Getting traffic to your website is the first step in making money online. Without traffic, you won’t be able to make money. It’s as simple as that. Of course there are some random exceptions, but in the world of the internet marketer, traffic is potential currency and without it, there isn’t any money. Monetizing the traffic is probably the topic of a different article. Either way, getting traffic to your site is important. You can get traffic by buying it, or by working for it, or sometimes, just by luck. Even then, I believe luck is where preparation meets opportunity.

Pay per click is probably the easiest and perhaps the fastest way to get traffic. Once your site is setup and ready to get visitors, an account with Google or Yahoo can buy you traffic and get it started within a very short period of time. There are options to bid on specific keyword phrases that you feel would be a good match for what you have to offer. You can also choose to display your advertisement on websites that seem to match what it is you have to offer. Probably the best thing about PPC is that you have virtually instant feedback. If you have some solid tracking in place, perhaps a combination of both Adwords and Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see what keywords you are bidding on produce sales and which do not. You’ll also be able to see which advertisements produce the most clicks and sales as well.

SEO is search engine optimization which is the idea that you design your site around providing solid valuable content for the user, then create supporting content and build a base of sites or links that support your site and help sustain it as an “authority” site. There are some tricks to getting this right, but the overall concept revolves a bit around SEO being a “popularity contest” with backlinks being the votes that determine how popular your site is. Targeting keywords that are less competitive will give you a chance to practice this before you go for the most popular keyword phrases in your niche.

social media – Targeting social groups with your marketing message may be like tight-rope walking. It also may require some nice social engineering where you have an opportunity to talk about your product or service without it coming across as an advertisement or a “pitch”. Of course the social media side of things doesn’t always have to revolve around your peers or social group you know personally. Social media can be anything that leverages the ability of potential customers to interact, discuss, compare, and then purchase. Reviews are huge in this category as well because the majority of your customers, no matter what they’re purchasing are looking for “social proof” that what they’re going to be buying from you is worth buying according to their peers.

If you’re after some serious traffic, you may consider media buys. This is the concept that you are purchasing traffic from websites that have literally millions of visitors per month. This requires that you do have a budget that can go towards a good amount of traffic. This is different than payperclick as you don’t have the chance to ramp up your budget a little at a time. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s risky, but it does require some diligence, testing, and agreement that you can back out of a media buy if, within 24-48 hours, you aren’t seeing the conversions you would expect. This may save you a significant amount of money and hassle if you’re trying to revamp your landing pages for conversions all the while you’re being bombarded with traffic. If done correctly, media buys can be one of the single largest revenue generators for you.

There are other types of traffic sources you can leverage including “web 2.0″ style sites that allow for a more integrated interaction with potential users of your site. Not only social media as discussed already in this article, but through video, audio and other media. Use this to your advantage for some unique opportunities the most amount of traffic for the least amount of your time while providing the greatest amount of value.

Getting the right web host may be a matter of trial and error. I’ve been through several hosting companies over the past 11 years and I’ve come to know what’s important and what’s not. The main issues revolve around getting the best possible web host for the budget you have. If you have a large budget, you may decide to hire a professional webmaster or server administrator and co-locate. If you are a small business on a tight budget, you may decide to go with a shared hosting platform that will allow you to spend a minimal amount of money per year for a solid service. It also depends on what you plan on doing with your website and what it is used for.

You can evaluate your hosting needs based on what you want to accomplish. For instance, if you are hosting a simple website promoting your retail business and are not offering anything for sale online, you may require a lot less than a fully functional ecommerce site with the ability to do secure checkout through a gateway account. You may also have needs around a security standpoint if you collect and store sensitive information. These types of things will most definitely influence what type of hosting setup you require and may significantly influence the price you pay.

Based on what you’ll be using hosting for, you’ll have a very broad range of possible prices you can expect to pay for monthly or annual hosting. The most simple packages for hosting may be less than $10 per month. Other hosting including a VPS or virtual private server or even colocation of your own servers may be much more. Data centers that host these type of secure location have a lot of requirements including protection from natural disasters, keeping and maintaining the servers in working condition. Your budget may not influence the cost, but this cost should definitely weigh into how much you plan on budgeting for this service, again, based on your needs.

In addition to determining your budget, you should also ask yourself what type of features you require. This will be built on the question of what you’re using your hosting for. Do you require any special software to be run on this server? Will you be using this server as a primary email server? Do you have multiple domains that you need to host? Do you already know the list of features that you need? There may be several that you don’t even know you need, but assume would be available. Check the feature list of web hosting companies to confirm.

Security is a primary feature and function of hosting. You will want your data to be protected and secure. Although you do have most of the servers themselves locked down pretty tight as far as server access, you may have some vulnerabilities built into the software you’ve chosen to use for your website. Some main features include a cpanel or control panel that allows you to interact with your host and manage domains, user accounts, website software, etc. If you’re colocating or doing some virtual private server managing, you’ll have some different types of features that your vender should tell you about and provide documentation for.

Getting to the point where you have a solid hosting plan may be as simple as selecting a host that seems to have the features you’re looking for as well as an option for a “trial” period or money back guarantee then taking it for a test drive. You can find a lot of solid information online, but just remember that the larger a company is, the easier it is to find reviews (both positive and negative). If you stick with a hosting company that has good customer service and solid products, you shouldn’t have to worry about your hosting situation moving forward.

Getting traffic really does represent one of the basic fundamentals of building any online business. Similar to the retail world, having people walk in through the door is the first step to making sales. Same with online business. If nobody visits your site, you simply won’t make any money. There are two types of traffic, free and paid. This article will introduce you to the basics for both types.

Possibly the fastest way to get traffic to any website is to purchase it. In theory, you could have traffic visiting your website within about 10 minutes of setting up a Google Adwords account. The idea is that you will setup an advertisement that will either show up on Google’s homepage when someone searches for a keyword phrase you’ve selected as one you’d like to have your ad associated with. Or, you may see your ad on another site that accepts advertising and has agreed with Google to have ads show up on their site.

Search engine optimization is probably the most common of the free methods of getting traffic. However, the process is not “free” as it does come with a cost. The only difference is that instead of spending money, you’re spending time, occasionally doing both. Search engine optimization is the art and science of creating solid valuable content for your users and being strategic in how you promote your site. SEO can be a popularity contest where you either find keywords that are low hanging fruit and have virtually no competition or you spend a lot of time creating content on other sites that can link to and support the page you’re trying to get ranked.

Social media optimization or marketing can happen when you take the message of your products or services to a group of people you have an existing social relationship with. The idea here is that you leverage a group of people you already have a level of trust with and take your message to them. This has the prospect of creating problems if you are over using this method with your existing friends. Think of this like someone who shows up at the family reunions and all he talks about is his MLM. Depending on the nature of your social group, there is probably a fine line when taking any marketing message to your peers.

One of the ways you can get a ton of traffic, even more than search engine optimization is to purchase advertising on sites that already get millions of visitors per month. The type of traffic you will get would be slightly less “qualified” than those that are actively searching for your products or services through a search engine. However, the sheer amount of visitors you can get to your website is incredibly high. Of course, the other factor that may influence whether media buying is a good thing for you to use is the type of products or services you are selling. If you’re offering “underwater basket weaving”, you may be out of luck unless you have major hook, but if you’re offering “weight loss”, you may be targeting 2 of every 3 Americans, and your ad may do very well.

What I consider to be a “shortcut” to the top of the search engines is leveraging video sites, specifically YouTube. This is a site that already has millions of backlinks and Google already has proved that the like to provide some variety in their rankings which includes rich media (video). If you can create a video with content that offers good value and uses the right keyword phrases in the title as well as the description, then add some articles with backlinks to your videos from various article directories, blog commenting, etc, you can get your video to rank relatively easily. This is especially true if you’re targeting some less competitive keyword phrases.

Getting traffic is crucial. The main thing to consider is that no matter what you have planned so far, the important part is taking action. Redesigning your website for the umpteenth time won’t make you any money. The ugliest website ever online will make more money than the website sitting in your photoshop and dreamweaver on your computer. My only other advice is to not get distracted. There are a lot of bright shiny objects out there that are excellent at getting you off course.

When considering which company to use for web hosting, you should base this decision on what you’ll be using the hosting for and what type of budget you have. If you are just getting started with an online business or online presence, there are some things you can sacrifice by way of services or features for a lower cost. The nicest part about this scenario is that web hosting is becoming so competitive that you have very little to sacrifice and have access to very low cost.

The real question you may decide on is for what purpose you are using the hosting. If you need it for hosting a few simple websites or even a single website for your business, you should have a very simple approach, something that would cost you less than $100 per year at most. If you have a higher requirement of security selling some online products or managing some online software that users have access to, you may have additional requirements for uptime or availability which would require you to invest some more money in a dedicated “managed” hosting platform. Lastly, you may require some admin specific to your company where you may choose to co-locate your servers at an ISP with available bandwidth, but still manage your servers and do all the maintenance yourself (internally).

Determining how much budget you require may also influence which company you decide to use. You can decide to start small and assuming you have a solid backup of your hosted files (applications, databases, sites, images, etc), then growth to a larger or more stable hosting platform should not be a difficult process. Of course, the opposite is true as well. If you start a bit to big, you can always “downgrade” if you have more than you need. One option may be a “cloud” environment that will allow you to only pay for what you use. This may be the best of both worlds and a lot of providers that host some relatively “heavy” websites use these cloud services.

If you are hosting a simple website and the site itself is not necessarily critical to the services you offer, you can look into a lower cost option that will fit all of your needs. One other consideration is what “site builder” features are available with the hosting company you’re considering using. Do you have enough experience to build your own website? If you had some convenient tools to create a template for you and get a site installed, would this be better for you? Are you the type of person who would rather setup everything on the server? These questions may help you determine what features you should look for when evaluating hosting companies.

The main “feature” that some of the lower cost sites have is that they allow unlimited domains to be hosted along with unlimited emails, unlimited bandwidth, diskspace, etc. These companies are usually a shared hosting platform which means your account is shared with several other “users” on the same physical hardware. This is not a bad thing necessarily and for the price is one of the best options for web hosting, especially for those who don’t have the budget for a full time website administrator. Other features include a cpanel or control panel that allows for easy administration including site installations, email configuration, and domain management.

When evaluating what to go with, if you are new with a business idea and want to get a website setup quickly, the best advice I could give is to go with a good company that has a cpanel and offers a free domain name, then sign up. Don’t wait, don’t over-evaulate, just give it a try. Many of these type of hosting companies also offer a 45-90 day money back guarantee, so don’t take too much time in the analysis phase as most of these companies are very similar and it would take some pretty serious benchmarking tests to determine any real difference. A big factor to influence may be whether or not the company has live support and what they offer. I’ve used both, and it’s always nice to get a good support engineer on the phone or chat with you to resolve issues quickly.

There are as many ways to make money online as there are ideas. Now, not all of these ideas will work, but all of the ideas revolve around getting traffic to your website. Nothing happens until you get someone to visit your site. There are a lot of ways to monetize your traffic once you get it, but you have to get the traffic first. This should be the focus of any internet marketing plan you undertake.

Buying traffic may be the quickest way to get started, but is not necessarily the most cost effective. Depending on the market you’re going after, you may find that the market supply and demand evens out to where if you’re just getting started, purchasing traffic is a losing battle initially. Those that succeed with pay per click or traffic purchasing are usually those that have enough budget to stick with it to find out what works and what doesn’t work.

Search engine optimization can be one of the largest sources of traffic, but can be very difficult and time consuming to get your site ranked. I’m not discouraging this at all, in fact, it’s one of the methods that I use most frequently. However, the concept that I’d encourage you to pursue is that of targeting keyword phrases that have little competition and build up your site based on these types of phrases. If you’re able to do this, you’ll have the chance to build up trust with the search engines. Once the search engines consider your site an “authority” site, it becomes much easier to rank for keyword phrases that you’d normally never be able to get. This is a time consuming process and requires patience, but establishing a site like this will surely bring you solid traffic over time.

There are options of getting traffic through social media outlets. There are any number of “conversations” going on in the niche you’re choosing to pursue assuming it isn’t too obscure. This type of traffic does require you to inject yourself into these conversations and contribute value. There are probably a lot of “tricks” that you could employ that would shortcut you to additional traffic, however, these are short term only and won’t create an ongoing relationship with customers, especially those that may have been tricked into visiting your site.

If you’re familiar with pay per click, especially using something like Google, you are aware of their content network. This is an option that allows you to put your advertisement on hundreds if not thousands of different websites. This method of purchasing through both Adwords as well as a number of other agencies. It’s about purchasing advertising space from sites that get millions of visitors. This traffic gets to you at a click thru rate of about .03 to 3% depending on your ad and the nature of the site visitor.

Video and audio using existing video sites and other podcast type sites can be a great way to get additional traffic back to your site. There is still work involved in getting views and downloads of your audio, but a strong call to action and offering additional value on your website. Of course, there are also options to share revenue as a partner with some of these video sites. The traffic itself can be leveraged through the fact that there is already a high level of trust with these video sites and there are also instances where the search engines want to include more than just website listings and would like to also include rich media. Think of online videos as a shortcut to getting rankings and traffic.

Getting traffic is really what takes any idea from zero revenue to a profitable business. Without traffic, you don’t have the ability to sell. Of course it takes customers to buy. Traffic also allows you to test offers to see what the best options are for monetizing your website. Too many people go after the perfect site first and think about traffic only as an after-thought. Don’t make this mistake.