Traffic Generation

Getting traffic to your website is the lifeblood of your online business. Without traffic you don’t make money, no matter how good your content and offer is.

There are two main categories that traffic generation falls into: paid and free.

1. Paid Traffic

Examples of paid traffic are:

• pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords
• banner advertising
• ezine ads

The advantage of paid traffic is that you can get lots of targeted traffic fast to your site. The disadvantage is that it costs money!

2. Free Traffic

Examples of free traffic are:

• being ranked high in the search engines, like Google, and getting visitors that search for content relevant to your site
• blogging
• article marketing, e.g. Ezine Articles
• forum signatures
• traffic exchanges, e.g. TrafficSwarm
• ad swaps
• press releases
• social networking, e.g. Facebook
• social bookmarking, e.g. Digg
• Youtube traffic

Free traffic requires more effort but the advantage is that it is free.

Which method or methods should you use? I would recommend that you try them all and see what works best for you. If possible, use them all.