Getting traffic to your website using traffic generation techniques, is one of the most important aspects of your online business. If you don’t receive visitors to your website, your online business will not survive.

Obtaining traffic is one of the main reasons for having a website. Let’s compare your website to a shoe store. In your shoe store you sell tennis shoes, loafers, pumps, flip flops and golf shoes. If no one comes into your store to purchase your array of products, your business will soon go down the tubes. Whatever medium you choose to use, you must advertise your business. Just as with your website, you must have visitors in order to thrive.

If the shoe stores does not have customers comming into the place of business, it will soon shut down, as with your online business if your are not receiving the website traffic that you need. You might be wondering how to go about getting this much needed traffic to your website. We will discuss four different ways of obtaining those visitors.

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

There isn’t enough room here to discuss all of these, and you will likely be familiar with many of the more conventional traffic generation techniques, so let’s have a look at one or two of the less well known methods within each of these categories that can be used to attract website traffic to your site.

Search Engines

SEO and search engines are not the same thing. There is a lot of studying and reading in order to use SEO on your website. But with search engine you can benifit while receiving traffic your website, with less aggravation.

One is by the use of Smart Pages. These are pages on your website that the search engines spiders can find, but that your visitors never see. They are legal, but very borderline, and the way they work is that you generate dozens and more of web pages based on long tail keywords that have been used by people seeking the information on your website. You would normally use Smart page software to do this, and each page will be unique, without duplication.

The way that the smart pages work is when a person is searching for a certain keyword phrase, using any one of the many search engines. Your web page has usually already been indexed for that certain keyword. So wouldn’t you think that the person would be directed to your indexed web page. That not so. They would be directed to the page that the software has been programmed to send them to. A person can set up as many of these smart pages as they deem neccesary, and the visitor that does the search will be sent to the page that the software is set to send them to.

You can used this as one of the many techniques, to get the search engines to direct traffic to a certain page where you have information regarding a certain topic.

Advertising Online

There are many online advertising techniques that people use, including using blogs to advertise their URL and article marketing for the same purpose. Web2 sites have been used, but they are not very productive, but there are other options. You can get free links from your own Facebook page: for every website or blog you possess, and what about Twitter? You can advertise your website on your twitter posts. You can also use PPC, but not Adwords that can be expensive. Searchfeed offers good pay-per-click ads for 1 cent. If you use searchfeed, you can get by spending $25 a day, which equates to 2500 visitors to your website every day - for $25!

Advertising Offline

A lot of people forget about the power of classifed advertising. Putting a small ad in your local newspaper has a lot of power. Sending postcards through the mail, advertsing your website has also been proven to be quite productive. Having flyers made up from your local print shop, and distributing them to certain areas around town is also a great way to use the power of offline advertising. These avenues are sometimes forgotten by people trying to get the word out, when promoting their products.

Buss Advertising

Many people are scared to try buzz advertising, but it can work if you have a good idea on your website. Audio postcards were a good idea that never took off - buzz advertising could have made them more successful. Get talking about your product, and get your friends and relatives to do the same. Leave business cards with your website lying around, and get posters going about it. The more work you put into buzz advertising, the more effective it becomes.

Website traffic is very important to your online business, and it is the lifeblood of your business. You will have to find and use the techniques that are best suited to you. Why don’t you go out on a limb and try some of the methods that are mentioned above.

Visitors to your website is of the utmost importance and the traffic generation techniques that you choose, means that your business lives or dies. Without traffic your online success will be very limited.