If you have a website, then its lifeblood is traffic. If you are selling your own product, you need more website traffic to turn a percentage of visitors into buyers. If you are selling someone else's product as an affiliate, you need to constantly increase website traffic to offset dwindling conversions as the product cools off. And if you have created a high quality content site in order to display Adsense, Chitika or other context sensitive advertising units, then the more website traffic, the more clicks on your ads.

Here are five surefire tips to increase your website traffic:

1. Writing articles is a win-win-win situation. The ezine editor gets content, the reader gets valuable information and you get backlinks. And it's not hard, just tedious. Go through everything you've written down as part of creating your website and, if applicable, producing your product. This is your area of expertise and others will benefit from it. And it's original. Highlight separate topics and bring like topics together. Associate relevant keywords with each topic. Pick a keyword and write a headline based on it. Use three to five relevant topics as your content. Finish off with a resource box like mine at the end of this article. Rinse and repeat until you've got several articles. To get more website traffic, submit them to the high Google PR, low Alexa Rank article directories listed at: http://www.trafficfloodgate.com/articles/bestdirectories.html

2. Create an account at http://www.trailfire.com. Find four other sites, blogs or articles on the same or a similar topic as yours, but who are not direct competitors, and link them and your site together in a "trail." Include your best keywords in each review. Google loves these "fire trails" and with luck will rank yours highly for your chosen keywords.

3. An oldie but still a goodie. Create several unique (very important - you will get deleted if they are the same or even too similar - you might even need to create separate accounts) advertisements at http://www.craigslist.org across different regions in the Small Business category, using your best keyword as the anchor text linking back to your site. Craigslist has a Google Page Rank of a whopping 8!

4. Every time you create a website, you should add a Wordpress blog to it. If you're using cPanel, it's a very simple process. Click on Fantastico, then select Wordpress blog, new installation and follow the simple process through. Do a Google search on Wordpress theme (free if you like) pick one that appeals and follow the instructions to change the theme. If you don't, your blog will look like a million others. And what to post to your blog? Why, the articles you wrote in Tip 1. Try to post one a week, and watch your traffic go up.

5. Include a keyword based anchor text link back to your website in every blog entry plus keyword tags. Tempt your blog visitors with a free e-book or other valuable information. Make sure that http://www.technorati.com/ is included in your blog's ping list. (Click on Options:Writing:Update Services to maintain your Ping List.) Then when you post, the Technorati spider will list your blog post on their huge PR8 site under each of your tags.

Future articles will expand on each of the topics covered in this article as well as introduce new ones, all with the single purpose of getting more website traffic for you.