Some people sell products from other website owners while others sell products and services that they offer. Regardless of what your online business model is, lots of traffic is what you need for your websites. You don’t just want any traffic - what you want is targeted and buying visitors.

In the early days of my internet marketing career, I learned about many techniques on traffic generation. Many of the programs and services that I have purchased did not have a lot of effect on my website traffic.

The traffic tactics that I have proven to work well are listed below:

• Text Link Ads

Text links can either be paid or free. The paid methods are paying for your link to be shown in Ezines, newsletters or on other peoples’ sites. The best suggestion that I can give you is to research the Ezines, newsletters and or other people sites that you want to link with before buying. Make sure the traffic and ezine subscriber base is good enough for you.

One of the unpaid models is through article marketing . If you keep doing this, it will definitely make a good impact in your business. Keep in mind, your articles should be relevant and address the subject matter of your site and products.

• Pay-Per-Click

If you have the money to invest in your advertising, advertise through pay per click. Here you create an ad or ads relevant to your affiliate program, and place a bid on the keywords you select. This takes time, energy, persistence and money  and research unless you know the google secret loophole by now. Make sure you understand the rules of the search engine where you want to do PPC before you start your campaigns.

• Search Engine Optimization

This involves targeting a particular keyword and optimizing your website for that particular keyword. Although you get free traffic with SEO, optimizing your website can be time consuming.

These are some of the effective ways to get traffic to your website.

Article marketing can be seen as a form of offline and online marketing using written articles. The print media offers businesses a platform for reaching its millions or thousands of readers. The service can be free or paid but the content must be written according to stricked guidelines.

Newspaper and magazine articles are usually written by experts. These experts are well versed in certain topics, ranging from sports to financial matters. If you browse through your local newspaper, you will find specific sections in the newspaper allocated for various articles. Weekly issues may have topics on relationships and youth activities.

A well known newspaper will do everything to cater for diverse readers. Print articles come with credits, references, acknowledgements, and contact details at the end. This is very important if you want any readers to know your business. An article is meant to be informative as well as being an advertising tool. Either way, even if you are a non-profit making organisation, you will want people to know about your community service or charity work, so that they can donate money to the cause.

The growth of the internet has seen offline article marketing being applied online. Online article advertising is more advanced and open to any good writer. Yes indeed, there are millions of websites and blogs which need fresh content on a daily basis. This is an opportunity to thousands of writers who would not qualify writing for a popular newspaper or magazine. As with offline marketing, online articles must have references and contact details. These details are in the form of personal website links, referral links and e-mail addresses.

Online article marketing uses the article directory as the medium of outreach. First of all, the article must be written and posted on a website. It can be a personal website, community blog or affiliate website. Many web masters need content so badly. Written content is like gold and indeed the opium of many a website. Secondly, the content must be written in a way which improves the search engine ranking of the website. Thirdly, if the content is not written in a way which improves the search engine ranking, then it must be valuable and captivating to its audience. Readers will keep coming back for more, and inviting their friends in the process. After satisfying all these requirements, you must then submit your website for directory listing. After a couple of months, 2 or more, you should expect to see your website ranking in the search engines.

Search engine optimization is one great method for online article marketing. An article which is search engine optimized will find its way in the top most searched articles. This means that thousands or millions of web surfers will come across your article online. On the other hand, if your article is not search engine optimized, none or very few searchers will come across your article. Search engine optimization is both easy and hard. You may plug some great keywords at the right places in your article you wrote, but you will have to wait for months to see results. Some patience is needed here. Even more so, Google and Yahoo are constantly changing the rules for search engine ranking. Some of these changes are necessary because there are always one or more web masters who try to abuse the system.

There in no doubt that online article marketing is cheaper than newspaper advertising. The good thing about internet is that it has broken the rules for competition. An internet whiz kid can now easily compete on a level field with any big corporation. You no longer need thousands of dollars to implement your marketing plan. There is a lot of successful websites which grew up from nothing more but content. Some of these websites are making thousands and millions of dollars each year. Participating in forums and blogs increases your backlinks to other sites. Backlinking to your website or blog can be free or paid. Web masters with no time for forum participation will buy backlinks at a low cost.

Online article marketing with good content will bear fruit. Unfortunately there are webmasters and affiliates who post bad quality articles on the internet. The large search engines like Google and Yahoo have introduced rules that reward high quality articles and penalize poor quality articles. The aim is to reduce or eliminate junk from search engines. Right in the very beginning, it was believed by many that using the right keywords in your article will increase traffic to your website or blog. Webmasters started abusing the system, and Google smelled the rot easily and quickly. Google has a new rule where it penelizes keyword spamming. The density of keywords required for an article was set at 15%. This is roughly one or two keywords per paragraph.

Online article marketing has spawned many platforms for writing articles. Besides community forums and networks which rely on user generated content, there is a number of websites which offer web pages or mini websites to members. Sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages allow members to create a web page on their platform. All the web pages are hosted by the parent site owners. If you are looking to create a good website but you have no money for hosting or designing a new website, then this is an opportunity for you. Squidoo and Hub Pages allow content in the form of text, photos, polaroid, videos, html, payment gateways and many other cool widgets. There are many websites online which will allow you to create a free website or web page in exchange for quality content. Content attracts many visitors. Visitors and advertisers generate revenue for website and blog owners.

I actually feel kind of silly at times using free ads forum sites. They seem a little ridiculous. But the fact is, I have discovered that they really do bring in regular traffic and sometimes sales and clicks as well.

Some of these post free ads sites get huge amounts of traffic, so if you make it a habit to post ads on a regular basis, your ads will get seen and you just might be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Other than writing killer ad copy, there are no big secrets to making it work, but here are a few little tricks I use to maxmize my results:

First of all, if the forum allows it, I always make a “mega-thread.” What I mean is that a make a thread with my ad in it, and then I keep coming back and replying with the same or similar ad to that same thread. This bumps it to the top of the forum. Not only that, it accumulates the most views and has the most replies as compared to the single ad threads, thus making it look really popular.

Another thing I do is always give my own threads a five-star rating which provides instant credibility.

And lastly, I also reply to popular threads that others have posted using my own ads and gaining even more exposure.

I find that the only thing that it takes to be successful when posting to free advertising forums, is to come up with good ad copy and the just keep attacking the forums, posting my ads again and again whenever time permits. Another cool thing is that there is forum posting software on the market that automates the whole process. Otherwise it can be a little on the tedious side. However, if you don’t want to use software to post ads, you can used tabs in your browser and keeps a bunch of tabs open with all of your forums.

On top of posting ads at the forums, I also post to some the free classifieds sites as well. Like the forums, some of these classfied ads sites also have huge traffic. They might as well be checking out what you have to offer.

There is another thing to also consider. The backlinks from these classified sites and forums do count, at least a lttle bit anyway, when it comes to SEO. Of course these are not like links from the home page of some big authority site, but still, they do count as far the search engines go. The more popular ones are always getting spidered by the search engines. So using anchors with good keywords for your links can’t hurt a bit.

One final thought I have: I haven’t tried this yet myself, but one were to get a profitable system down with the free advertising sites, it would then be possible to outsource the ad posting and really crank up the heat. There’s no shortage of low-cost virtual assistants and freelancers eager to this type of thing. Well it’s something to consider anyway.