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If you’re a business owner with a website, you know that you need to get traffic to your website.

You may be asking: what do you mean by “traffic”. I’m glad you asked. Website traffic refers to people checking out your site. Consider the possibility of laying out the investment to build a website, and thousands of dollars later, you have nice-looking site that no one knows about and thereby not earning you money. You may as well put a McDonald’s smack-dab in the middle of Death Valley.

There are many ways to get traffic. If you need traffic fast, there are two basic methods you can use.

The first basic fast-traffic method is to borrow the traffic. This may or may not work for your industry, but try and get creative and adapt it to your business because it can be very effective. What is done is to convince another website owner with a list of prospects and customers that would be interested in your product or service, and encourage them to recommend your products or services. In most cases, you will have to give them an affiliate or referral commission in order to encourage the referral.

This particular method is effective for two reasons I’ll mention. Firstly, the website owner has already gathered the list of people who are interested in your specific topic, saving you the expense and time of identifying them. Secondly, in so doing you are “borrowing” on the goodwill of the referrer. Consider in your own experience. If you need to make a buying decision, do you place more weight in traditional, self-serving advertising or upon the impartial recommendations of friends and advisers? Most people choose the latter.

If you borrow traffic as described above, it will likely not cost money upfront, though in most cases you will pay a percentage of sales to the referrer.

The next fast-traffic method we’ll discuss is paid advertising. There are several types of paid advertising, and the very first you should consider is pay-per-click advertising. Google’s Adwords program is the easiest to begin with, and eventually you will want to research using Yahoo and MSN as well. Pay-per-click advertising’s great benefit is the ability to hone in one certain keywords that people are looking for, and as an added bonus, you can start getting traffic in 10 minutes or less.

This method of advertising is attractive for numerous reasons. Chief of these is the ability to match the words people are searching for with your particular ad. Another great benefit is you can track many aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns.

This method does mean you will pay before making sales, although Google probably won’t charge your credit card until the end of the month. As a caution, in the beginning you will want to monitor your Adwords account often to make sure you are not spending more than you intended.

These are only two methods of getting traffic to your website. Future articles will reveal many more methods.

Tags: Advertising
Filed under: Advertising