content network tend to be browsing the Internet for information. In most cases, they expect to get this information for free. On the other hand, those searching for key terms, especially product names, are more likely to be looking to buy. Because of this, conversion rates are typically much higher on the search network. This leads to more demand which, in turn, leads to higher prices for these ads.

Unfortunately, paying for advertising can eat into profits. In some cases campaigns that are generating a good volume of sales can be rendered unprofitable due to the costs of advertising. However, organic traffic, which comes from unpaid listing on search engines, is free and targeted. The difficulty arises in generating sufficient volumes of traffic. To do this requires being on the front pages of the major search engines for popular terms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to rank highly for competitive keywords. Unfortunately, many SEO techniques take considerable time to put into place and to affect search engine rankings.

One technique to overcome this problem is to aim for ‘low-hanging fruit’. That is, keywords that have less competition. While these generate lower traffic, it is possible to build up considerable amounts of traffic by building up a portfolio of less popular keywords.

Other good forms of generating free targeted traffic include article marketing, email marketing and utilizing joint venture partnerships. The main thing is to avoid traffic generation strategies that cost money, but don’t result in conversions.