Driving Traffic to Your New Website

One of the first things you learn when you start an Internet business is that for long term success you must get traffic to your website. There are many methods to achieve traffic, some are free and others are paid.

When planning your strategy for traffic, establish a budget and stick to it. One of the most expensive mistakes people can make is not having a budget for their traffic generation tactics.

Types of Traffic Generation:

1. Have a Blog and RSS feed linked to your website. The search engines love fresh content and a blog is a great way to do this.
2. Submitting articles is one of the most powerful and long-term traffic generating methods.
3. Have a newsletter on your website. Offering people free advice or tactics is a great technique for getting long term repeat traffic.
4. Join forums that are applicable to your market. By offering free advice you will build a reputation as an expert in your niche, and people will visit your site.
5. Create a forum of your own.
6. Have good keywords for your website. Do your research and find out what people are searching in your niche. It is a good idea to have competitive keywords (searched a lot but a lot of competition) and some that are not as competitive (not searched as much but also easier to get good search page ranking).
7. Exchange links with other website owners, it can be time consuming but as they improve their traffic you are also gaining exposure.
8. Using e-mail marketing is still popular, but be very careful you are not spamming, for the new marketer you are better to use a service for this.
9. Use social book media and book marking sites to promote yourself.
10. Use offline methods to promote your business such as business cards, letter heads, and brochures.
11. Keep your website simple but elegant. More is not always better.
12. Ezine ads can be a really good advertising source, but do your research before you spend, in order to create an eye catching ad.
13. Pay per click (PPC) ads are extremely powerful if done correctly. If not done correctly you will get very few results and spend a lot of money. Not recommended for the new marketer, do a tremendous amount of research before you incorporate PPC into your website traffic plan.
14. Give away a free report or ebook that is appropriate to your niche.

There are many forms of driving traffic to your website. As a new marketer the best method is to choose one or two and become very good at them. Once you feel confident add another method until you find the best plan for you.