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A critical element of running a successful business on the internet is getting people to visit your site. Attracting site visitors is called “getting traffic.”

With the number of existing Web sites in the billions and the growing daily, it can be extremely difficult for a small or new site to get noticed in the vastness of cyberspace. It’s not as though you can simply “build it and they will come.” Getting steady traffic to a site takes time and effort. The more traffic a site receives, the easier it becomes for others seekers to find it.

Here’s how it works: most people surf the Web for information or products using search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. Many people enter general terms into the search box (for example, “dogs,” “music” or “cars”), and the search engines deliver a listing of sites containing those terms.

This gives established mega-sites such as eBay, Amazon and Wikipedia a tremendous advantage over everyone else, as they contain these terms on multiple pages, are already well-known, and are visited by millions of people daily. Newcomers and smaller ventures with the same terms get buried deep in the search engine rankings.

Luckily, you needn’t rely solely on search engine searches to get visitors to your site. There’s a wide array of methods for helping customers find your on-line presence. Using one or a combination of them can bring you enough traffic to make a respectable living on-line. The following are some of the most popular methods:

Link exchanges: The more sites that link into yours, the better your search engine ranking (i.e., the earlier your site appears on a search engine when someone enters one of the terms you use on your site). You can get sites to link into yours in a few ways, including looking for complimentary sites that might like to exchange links with you, or starting a blog on one of the blogging sites and including your link in your blog.

Article writing: Other sites and e-zines (electronic newsletters) are constantly in need of fresh content and articles, but often cannot afford to pay much if anything for this material. They love free articles on relevant topics, and will gladly let you include your site information in the resource box at the end of the article—a great way to get both links and direct visitors to your site.

Off-line advertising: You can advertise your Web site using the exact same techniques that brick and mortar businesses do. Put your Web site URL on everything from brochures and business cards to giveaways such as pens, calendars, coffee mugs. Advertise on television or radio, and/or place print ads.

Wholesale Website Traffic: This option is the best of them all. It requires the least work and it really gets your website real visitors fast. In a nutshell, you do not need to write anything, build links, or even lift a finger. If you choose the right company for the job, you will be seeing real visitors coming to see your website. You are leveraging their websites power to get your site popular, it is a win for you all the way. Please read on for our company recommendations.

In a nutshell, you need to get your URL out there so that people can find you, and most of these are relatively low cost ways to start. Incorporate these traffic generating techniques into your internet marketing strategy and watch the number of visitors to your site—and your sales—start to grow.

Affiliate Marketing for Newbies

Buy Website Traffic

If the idea of making money on-line appeals to you, but you have no idea of how to do so, affiliate marketing is probably your best place to start.

Briefly, affiliate marketing is promoting the products and/or services of others, where you earn a commission for every sale made through you. Thousands of business people and Web-based companies rely heavily on affiliates to sell their products (such as books, software, training courses and memberships) for them.

Unlike sales in the off-line world, you don’t have to go door to door or make cold calls on the telephone to reach potential customers. In fact, there are a number of ways to earn affiliate commissions without ever having to actually talk to anyone at all!

So how do you sell products to people without talking to them, and perhaps not even e-mailing them? There are several ways, but first it helps to explain a little bit how affiliate marketing works.

Buy Targeted Traffic

When you sign on as an affiliate, you provide the company or business person with some basic information about you (name, address, and so forth), as well as the manner in which you would like to be paid. The fastest way to receive payment for your affiliate marketing efforts is to set up an on-line banking account. PayPal is by far the most popular method of sending and receiving payment on-line.

The seller then provides you with your own unique affiliate URL or link. This is the link you use to steer people to the product. When someone who clicks your link buys the product, the company knows which affiliate earned the commission for the sale.

Where do you put your affiliate link so that potential customers can find it and perhaps make a purchase? There are several popular ways to promote affiliate products:

1. You can create a Web site of your own on a topic related to the product or services you are selling. For example, if the product is an ebook on how to win at poker, you could create a Web site that tells all about the game of poker, and include your affiliate link on every page of your site.
2. You can start a blog where you review products or services that you are promoting as an affiliate, and put your link there for readers who want more information.
3. You can place classified ads with your link in on-line newsletters or on other people’s sites that are related to what you are promoting.
4. You can write articles on topics related to the product or service you are promoting and post them to one or more of the free articles databases on internet. Again, remember to include your affiliate link somewhere within or at the end of the article.
Finding affiliate arrangements can be quite simple. Just search on the Web under the term “affiliate program” or “be an affiliate.” You will quickly discover that the number and variety of money-making affiliate opportunities is enormous.