Traffic generation is the key to an online business success. No Traffic means No Business. You could have the best product, best sales letter in the world but if no one knows about it sales are going to be very low. Bottom line is getting traffic is crucial.

Traffic generation are the marketing techniques you apply to generating leads for your business and building a massive database which overtime will convert into customers. There are off line and online marketing methods.

For the purpose of this article I will cover predominantly online methods for you to get started but there are hundreds of different techniques you can use to get traffic to your business.

Traffic generation or lead generation for any business tyically requires a cost which is significantly higher cost than getting a customer to buy more products from you, therefore, it is very important to great conversion strategies and retention strategies in place once your business is up and running so you can improve your bottom line.

Today technology is advanced and to many people often a daunting task and for that very reason may stop people from investing into Internet Marketing strategies to help increase sales. If this is the case I would do one of two things. First, I would look to employ someone who specialises in traffic generation. There are people out there today who do this as a full time job. Pay the professionals. Second, I would look to invest some time and money into self education. Alternatively, look towards a mentor or a coach to help you achieve your desired outcome.

Traffic Generation Techniques

There are 100s of ways to generate traffic to your site ranging from offline to online traffic. Some techniques will have a significant cost, others will be FREE, for example, saying to someone at a party here is my business card go and have a look at my site. So open your mind, you may focus on a couple of different methods to start with and then branch out with some more advanced strategies later after you have developed your skills and mastered some of the traffic generation techniques.

Here are a few to kick start your business

Low to No Cost Methods

1. Tell a friend

As mentioned above you surely have a few friends that may be interested. You obviously have a friendship so you may not want to do a hard sell but why dont you just say, I have just joined this program online, it is a way I am looking at making a bit of extra cash if you want to have a look here is the address. Then they can make there mind up yourself. You will probably already have a few people in mind that would most likely jump at the concept.

2. E-Mail

You can send out a group e-mail to all your friends, if they are not interested kindly just ask them to send it on to people that may be interested. If you are advanced you could look into setting up an auto responder. The system has an auto responder working on your behalf to convert your leads, however, we have personally introduced our own auto responder to improve our relationship with our leads to convert to m1 consultants or upgrading consultants from m1 to m3. The other value of our auto responder is we are going to provide valuable e-mails to help all consultants in our team build their business.

3. Social Networking Groups

Groups such as myspace, facebook, youtube are great ways you can sell your product. There are groups on social networking sites that you can join yourself; you can set up a page and just network with people. I joined facebook and had a number of people I had not spoken to in years find me, some of them were actually people that are interested in what I am doing now and have invested money into some business mentoring, and purchased products. You will be surprised at the power of these mediums to generate traffic to your site.

4. Buy a Baby Name Book

This is out there thinking but by going through the names in the book it my spark a thought of someone you know with that name that you can contact and direct them to your site. While not a traditional method, it is cost effective and certainly a way to spark your memory on someones name and then contact them and try to get them to look at your site.

5. Blogging

Blogging is probably a more advanced strategy but it can be free by joining wordpress.com, or blogger.com and setting up a blog post which is effectively an online diary.

This certainly helps drive traffic to your site, it helps build rapport with your customers and creates a connection. Blogging also helps with search engine optimisation.

Some other advanced blogging strategies including

a)Commenting on other peoples blogs and adding your URL on their blog

b)Submit your blog to directories. Directories such as Digg.com and Decicious.com have heaps of traffic.

c)List your products in your blog rolls

d)Google Adsense (listed below)

e)Product reviews with a resource box at the end of the review

f)Give your blog content for other people to use

6. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of ranking your website in the free part of Google or other search engines. Google looks at the code of each website and ranks your site based on a number of features. It is obviously important to get as close to the top as possible because that increases your chances of making a sale or having people click onto your website. The first thing Google looks at is the title tag at the top of the page and the last thing is the bottom right hand of the page. It is known as the first and last principle. You want to have the same keyword at the top and bottom of the page. Some other key features that help with page rank include page title, meta description tag, meta key word tag. This is a simplified look at SEO and can be effected by a number of off page strategies also but if you at least do the basics you will improve your chances of generating some more traffic.

7. Google Ad Words

Google Ad Words is effectively paying for your leads. You put an ad up and when people click on the ad it will cost you money. It can be costly if you do not have any idea on what you are doing. My advice is only start exploring this avenue once you are either generating sales and have some cash to invest in marketing strategies or are very savvy in this area. In saying all that it is a great way to build a database and make some sales once you understand how to do it properly.

8. Zango

Very similar to setting up a Google ad words campaign. It is an online media company that gives people free access to games, videos and other online entertainment. In return for the free content they agree to view targeted advertising.

9 eBay

There are over 270 million people on eBay holding a credit card in their hands. Therefore, for any business in the world I would suggest if you want to get an online presence and do not understand Internet Marketing have an eBay business and set up your store. You can not directly direct traffic from eBay however there are a number of people that creatively send traffic from their eBay business to their Internet business.

10. Google Ad Sense

You can advertise on other peoples websites and blogs and it is a pay per click method. Internet Marketers advertise their products on their own websites because it increases sales significantly.

11. Articles

You can submit articles to article submission websites. Great examples of article submission websites include articlemarketer.com and you can direct the traffic to a specific site. With article submission the subject line is crucial. Like Google adwords and Zango you need to use great key words in your subject line that you think people would put in the search section of Google to find your product. Another important thing to understand with articles is that you only want to advertise at the end of the article and in particular in the authors resource box. Have great content in the article and then they will want to buy your product at the end of the article and then from the authors resource box send them to a forced opt-in page. On the forced opt in offer a free report, newsletter or some form of free gift and then once they have opted into your page have a sales letter with the product. In this instance you drive your traffic to your site and once people opt into your page you will have an auto responder set up to convert your leads.

12. Create products to give away

Another traffic generation technique is to create products. You could write an eBook, create a video or audio and with your product you could promote throughout the product. One method is create a product and give the resale rights to your product. You advertise at the start of the product and the end of the product and maybe with a footer at the bottom of the page. You give people the rights to sell your eBook and keep all the money and the trade off is you can get traffic and branding. That is a win win situation.

13. Hiring someone to drive the traffic

If you are not technically minded, or are not interested in self-education I would strongly recommend you pay someone to drive the traffic to the site. There are plenty of people you can pay to do it for you. Obviously, you would want to budget for this and like any business you need to have a budget for marketing, your budget is set up for outsourcing traffic generation.

14. Affiliate marketing

Save the best for last

Regarded as the greatest way to market your product is by affiliate marketing and giving people commissions for making a sale on your behalf.

These techniques will certainly improve your ability to make a sale and generate sales for you business. As suggested, improve your self help knowledge on traffic generation because once you know how to drive traffic to a site you certainly have significant power in generating more sales and profit for your business. Once again you can have the best product and the best sales letter in the world but if you can not drive traffic to the site you do not have a business.