10 Remarkably Effective Traffic Building Techniques - Part 1 Of 3

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.

The web sites shown in sponsored listings are usually determined through a bidding system. You bid the maximum price that you are willing to pay for each visitor that clicks on your listing and comes through to your site. The more you bid, the more likely your listing will show.

How much you need to bid to get traffic really depends upon the niche in which your web site operates. Although you could easily pay anywhere from $0.01 to $1.00 for each visitor that clicks through your listing, many webmasters obtain traffic for $0.05 to $0.15 per click.

3. Article Marketing

Article marketing involves writing articles and making them available for webmasters and editors to publish. The greatest exposure usually comes from listing the articles at article directories such as EzineArticles and IdeaMarketers. This allows anyone to publish the article without any fee to you, the author, provided they include your 'Author Resource Box' at the end of the article. Your author's resource box should be a small paragraph or two about you including a direct link to your web site.

Article marketing is a great traffic building technique for several reasons.

First, there is an increase in name exposure and brand awareness as people read your articles all over the Internet. They will begin to recognize you as an expert in your topic.
Second, there is direct traffic to your web site from readers clicking through the link in your author's resource box.

Third, there is the indirect benefit of backlinks increasing your search engine ranking. Backlinks are links on other web sites that point to your web page. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization because some search engines, especially Google, give more credit to web sites that have a good number of quality backlinks.

In Part Two of this article I will discuss Free Ebooks, Viral Marketing, Classified Advertising, and Advertising Swaps.