What Are The Best Ways To
Increase Online Traffic?

   Search Engines (SEs): Generating traffic from the search engines
      takes time and quite a bit of work. But once you have done legwork,
      the SEs will bring you highly targeted traffic for the years to come.
      And best of all - SE traffic is absolutely free.

      SE’s work best for narrow niche businesses with little competition.
     
      Site Build It! Sites are using the search engines as their main traffic
      driver and they are incredibly successful.
      Check out some of these impressive case studies.      

   Affiliate Programs: An excellent traffic driver, if your business is about
      a more general topic (as discussed above) with high competition.

      Your affiliates send highly targeted, ready-to-buy visitors to your
      sales site and you pay them a certain commission on the sale.  

   Pay Per Click Search Engines (PPCSEs): An excellent way to get
     highly targeted traffic almost instantaneously to your web site.

      With PPCs you are bidding for specific keywords against your
      competitors. Your bid determines the search engine ranking position
      for your keyword. Each time a PPCSE user arrives at your site after
      clicking on the link with your keyword, you have to pay the amount
      you were bidding.

      That means, you only pay for highly targeted visitors and you know
      exactly how much you pay per visitor. Unfortunately, pay-per-click
      search engines became a bit expensive lately.

   Joint Ventures (JV’s): You benefit from someone else's mailing list
      to increase online traffic to your site.

      Lets assume you have written an eBook about gardening, and you
      want to sell it via a joint venture. A suitable JV-Partner would be
      someone with a big list of targeted subscribers – in our example,
      people who are interested in gardening.

      Your JV-Partner will send a recommendation for your product to his list,
      and you will offer to pay a certain percentage (usually ~50%) of the
      generated sale.

      JVs are one of the most powerful ways to generate a huge amount of
      short-term traffic with ready-to-buy visitors.

   Advertising: You can generate fairly cheap and targeted traffic from
      advertising in e-zines. In order to succeed with e-zine ads, you have
      to find a reputable publisher with an audience that matches your
      target market.

   Articles: They are an excellent credibility builder and a great way to
      increase online traffic. Articles allow you to establish yourself as the
      expert in your field. 

   Word of Mouth: It takes time and effort to build traffic from "Word of
      Mouth", but this kind of traffic grows exponentially and it doesn’t cost
      you anything. Don't underestimate WOM!

   Signature File: Not a huge traffic builder, but it doesn't cost much
      time and effort to create a good signature file. Include your Sig-File in
      all your emails, articles, newsletters...

   Banner Ads: Don’t bother with banner ads, they just don’t work.
     Honestly, do you often click on banner ads and buy any of the promoted
     products?

      Banner ads give you a lousy “click-through” rate of ~ 0.3%, that means,
      on a run of 1000 banners, only 3 visitors will come to your site - in other
      words, banner ads are inefficient and expensive. If you have some
      money to spend on advertising, rather spend it on a  “Pay-Per-Click” –
      campaign or on e-zine advertising.

   Spamming: It might be tempting, to reach thousands of people
      spending only a few dollars. But be warned, spamming will put you in
      big trouble, it will destroy all your credibility and your business will
      be dead before it even starts.

      I also recommend you use a double opt-in process for your newsletter
      subscriptions:  A site visitor subscribes to your newsletter on your
      website. Shortly after he receives a confirmation email to which he must
      replay (that's the second opt-in part). From that point on, the subscriber
      will receive your newsletter on a regular basis and he can unsubscribe
      at any time.

   Posting to newsgroups and forums: That's ok to build up your
      credibility and to establish yourself as the expert in your field, but don't
      expect to generate a lot of traffic.

      If the members are loosely regulated (ex. Business and miscellaneous
      newsgroups), you can post your message and weave in some
      promotion, but no one will pay attention.

      If you post to a serious and more targeted group, you will get kicked
      out if you are using any promotional language.    

   Classified Ads: Don’t bother submitting to “free-for-all-classified” sites,
      they have a bad image and no one really looks at these ads.

      Serious traffic coming from these sources will be almost zero, but on the
      other hand get ready to receive lots of scam and spam messages.