Any method of making money online requires traffic. You need to have traffic. The more traffic that you have to your website, the larger will be your ability to make money online.

So, the question is: how do you get traffic?

And that is the age-old question. Several of the past days in this series have touched on various ways to do it. People are devising new, creative ways to attract new audience every day. There is no single right way to generate traffic to your site. It is as much an art as it is a science.

So, given that there is no magic pill for traffic, I will simply list out some ideas which we can then expand upon in the future.

1. Set up a blog and start posting regularly. Blogs work well with search engines, and the “pinging” helps promote your site when you post things with links to other sites.
2. Use Google Adwords. This will cost you some money, but you have full control over how much you spend. Adwords is essentially guaranteed traffic. It WILL send you new visitors. It is then up to you to create a site which converts a visitor into a potential sale.
3. Participate in social media. If you play an active role in social media when it comes to your niche, people who are interested will take note. Use your profiles to create links to your site. And, where appropriate, you can mention your site.
4. Post meaningful comments on relevant blogs, providing the URL to your website when asked.
5. Create videos and post them to sites like Youtube. Use TubeMogul to post your video to several video sites at once to gain maximum exposure. Do something buzz worthy and provide a link to your video along with the video as well as IN the video.
6. Write articles for your target market and post them on article hubs where they could be picked up for republishing by other sites. Sites like Isnare and are good places to post your article. Articehubs.com has more information on this.
7. Write a free report and use that as a way to attract people to your site. You might even offer to allow other sites in your market to also give away your report as a value-added benefit to their visitors.
8. Participate in relevant forums and use the forum signature to place a link to your website.
9. Approach bloggers in your market and make contact with them. Offer them material for a blog post - something that would be interesting to their audience. And perhaps you can get a link to your site along with it.
10. Offer to guest post on other websites.

Obviously, we’re only scratching the surface here.

I have been working online for almost 10 years now. I have been familiar with the internet since before the concept of a website really existed. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a www or a dot-com. You connected to what was called a Bulletin Board System (BBS) and you did so using a phone number. You would literally dial a phone number to connect to the BBS and you would browse the BBS using a text interface. Obviously, this is a far cry from the websites we use today.

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You have an idea for a website or a product. You invest time and maybe money into creating it. You get it all ready. It looks gorgeous! It is time for launch. You upload it to your web server. You pull it up in your web browser. Wow! There it is. You’re in business.

But, nobody is coming.

What the HELL is going on?!

Well, what the hell is going on is that nobody knows about you! You’ve built a website but there are no roads to it. It’d be like building a house out in the middle or the forest and having no roads to get to it. Well, that house is going to be hidden, right?

So, the whole adage of “if you build it, they will come” is most certainly not true when it comes to the Internet. Setting up a website and a product is only stage one of setting up an online business. Stage two is promotion and marketing to make people aware of you. Smart people will be working on stage two while stage one is under way.

Getting People to Come

There are a multitude of ways to get people to come to your website, and each could probably be an entire body of information on it’s own. But, here is a basic list to get your feet wet:

1. Running a blog on your site.
2. Posting in relevant forums (with a link to your site in your signature)
3. Posting on relevant blogs
4. Google Adsense (probably the single best way to start getting traffic from scratch)
5. An Email List
6. Joint Venture Deals
7. Guest Blogging
8. Article Marketing
9. Social Media (be careful when using this as a marketing medium. It can backfire if done incorrectly).

Outflow Equals Inflow

If you want an inflow of traffic, be prepared to outflow. Your efforts will be almost directly proportional. To the degree you are active in getting your name out there on other sites in as many places as you can, you will see an inflow of traffic. If you ever want to get more traffic, outflow more.

Period.