Many wealth building practitioners are turning to online businesses as a possible stream of extra income with the potential for hitting the jackpot if the right product or service can be delivered online. The Internet has leveled the playing field in many respects as the cost of starting a business has been significantly reduced. However, choosing a product or service, and launching a website is just the first step in the long journey to profitability and riches. The lifeblood of an online business is traffic. Online traffic of interested, targeted audience that is seeking the solution that your product or service provides is absolutely critical to the very survival of your online venture. And finding a way to increase website traffic and website positioning vis-à-vis your competition is the best way to raise your business revenue and profitability.

Before you spend your energy trying to increase traffic to your website, you must ensure that you:

• Have a product or service that your target audience wants
• Know your target audience - their likes and dislikes, websites they frequently visit, how much disposable income they have and so forth
• Have a well-crafted website that allows your visitors to quickly know what you are all about, and how they can learn more about your solution, and how can they buy your solution.

If your website is not ready, or ultimately, you don't have a solution that your audience wants, any increase in traffic will not yield the fruit that you desire. As the saying goes "The sooner they find out about you, the sooner you will be out of business!".

But assuming you have all that covered, an increase in traffic will often result in a direct, proportional increase in revenue. Let us walk through the major, free traffic generating engines for your website.

• Natural Search Engines - Search Engines are your best friends online - Google, Yahoo!, MSN being the big three in that space, but AOL and some smaller engines will also generate reasonable traffic to your site. The steps to success with Natural Search Engines is to:
  • Register yourself with online directories, at least three. Websites such as qango.com, dmoz.org and Yahoo! are examples of such directories. Google, for example, will not begin spidering your site unless it finds at least three in-bound links to your site. These directories will provide those links for you.
  • Allow for multiple ways to navigate your site - through an Article Index, through reference links at the bottom of articles, through creation of departments and so on. No part of your website should be more than three levels deep - most spiders (and human users) will lose interest by then.
  • Content is king - Add content regularly to your site. Regular updates (3-7 articles/week) will keep the spiders coming back and let the search engines know that it is an active site, and you will be rewarded with superior website positioning in search engine results.
  • Keywords - Ensure that your articles are keyword rich, with links pointing to some highly relevant sites from your keywords. Do not overdo this - make it just right for your reader, while ensuring that the links from the articles, the article headline and overall flow will convey to the reader and the spider what the intent of your article is. Even as spider technology becomes better, it will simulate the human reader even better. So keep your reader at the center of your focus at all times, with just the slightest nod to the robotic spider.
  • To get ideas for content, look at your referrals log. This will give you an excellent idea as to the exact search phrases that your audience is using and finding your site for. This will allow you to further fine tune your content and website.

  Even as your content grows, the search engines will reward you with an increasing amount of traffic. Within about one year of such efforts, you will begin seeing traffic in the range of 500-2000/day.

• Links from other websites - At the early age of the web, referrals from other websites were a rich source of qualified traffic. Today, this has decreased in importance unless you are being linked to from a high-traffic site. Having said that, having many websites that link to content on your site cumulatively provides a very steady stream of traffic.

  You can follow the old-school route of linking to other websites and requesting links back from them. It is a slow methodology, but eventually, as your content builds up, you will find success. Alternatively, you can simply focus on content building, and allow links to build up organically. This is an even slower process, but you will avoid the effort required in sending requests and adding links. Another way of getting links is to use free press releases or submitting articles to free-article databases.

• Submitting Articles to Free Article Databases - Today, there are a large number of e-zine article websites that host content for free use and distribution by e-zine writers and other website publishers. The advantage of submitting articles to these sites is that you get a link back to your own website, and these e-zine article websites tend to have excellent search engine position. You will see some traffic coming from these websites - and occasionally, you will get a reprint request from a publisher, which can also lead to some additional traffic. This is not a high-return venture, but since you will be creating plenty of content, it is a good way to spread the word about your site by submitting a few articles to these free article databases.
• Blogs - If you have a content-rich website, you don't really need a blog. If however, your site is very product centric with insufficient rich content, then blogs are a great way of doing everything discussed above, and then rerouting traffic from your blog to your product site. Even with a content-rich site, it may be useful to blog - since the blog-world has its own directories and networking - it will be profitable to tap into that.
• Discussion Forums - Message boards and discussion forums are places where you can link to your site either through your signature or links placed within your messages. This is however a labor-intensive process. Message boards have become far too common, and you have to target some targeted niche boards to have an impact. Also, you have to earn your trust on the boards, and that is a long process as well. If you already have such a position on a web-board, you might be able to use it to your advantage - otherwise, you should undertake this route after careful consideration of all other methods for generating free traffic.
• E-Mail List - If you maintain your own opt-in e-mail list to which you mail regularly, you can place links back to your site - to articles, or other promotions that are valuable and enticing - and it will bring regular return traffic to your site. Building an e-mail list has many advantages, and getting some free traffic is only one of them. However, note that most online users are getting tired of e-mails, and do not have even a moment to spend on anything that is not adding value. E-mail lists are valuable, but use them sparingly and treat them as precious items - it is indeed a privilege to be able to contact your audience.
• Speaker's forum - If you are a speaker by trade or host other events as a professional, those are good venues to mention your online site. For example, if you host a radio show, it might be a great idea to mention your site for some useful information several times in your show. You will see a direct spike in traffic. Similarly, if you write a newspaper column or host a TV show, those are great occasions to mention your website. Alternatively, if you become a guest on a show in any of these mediums, you can bring up the name your website in a useful way for the benefit of the audience.
• RSS and other medium - New technologies are constantly showing up - such as RSS that allows a visitor to your site to be alerted if something of their interest shows up or changes. Supporting these technologies are simple ways to bring repeat traffic to your site.
• Product - With each product that you sell, you can place reminders about your website, or specials that the visitor (and now customer) may have missed the first time around. In fact, since the visitor actually purchased something from you, they are more likely to buy more from you since the gap in credibility has been bridged (assuming of course that you delivered on quality the first time around). Thus, putting in more material along with the product shipment is a good way to bring them back to your website.
• Word of Mouth - Word of mouth is an excellent way for your website to be promoted. However, the only way for you to accomplish this is by providing an excellent product and backing it up with superior service. This is the best way to ensure that people will be talking about your service and sharing your website address. This also gives you your best chance of getting mentioned in a newspaper or magazine article.

By working hard at each of the above avenues for free traffic, you will soon be rewarded with as much qualified traffic as you need to make your business into a success. Best of lucks!