Without traffic your website is a lame duck in the sea of the web.

Or perhaps an oil soaked pelican is more apt. It is not going anywhere and it does not feel good.

So the big question is WHERE do you get traffic?  Buy it? Wait?

Well. There are several avenues for you. First you must get your site indexed by search engines and have it set up in such a way that is search engine friendly. That means there is some back office stuff either you need to learn OR get someone to DO for you. The time and effort you put into search engine optimization can make the difference between being on page ONE of Google or being at the end of the world’s list. Most of my sites are ranking in the top ten of Google for their chosen terms.

Another back office step is to essentially announce to the world that you have made a post. That is accomplished by “pinging”.  There is a way to do that in the WordPress admin area, another back office task to set up.

Create ways for people to find you with links to social media. For a while I was earning a fair amount of money by posting for other people at a lot of different social sites.  Now there are many ways you can set this up and automate it. If you are totally lost, there are people who will either teach you how to do it or do it for low cost.  Send me an email and I will explain it in the newsletter tips that you can sign up for in the top right corner of this page. (hint)

Another source of interested traffic is through the wise use of  article marketing. See that article  I posted recently.

Going to forums or blogs that are related to your niche is sometimes time consuming but it is a great way to bring people to your site. Again, when I was getting started online I did a lot of posting for other people in their niches and it was easy for me to pick up $50 or more a day just with forum posting.  (Integrity check here – I only got $50/day on the days that I actually worked. This was and is a part-time endeavor.) Another advantage to forum posting is to begin to BRAND yourself as an authority in your niche. Make meaningful comments and worthwhile contributions to the discussion and people will begin to notice you and your site.  That is one step in Attraction Marketing.

Pay Per click or Pay per view are both paid vehicles to get traffic to your sites. I have never paid for traffic to my sites.  And I doubt if I shall need to in the foreseeable future. Hm. Did I spell that “for see able” right?

My best recommendation is to get indexed. Get backlinks to your site from other sites with authority.   That is fuel for another post specifically on link building.  For now, go see a case study I did on link building as a starting point.

Also look at the simplest things you do like sending email.  If you are not already using a sig file … or a signature file that announces or points to your site, you are missing a significant  connection. Then there are link wheels and traffic exchanges and more alternatives than most marketers imagine.

Do these methods work? Yes. One of my favorite sites is about birds and binoculars.  It has been on page one of Google for a long time for its chosen terms. What kind of traffic does that bring to that site? See this proof for June 2010.

Each of these things contributes to the whole. None of it operates in a vacuum. A mentor of mine pointed out the need for mini-networks in which ‘all roads lead to Rome’. And in this case, Rome is your income producing site.