Internet traffic is the life of any website or e-commerce business, and if you are an internet marketer, you already know that good traffic is not always easy to achieve. There are however, some simple and effective strategies for getting quality traffic to your site, and most of them are FREE or low cost.

1. Good old fashioned search engine optimization. This is perhaps, the most cost effective way to get many customers to your site, because it does not cost a thing. A web site with top ranking on even a mildly popular term, can get thousands of visitors per month. Visit any SEO forum or article database and you can find hundreds of effective search engine optimization tips and tweaks to apply to your website for free.

2. Pay-Per-Click Campaigns (PPC). Almost all of the major search engines offer some sort of Pay-Per-Click marketing. This is a great way to get targeted traffic to your site, and with some bids as low as $.01 per click, it can also be very economical. Although Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) are the main players in the PPC market, there are really good deals to be found with some of the smaller search engines, such as ExactSeek.com and GoClick.com.

3. Traffic Exchanges. Traffic exchanges offer a website owner an instant, free way to get traffic to his/her site. Traffic Exchanges come in all kinds of themes and forms, but the underlying principle remains the same: I view your site, you view my site. The ratio of sites you view to your site views can be diverse, depending on the individual exchange, however it is recommended you find one with a 2:1 ratio or better. Traffic exchanges also offer a multi tier referral program that gives you a percentage of traffic earned by affiliates you bring into the program. Traffic Swarm.com, NoMoreHits.com, and StudioTraffic.com all offer a website owner great ways to increase traffic, or you can simply search the term “traffic exchange” in any search engine to find an exchange that fits you.

4. Link Exchanges. Link Exchanges are a fantastic way to increase web traffic, and the benefits are two-fold. Not only do you get traffic from the linking website, you also get the added benefit of better search engine placement with every link that is pointing to your site. Reciprocal linking has always been a major component of effective search engine optimization, with more and more weight being placed daily on the quality and quantity of links pointing to your site. Be sure your anchor text is the keyword(s) you are targeting, but at the same time, periodically phrase your anchor text differently so that all of the links pointing to your site do not say the same thing. This makes your links appear more “natural”. Linkalizer.com and Linkmarket.net are some good, free services to help you with your link exchange campaigns, or you can also visit any SEO forum or article/ezine database for more tips.

5. Banner Exchanges. Banner Exchanges work on the same principle as Link Exchanges, and depending on the banner you decide to promote, can be very effective at drawing targeted web traffic to your site. As with link exchanges, look for ratios of 2:1 or better, with some banner exchanges providing a 1:1 ratio. The banner you decide to use is very important, as many internet users ignore most banners they see. Your banner needs to be catchy and needs to compel the user to take action and click it right away, but at the same time you do not want it to be too flashy as to turn off potential customers. Most banner exchange programs also have an option to purchase banner impressions at very low prices, usually a few dollars for thousands of impressions. This is a great way to put your business in front of many customers, and helps to increase your “brand awareness”. Click4click.com and ThebannerExchange.net are some free banner exchanges that can provide your site immediate advertising and traffic.

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If there is one bit of advice I can ever give you, whether it be about marketing or business success in general, it is a quote from Russell Crowe in Gladiator: “On my mark, unleash hell.” Yes, you might have heard one or two other marketers quoting this very same line. And with good reason. That one line epitomizes the very core of what all marketing programs teach you. Here’s a break down:

Find your target - Pick a market that is favorable for approach. It doesn’t have to be the perfect idea, just one that works on paper, and most importantly, something that you know you can do while maintaining interest.

Prepare your approach- Mark out the main spots – what sort of advertising mediums can you use? What is your budget? What is your exact strategy for each medium? No need to go into excruciating details, but you should know, for example, your allocated monthly budget for your PPC campaign, your target keywords and the expected cost-per-click for each keyword. This will at the very least help you monitor your advertising and tune it based on the  results.

Intense marketing- There are two different approaches in this regard. Use the first one if you can afford to spend a lot of money on traffic, use the second if most of your advertising budget will be paid for by your business even at the start.

- All-out marketing, pulling out all the stops at once, complete blanketing of your target market – Slow build-up, tackling different advertising mediums one by one, building to crescendo effect where at the end, you replicate the effect in the ‘all-out marketing’ technique.

Taken by itself, the term ‘unleash hell’ is also used to describe another valuable business lesson:

If you have a product, or a business idea, or a service to sell, GET IT OUT THERE! Take your business to the market first, worry about refining and
managing later.

Essentially, don’t wait months to find the perfect idea. Pick an idea that’s good enough, and launch your business. If you are a resume writer and want to sell your services online, throw up a website, put up your basic contact and payment information and BEGIN PROMOTION.

Too often people wait too long until they have the ‘finished’ product before starting their marketing campaigns. A newcomer shouldn’t waste their time like that. The product will be developed along the way through customer interaction anyway. On the other hand, there is no way you’ll make any money without traffic.  So go get that traffic, and ‘perfection’ will come in due time.

Today’s resources – One of my favorite tools is a point and click dashboard that walks you thru each and every step for promotion and it is done Marlon Sanders. The Promo Dashboard is a fun tool to use and you simply follow his point and click formula to drive tons of traffic to your site.

If you are looking for a simple guide to over 70 promotion methods than I don’t hesitate to bring up Ross Goldberg’s ebook The Traffic Manifesto.

If you have yet to start writing your own info product then this is without a doubt one of the easiest ways to get started. Jimmy D Browns Short Reports Fortunes. I wished I had this when I was starting out in the info product business. It’s fast and super easy to understand and you have can have an info product ready to go in just a couple days.

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There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how the big hit sites drive traffic to their sites? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmicks. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

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The easy days of AdWords are over. But you would not guess that from reading most of the launches, sales letters and make-money-online pitches on the Internet.

Yes, there are lots of people volunteering to teach you AdWords but most of them are still pretending it’s 2006. If you do what they teach:

-You’ll promote some affiliate program that they are somehow tied into, which means they’ll always make at least some pocket change even if you lose thousands of dollars

-You’ll do things that p*** off Google and might even get you banned

-You throw good money after bad in a frenzy of constant changes and attempted fixes, ultimately throwing up your hands in total exasperation

-They teach you a whole set of bad habits that’s sort of like Internet Bulimia. A vicious, addictive cycle that some never escape from

AdWords started in 2002 and back then, nobody understood it. The way you succeeded back then was, you threw a whole bunch of mud against the wall, AND you split-tested a whole bunch of things (it’s not like it was a total crap shoot, even then!) and some of it stuck.

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It’s all under your control. If you sell information products and want to make more money with them, there’s good news. It’s all under your control. That’s right, you can make more money with your information products simply by doing something that you have the power to do.

It’s not dependent upon anyone else. It’s up to you.

Let me explain …While there are a lot of different aspects of selling information products, there are really only two ways to make more money with them …

Sell More
Refund Less

Really, it’s pretty much that simple.

In order to make more money with information products you need to either SELL MORE or REFUND LESS.

Or, better still, do BOTH. Now, in the many years I’ve been selling information products, I’ve found there are three powerful tools that will help you do just that.

You can use these three tools to SELL MORE by using them on your classified ads, solo mailings, sales letters, autoresponder messages and virtually any sales tool.

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