The whole purpose of a website is to get visitors. You can equate a website with a store in a shopping mall. No matter what you are offering: vitamins, ebooks, software, information or just advice, without anybody walking into your store, you might as well close shop. The mall is your environment, as the World Wide Web is the environment of your website. You have to advertise your offline store as you must your online website, and traffic is your life blood, as shoppers are to an offline store.

If you are not receiving website traffic, your online business will not succeed, as the shoe store without customers would have to close down. So how do you go about getting the traffic, that is the life blood of your online business? We will look at four different ways of obtaining the traffic that you need to your website.

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

We don't have the time or space to go over all the techniques that you are probably use to hearing about. So let's have a look at a couple of ways that are not talked about much but are very productive traffic generation techniques.

Search Engines

There is a difference between Search Engines and SEO, with SEO you will have to do a lot of reading, in order to get the process right. But you can use search engines, in order to get visitors to your website.

One is by the use of Smart Pages. These are pages on your website that the search engines spiders can find, but that your visitors never see. They are legal, but very borderline, and the way they work is that you generate dozens and more of web pages based on long tail keywords that have been used by people seeking the information on your website. You would normally use Smart page software to do this, and each page will be unique, without duplication.

When somebody using the search engine uses one of these long-tail keywords, the search engine is likely to have indexed your page using that keyword, and the visitor will be directed to it, right? Wrong! The visitor is directed to the landing page that the software directs it to. You can generate hundreds, or even thousands, of Smart Pages on your website, each based on a little used keyphrase, but when it is, the visitor gets to the page on your site that you have programmed it to: it could be your home page or it might be a squeeze page or a sales page.

That is just one of many techniques that can be used to direct search engine users to your website when they are seeking information with which you can provide them.

Online Advertising

When advertising online there are a few option that a person can take advantage of. If you have a Facebook page, you can get free links from it. You can also get free links from your post that you put on Twitter. In my opinion the best priced pay-per-click option that you have is to go with Searchfeed. Searchfeed charges 1 cent for pay-per-click advertising, and that is a great deal compared to Adwords.

Advertising Offline

This is where most people slip up. They ignore the power of the classified ads in their local press, a postcard in a local shop window or a poster in their local health center or sports club. All of these can get you some pretty useful traffic if your niche suits it. What about local radio: it can be very inexpensive to have a quick advert for your product and website URL read out. It's the name that counts, so make it memorable, and, allied with the technique below, you could find people talking about it on the streets.

Buzz Advertising

Buzz advertising is a good way to promote your products. Get talking about your products and the benefits that they can bring, get your family and friends to do the same get the word out. Wherever you go drop a couple of your business cards, at the doctors office, the car repair place, pin a couple up at your local grocery store. The more your advertising is placed in front of people the more likely they are going to respond to it.

Website traffic is very important to your online business, and it is the lifeblood of your business. You will have to find and use the techniques that are best suited to you. Why don't you go out on a limb and try some of the methods that are mentioned above.

The importance of traffic cannot be overemphasized, and traffic generation techniques are of extreme importance to the future of your online business. Why? Because without visitors you might as well have no website at all.