Driving traffic to your web site is your number one goal when starting out. No matter how great your web design is, how awesome your content is, or how fabulous you are, your web site is worthless if nobody visits it.

Of course, you don't want thousands of people flooding your website and never buying. But look at the alternative: Zero visitors and zero purchases. Which would you rather have?

If you create compelling content (i.e., a reason for people to read your posts), you will find buyers who keep coming back.

So how do you get people to come to your site?

There are 2 main ways to drive traffic to your site. One way is to pay for it with cold, hard cash. Cash that you probably don't have because you're just starting out. We'll explore paid traffic in a future post. But it's really for experienced marketers who have some money to invest and time to spend learning how to do it properly.

The second way to attract traffic is the free route. It's really not free, however. You're just spending time (which you have more of) instead of money (which you don't have).

However, there are some free methods for driving traffic to your site that give you a really good bang for your time buck.

One thing you should embed in your head is this: EVERY time a visitor visits your site, it's from a referral.

Think about that for a minute. Let it settle in. Visitors don't randomly type in your URL. They see it somewhere. It could be from:

• Google, Yahoo, or Bing (or another search engine).
• Another website. The author may like your site or a particular post and linked back to your site. He may have linked to your site in a post or he may have liked your site so much that he put you on his blogroll.
• You may have made a comment on another site and the reader of that site wanted to know more about you or your site.
• A visitor may have found you in a Directory. There are directories all over the web, from places like Yahoo, Google, and other search engines to site directories to niche directories.
• The visitor may have found your site through a forum. Perhaps you made a good post or answered a question and the visitor wanted to get more familiar with you.
• Perhaps your visitor found you on twitter, Facebook, or some other social media site.
• Article directories. Did you know you could post articles on ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, and Searchwarp.com with links back to your site? These directories get loads of traffic and it's not too difficult to get these pages indexed and ranked on the search engines. Plus, depending upon the rights you give, other website authors may post your article on their sites with links back to your site (they have to attribute the content to you or else they're guilty of violation of the TOS of the article directories as well as plagiarism).
• If you participate in blog carnivals, you can attract visitors to your site if you post compelling content.
• If you run a blog, your RSS feed might be picked up by a feed directory and visitors may find you through this route.

There are many more ways to attract visitors with free methods like this. These are just a few of the big ones – these offer a huge bang for your time buck.

Just note that all of these backlinks do not happen by accident. You can strategically place backlinks on other people's sites through various methods, such as by making forum posts, submitting comments on other blogs, creating your own blog that links back to your main site, or by submitting your articles to directories.

You can learn more about these methods by picking up a copy of Guaranteed Free Traffic System. This inexpensive report will give you the tools and knowledge you need to build a lot of targeted traffic to your website.

Of course, I will make specific posts in the future about various tactics and strategies that will build your web traffic.

I know that when I started this internet business, I had a difficult time deciding whether I should sell my own products or sell other people's products. Let me tell you – marketing for others is far easier and just as lucrative – if not more so – than creating your own products.

There are many advantages of affiliate marketing – here are some of the benefits.

• There is no need to create a product. You simply make mention of an existing product, place an affiliate link, and move to the next promotion. Remember your high school term papers? How much you procrastinated? How you abhorred them? It's the same with creating a product. Plus, people look to you as an expert, so you'd better deliver expert-quality content. No more "mailing it in."
• Speaking of mailing, there is nothing to ship. Every part of the sales transaction is handled by the product creator. You write your product review, a user clicks your link and he buys the product at the vendor's site. Everything from then on is taken care of by the vendor.
• You don't have to deal with customer support issues. The product creator handles all of this.
• There is no "inventory." Many products sold on the internet are digital in format, but even the physical products like books and CDs are shipped out of the vendor's inventory. There is no need for you to store anything at all.
• You don't have to assemble a sales force – YOU are the sales force. In order to be successful, an internet marketer who's created a product needs to develop a sales team of eager affiliates (people like you). It's not easy. For one thing, there are tons of products to sell – why should an affiliate pick yours? In order to lure potential affiliate marketers, product vendors often have to offer very high commissions (50, 75, or even 100 percent!). You reap these rewards by simply pre-selling the product for the vendor, who then takes in 50, 25, or 0 percent of the sales price.
• You don't have to create any sales pages, set up elaborate sales funnels, or configure shopping carts or other sophisticated (and complicated) sales systems.

As you can see, there are many benefits of being an affiliate marketer. Of course, you need to get eager buyers to your site to click your affiliate link. Traffic building will be the subject of a future post.

<sigh>

If you saw this morning’s very early post, I made a big Oops, a mistake I cannot recover from. Why? I didn’t have a backup. The crummy thing? I used to be in tech support, telling people all the time to back up your stuff.

Well, I should have taken my own medicine. But I didn’t.

So, today is a new beginning! This time, I’ll put better content up, learning from my past experience, and perhaps this time, I’ll get it right!

Please stick with me while I re-build this site. I hope to bring you some really cool stuff. SOON.

By the way, I thought of doing this before the site went down, but now I’m convinced that this is the right thing to do:

• The slow way
• The less slow way

What do I mean by this? Follow along with me here and you’ll take the slow but steady way, learning little chunks here and there.

However, I’m working on a project that will speed up the learning curve quite quickly. It’s not overwhelming in terms of the things you’ll have to learn, but you’ll get all the knowledge and materials you’ll need to build an online empire in one shot.

Of course, since this is a pretty big effort on my part, I cannot give it away, but you’ll be surprised by the value you get for the very low price you’ll pay.

Plus, it will save you a TON of time and you won’t have to learn things the hard way, like me and coountless others.

In fact, the project I’m working on is based on a very prominent internet marketer’s own personal business blueprint.

Come on back in a while for the launch.

• Free
• Rebrandable
• Offer an incentive for others to publish

This one, by ClickBank guru Harvey Segal, is the epitome of a viral report.

Under the guise of "How to Sell Anything Online" (and it does deliver on that front, by the way), Harvey lays out the perfect example of how to create a viral report that people want and will distribute freely.

It also offers an awesomely-clever twist at the end to entice folks to "sell" the free ebook. Take a look – it's a great illustration of how to create a report or book that is viral in nature but that also offers relevant and actionable information for everyday internet users. The Ultimate Super Tip by Harvey Segal

But the thing I like most about Gabor is his guidance. Take this for example, from How I Kicked Ewen’s And DJK Chris’s “Ass”

Take action. Develop a habit of taking action as soon as you realize what action you need to take. If you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, don’t stop doing the parts you can do now. Even a poorly formed plan of action that’s acted upon is better than a perfect plan that sits there, unused. Do not allow ANYTHING to stop you. If you can’t do something right now skip that step or try to replace it with something similar that you CAN do. DO what you can! Start selling something right now. How many order buttons do you have on the internet right now? The more order buttons you have the more money you will make. Just DO what you can and skip (or replace with something) what you can’t…for now.

See how much sense this makes? More here.