Build it and they will come. This holds true only for malls and brick and mortar businesses but not in the virtual realm of e-commerce unless you are giving away software programs and utilities for free. For your website to generate income through affiliate commissions or other online marketing techniques, it is necessary that you drive targeted traffic, visitors to your website. The more visitors you direct towards your website, the more chances you have to generate sales.

Driving targeted traffic to your website can be accomplished in several ways, in less than one week.

Here are some highly proven and effective methods to drive targeted traffic to your site:

1. Article Marketing and Submission. To generate free and targeted traffic to your website, you can write articles related to your affiliate products and services and embed a link to your website in the article's resource box and then submit your article for publication to the various article directories on the Internet. You can generate continuous and free, targeted traffic by writing new articles and publishing them every week. Doing this for a year, 52 weeks can drive sizeable free traffic to your website and generate sales.

2. Join Community Forums and Message Boards. You can also generate free traffic by joining community forums and message boards by posting messages by signing each message you post with a link to your site.

First, do a Yahoo! or Google search to find forums and message boards directly related to your affiliate products and join as many of them as you can.

Second, create your forum profile making certain that you include your website link in the signature option to enable other forum members to click and go to your website.

Thirdly, invest a few hours daily in navigating the different sections of the forums. Make your presence felt in the online community by asking relevant questions and posting informative and useful replies to other members questions or messages in order to build up your reputation. The more people believe and trust in you, the more likely they will click your link to check out what it is you have on offer at your website. They can also provide viral marketing for your website by word of mouth.

3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. Although PPC Advertising will cost you some money, it is one of the effective ways to generate targeted traffic in a short period. Two of the most popular and effective PPC advertising programs are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords. PPC advertising programs allow you to bid for top rankings on the keywords of your choice. When an Internet user enters a search word or phrase that matches your keyword in the PPC search engine and presses the search button, your contextual ad will appear on the sidebar of the search results page. Only if the visitor clicks on your contextual ad to visit your website, will you be charged base on the amount of your bid.

It is therefore possible to generate targeted traffic for your e-business with no cost or minimal investment in terms of real dollars but it does require perseverance, dedication and time.