Without traffic any site, blog or content you create is meaningless! Traffic is the lifeblood of every online business. All things being equal, the more visitors you send to your blog, sales page or offer, the more money you’ll make (duh!), so long as that traffic is targeted (if your traffic consists largely of young, single mums and your product is about dentures you’re not likely to make many sales!)

There are many ways to get traffic to your site and they basically boil down to one of three groups – you can buy traffic, borrow traffic, or build traffic. All three are viable and you need to know how each works:

Buying traffic could mean PPC (Pay Per Click) where you set up an advertising campaign and pay a small fee every time a visitor clicks on a link to visit your site. It could be that you place banner adverts on a site, or pay for sponsorship in an ezine or newsletter. It could even mean traditional offline advertising.

Borrowing traffic is a little less obvious but basically mean leveraging off of someone else’s success. By networking, and joint venturing with others who are more successful than yourself you will not only attract some of their traffic, but you’ll also learn a lot by partnering with them.

Finally, building your own traffic by creating killer content means you’ll never be short of visitors – or customers! Write good articles, develop good software, put together a great ebook. No matter what medium you choose, if you create great content of real value you’ll draw people to you. Become known as an authority in your chosen niche and you won’t have to go looking for visitors, they will come to you!

The best source of traffic…

Ideally you want to get traffic from all three of these. PPC is great because you can get instant traffic right now, and there’s nothing worse than building a site and sitting there waiting for people to visit - it’s worse than watching paint dry! Take the time to learn how to do it properly though, because it’s easy to spend money on PPC without seeing much of a return. Perry Marshall’s book is by the the best I’ve read on the subject.

Borrowing traffic is more of a long term technique - you need to build a reputation, and relationships with other bloggers, webmasters and list owners in order to set up JVs. The great news however, is that by creating high value content, you start to build that reputation while also building your own traffic.

Starting with a blog

That’s why I usually recommend that people start with a blog. Start writing every day, and as your blog and readership grows you start to build several assets…  Your blog becomes an asset in itself which attracts visitors, and can be monetised. The content you post to your blog also becomes an asset which can be repurposed, as articles, reports, audio products etc. Finally, if you use an autoresponder and place opt-in forms on your blog you build a third asset in your list.

So every time you write a post, every time you update your site, you’re building these assets up, you’re attracting more visitors, and you’re branding yourself as an authority in your niche.

With that in mind, I have a series of articles planned for the next week which will focus on blogging, and in particular using a blog to kickstart your online business. Be sure to check back and in the meantime you can get a headsup of what I’ll be discussing in my Business Blueprints report (Just fill in your name and email at the top of this page and I’ll send it your inbox!)