Ten Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques

by Daniel Moro

Part 1

In the world of online business, traffic is like gold. It is something you work hard for, and once you have it, you can turn it into cash, or even barter and trade with it. Above all you must remember how valuable it really is, and invest wisely with it, or your online business will fail.

If you want to grow your online customer base then you must build a good stream of incoming traffic to your web site. Traffic leads to revenue. Depending upon your online business model it probably does that in one of two ways.

For many online businesses, building traffic leads to growth in an opt-in mailing list which leads to establishing relationship or rapport. This in turn leads to strong prospects and an increase in sales volume.

For online businesses consisting of web sites without their own products and services, building a good stream of incoming traffic leads to increased visitor numbers which leads to higher quantities of clicks on affiliate links or advertisements such as AdSense. This in turn leads to an increase in the site revenue.

Let's look at ten traffic building techniques that have proven to be remarkably effective for growing an online business. In the first part of this three part series we look at Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Advertising, and Article Marketing.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of designing and fine-tuning a web page and the links to that web page to improve the web page's relevance and ranking in the organic, crawler-based listings of a search engine, for particular keyword phrase searches.

Search engine optimization does require some study of the techniques involved. That can be time consuming and the results might take weeks or even months to see but, in the long term, investing your efforts in obtaining natural - also known as organic - high-ranking placement in the top search engines will pay huge dividends.

While it is possible to optimize pages for many search engines, most webmasters working on SEO concentrate on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

2. Pay Per Click Advertising

In addition to their organic search results the major search engines publish additional sponsored listings on a pay-per-click basis. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the quickest ways to drive traffic to a web site. This is certainly not the cheapest traffic building technique, but it is probably the most effective technique to guarantee a large quantity of traffic, fast.