The Cheap Internet Marketer

Let’s just say it right now — a web site without traffic is a business that is doomed to failure.  If you’ve just started your first web site, don’t make the mistake of worrying too much at first about how many sales (also know as conversions in the IM field) you’re making.  Instead, concentrate on learning how to drive traffic to your site.  You must have traffic to get conversions (sales). 

There are a lot of different methods of generating traffic on the Internet.  Some that immediately come to mind are article marketing, buying Ads on Google, Yahoo, MSM and other sites (this is called PPC or Pay Per Click), posting ads on Free Ad sites, social bookmarking and Web 2.0, Forum Posting, Publicity Releases, Viral Marketing and others. 

If you are just starting out you will want to pick one or two of these methods and concentrate on learning how to use them effectively.   Each method has pluses and minuses, each has its own nuances you’ll have to learn.  If you know what you’re doing, each method works very well. 

Article Marketing is a very popular method of gaining traffic, so we’ll start our Traffic discussions with it.  Basically, you research and write short, informative articles and post them to free article directories.  Quite a few people go to these sites and read the articles and hopefully click on the links you are allowed to enclose, and these links take them to your website.  

More importantly, publishers of ezines and newsletters go to these article directories, looking for good, free content that they can publish.  The ultimate goal of article marketing is to have your articles published in newsletters and ezines, this can bring significant amounts of traffic to your site. 

There’s a lot more to know before you can successfully start an Article Marketing campaign, so stay tuned and we’ll discuss  more details about article marketing, plus some other traffic generating techniques.