Now that you have your product ready and your website set up, it
gets more exciting because it is time to promote your website.
In other words, it is time for traffic generation. There are
literally tons of ways to drive traffic to your website. But
broadly, they can be divided into two main kinds of traffic
generation. You can either pay for it or get it free.

There are pros and cons to both ways. Obviously, the paid
traffic generation methods cost money but on the positive side,
they get you fast and often targeted results. On the other hand,
the free traffic generation methods do not cost money but on the
negative side, they are generally slower and may not produce much
targeted traffic.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to traffic generation.
Every method works to some extent, so you need to choose which
ones suit you the best. But generally, traffic generation is a
numbers game. This means the more you do it, the better results
you get in the long run.

If you can afford it, it’s better to start promoting your website
with paid traffic methods. This includes Google Adwords, Yahoo
Search and Bing Adcenter. These three major search engines work
roughly the same way. You design your advertisement according to
the search engine’s specifications and specify certain parameters
like the countries you want to advertise in and the dollar limit
on advertising you want to spend in one day. Generally, you are
billed for the number of clicks on your advertisement. Each
click brings the searcher to your website where they are
presented with your product. Some will buy and then you profit.

As you can tell, there is a danger of losing a lot of money in
these paid advertising methods when lots of people click but no
one buys. To reduce the possibility of this happening, there are
two things to do. Firstly, put your long tail keywords into your
advertisement. This ensures targeted visitors going to your
website. A targeted visitor is one who has been looking for a
solution to his problem that your product gives. Such a visitor
to your website is much more likely to buy your product than a
less targeted visitor.

Secondly, avoid advertising in certain countries known to have
lots of browsers but not many buyers. Two of such countries are
India and the Philippines. Chances are, you will get lots of
clicks from these countries but few sales.

Besides text ads, you can also make image ads on the paid
advertising networks of the search engines. Image advertisements
consist of banners of certain sizes specified by the search
engines. Image ads are not as popular as text ads so that makes
it generally cheaper. But they work fine and are certainly worth
a try.

The reason it is better to go for paid traffic generation methods
first is because with paid advertising, you can get quick
results. You also can determine which keywords produce good ROI.
Once you have carried out paid advertising for a few weeks, you
can switch to free advertising using the same keywords that have
produced good results for you.

Free traffic generation methods will be the topic for the next
article.