Basically there are two ways you can get traffic to a website today.

1. Paid Traffic

2. Free Traffic

Paid traffic is good for people who have a monthly budget and can afford to purchase it. The most popular way to get traffic on the Internet today when purchasing it is doing a Google Adwords pay per click campaign. YaHoo marketing also offers an excellent pay per click program.

Purchasing ads on high traffic websites and blogs, banner advertising, ezine advertising, traffic exchanges, and so on are some other forms of paid traffic. Other than having a good ad tracking system in place so you can see where your visitors are coming from, there really is no secret to purchasing this type of traffic.

Many Internet marketers choose to do free or nearly free methods of getting Internet traffic. Even when you are not working at it this works well for long term traffic generation as you can do the things to constantly get traffic. That is one disadvantage paid Internet traffic lacks is that the minute you stop purchasing it the traffic stops.

The key to mastering free traffic generation techniques is to specialize in one and learn it inside out before taking on another one. For example let's look at becoming good at article marketing. You will need to learn how to properly write articles, how to implement search engine optimization into your articles, and how to submit those to the right directory so you get the maximum results.

In reality the real secret to Internet traffic is to become an expert at one form of it and learn it inside out. Internet marketers must learn the best ways to do the advertising method even if they choose to do paid advertising. Otherwise you can spend a lot of money and ultimately end up going broke.

However, if you become an expert at one form of getting Internet traffic it can really pay off for you in terms of visitors and sales. And that is really why you are in business anyway to increase the number of visitors and sales you get in a consistent basis.