The longer you are online trying to make money the more apparent it will become to you that you need your own website or blog. Replcated websites is not the way to make more money.

Speaking of competition what is it we are competing for? Traffic, or as we think of it, visitors to your site. This is Internet marketing simplified. We put in the effort because weare trying to get more traffic. This is a very easy principle to understand. You might think of it as Internet Marketing 101, or Internet Marketing for dummies.

If I have more traffic than you my business will be larger than yours. My website can be horrible in content and design, and I will still make more sales, get more subscribers to my newsletter, get more referrals, get more repeat traffic, and so on if I have more traffic than you.

Since I started marketing on the internet in 2002 getting traffic is the most written about subject I have seen. Do you get the idea that getting website traffic is going to be hard to do.

If you have a large budget for advertising you are still not guaranteed internet marketing success. You can waste as much money as you gain from your online promotion efforts.

For this reason I have always tried to think long term when I promote online. I like to ask myself this question. "Is what I am doing today going to benefit me in the future?"

I have always tried to go for as much free or nearly free traffic as possible. I put my emphasis on getting links back to my site as many ways as possible. For me that has meant article marketing, social networking, forum marketing, blogging, and email marketing to my opt in list.

This is a bunch of work to do it this way. Getting traffic one backlink at a time is not the fastest way to do it. Pay per click advertising is the way to do that. Getting my website address on someone else's web page takes effort.

That is probably why search engines reward you so much for doing it. Anyone with money can buy their traffic. To earn it takes some skill and a lot of elbow grease so to speak. But for a long term solution to getting traffic you have to understand it will take effort and then buckle down and do it.

Hopefully this article will help you understand how hard getting traffic is going to be and how much work is in store for you. But the rewards are huge for those of you willing to do just that. A link pointing back to you is potential traffic for years and years. That is exciting!

Copyright (c) 2007 Jeff Schuman