Newbie's Guide to Generating Traffic Online

Every internet maketer desires for one outcome to be realised, and that's to get traffic to their website which ultimately leads to a sale.

For a newbie, generating traffic online seems like mission impossible whereas for an old hat of a seasoned internet marketer, it's a walk in the park.

So what's a newbie got to do in order to transform from a new to an old hand. There's only one way and that's to simply walk down the well-trodden path that the veterans have taken and learn the proven strategies that have been used. And success will surely follow.

How should one go about generating traffic online then ?

The various methods available for an internet marketer can be broadly categorized under 2 headings; slow or quick. Both comes with pros and cons and we will discuss in detail later on.

One of the most common but effective means of driving traffic is to get your website ranked highly on the results page of a search engine. It is a slow method which takes time to implement and produce results. However, when applied successfully, is very effective and rewarding. While aiming to get your website ranked highly, you could choose to either target keywords which are not competitive in which case, results can be seen in days or perhaps a week or so,; or targeting competitive keywords that will mean a long wait of months to a year before your website will be ranked high within the results page for those keywords.

As for the quick mehods that are effective for generating traffic online, there are a variety that could be chosen from and they are listed below.

a) Classified advertising websites. These are websites where advertisements can be posted. Simply post an ad and include a link that will drive visitors back to your website. Craiglist and Usfreeads are popular sites which have a lot of visitors.

b) Press release. Distribute a press release about your website via submission services like PRweb

c) Article marketing Write short articles on topics which are related to your product on your website and publish it on article directories. Remember to include links of your website on the articles so that readers will be able to know where to go for more information. Popular sites are Article Alleys, Ezine Articles,etc.

d) Join forums which are related to your product and post links of your website.

e) Sign-up with social networking sites like facebook, myspace, friendster, twitter,etc and spread the word about your website to people that you network with.

Coming back to the pros and cons of the 2 methods. The quick methods requires continuous repetitive effort on the internet marketer's part but the results are manifested much faster. Whereas the slow method entails minimal effort to maintain the high ranking once that has been achieved. The choice depends a lot on the shelf life of the product that the internet marketer is selling. If it has a short shelf life, using the slow method might take too long by which time the product might become obselete. Having said that, it might be wise to combine both methods so that immediate results can be achieved while the ranking is getting improved. That however, will require a substantial amount of resources which is probably not within the reaches of most newbie internet marketers.

Incidentally, if the internet marketer has some funds available and is willing to invest, certain tasks can be outsourced or productivity tools in the form of software can be purchased to automate certain tasks like article submission, etc. This will free up the internet marketer's time and allow scaling up of the business operations. Personally, I have gone with some tools which was a one time payment as compared to outsourcing that will continue to incur repetitive costs.It was a choice that I've never regretted taking as it has catapulted traffic to my website to unimaginable heights.