Traffic Sources

When it comes to making money online, the ability to generate traffic is an absolute must if you want to succeed.  You can have the best products, the best websites, and best sales pages, but without internet marketing traffic, you do not make any money.

Most new marketers spend most of their time building fancy sites with lots of products and links, and overlook the importance of traffic.  The more traffic you can get, the more profitable your business will be.

There are many different ways of building internet marketing traffic.  Some are paid and some free.  Some are quite difficult, and others relatively simple.

Here are a few techniques that you can use to drive traffic to your website.

1.  SEO

Search Engine Optimization is probably the first form of driving traffic that comes to most people’s minds.  Simply put, SEO is having your website appear as high as possible in the search engines.

On page SEO can be quite simple and involves the correct use of keywords, title tags, external linking, and sitemaps.

Off page SEO is all about building backlinks to your site.  The more websites that have links to yours, the more the search engines will regard yours as being a quality site.  You should try to get links containing anchor text, and from sites with a high page rank.

2.  Article Marketing

This method of generating internet marketing traffic is one of the best.  Many internet marketers use article marketing as their primary method of driving traffic.  You should focus on writing high quality content and distribute it to a number of different article directories.

The key to successful article marketing is to create a compelling Authors Resource Box.  This is where you can insert links to your website, so you need to give your reader a reason to click the link.

3.  Forum Marketing

Many marketers have had success using forums to drive traffic to their websites.  It is fairly simple to join a forum and start contributing to the discussion.  Once you have developed a relationship with the members of the forum you can promote your site to them.  Remember to check the rules in relation to promoting your site or products.  Usually you can use links in your signature.

4.  Social Networking

The social networks are becoming more and more popular with marketers as a means of generating traffic.  The most popular networks are YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.  Others include MySpace, Linkedin, Ning and Digg, but there are many more.  Each different network has its own specific methods that work, so there is a lot to learn about using social networking for internet marketing traffic.

5.  PPC Marketing

Pay Per Click marketing is one of the easiest ways to create an automated traffic system.  Probably one of the most popular is Google Adwords, but there are others.  PPC is not something that a newcomer to internet marketing should attempt, but with a little experience, it is a system that should be considered.  One needs to understand the value of every visitor to their site before embarking on a paid campaign.