You spend hours designing your site making sure everything is as perfect as you can get it and then reality strikes, the simple fact that it will all be a waste of time without one thing – website traffic! A website without traffic is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard or like building an advertising board and never showing it.

Once website owners realise that traffic is vital to their success they start spending money trying to buy hits, unfortunately not all hits are the same.

A lot of webmasters in their haste to get any visitors to their site forget that its a lot more important to get targeted traffic to the site than just general traffic, and believe me there’s a big difference between the two. Just getting any traffic is the same technique TV advertisers use. Ads are thrown at people that are unaffordable and on the whole they show products that people don’t need.

Seeing as general advertising is not targeted it relies on the hope that someone who is interested in that particular product may be watching at that precise moment. Spam, banner ads, “safe-lists” and similar website traffic techniques fall into this “general” category. “Targeted” traffic is made up of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say or sell online. These people either share the same interests or have an immediate need or problem they are trying to solve.

“Targeted” traffic is best because the people hitting your website have a much higher likelihood of actually making a purchase. Targeted traffic comes from people following recommended links on other sites, typing in relevant keywords into the search engines, or even reading articles you’ve written on a particular subject and then clicking over to your site for more information.

If you don’t already know where to find the best sources of targeted traffic for your website, you will need to experiment with lots of different sources to find the ones that bring visitors who give you the most “bang for your buck.”

The fastest way to determine which avenues provide the most targeted traffic is by using an “ad tracker”. wouldn’t it be great if you not only knew where your visitors were coming from but also how many there are, and more importantly what percentage are buying from you? the answer is simple, all you need is an ad tracker program. Though it sounds simple, most businesses don’t do this! Many businesses spend too much money on traffic generation without knowing whether it is cost effective, you need to know what percentage of visitors are buying so you can make a profit and not overspend on advertising.

Whether you pay for your website traffic with cash (pay-per-click search engines, ezine ads), or you pay for it with the sweat of your brow (article distribution, free search engines), you must identify your best and most profitable sources of targeted traffic that convert into buyers, subscribers, or leads.

If you don’t know where your traffic comes from and how much its costing you to get them, then it’s odds on your business is going to fail.