The most important thing you must do in your online endeavors is get people to read what you write. You can have the absolute best product, most compelling content, or most valuable information available, but if you don’t have traffic, you won’t be successful.

Let me define “successful” for a moment. Success is your objective. It’s whatever you want it to be. It might be quitting your day job and running your own online business. It may be supplementing your income. Or it may be becoming famous.

Or it might just be getting 100 RSS subscribers. Or a 1000.

Whatever.

“Success” means whatever you want it to mean.

However, none of that will occur without getting people to your site. Of course, you could buy a bunch of traffic with Pay-Per-Click ads, but that traffic may not be well-targeted and it will most likely be short-lived.

One of the tried-and-true traffic-building tactics is to build your “backlinks.” A backlink is a link back to your site from another site. It’s a referral, so to speak. If somebody puts a link to one of your posts on her site, then she’s, in effect, endorsing it.

The search engines give a lot of weight to backlinks. Not only the number but the relevance. However, the number means a lot. In short, comparing two similar blogs side-by-side, we’ll see the blog with the higher number of backlinks rank higher in the search engines for a given search term.

So, you want to build your backlinks. But how? There are a few ways:

• Ask. Generally, if you propose to a webmaster a “link exchange,” most will comply. It’s tit-for-tat: You put up my link and I’ll put up yours. This tactic used to be very successful, but nowadays it seems to have a little less effect than a true one-way endorsement. By the way, this link exchange is also known as a reciprocal link.
• Comment. If you make a comment on a blog and you get the opportunity to fill in a “web site information” field in the comments form, do so! Comments are generally moderated by the web owner or administrator so the search engines view a posted comment as a (weak, but effective) endorsement by the site. Commenting on blogs is highly effective.
• Write articles for Article Directories like ezinearticles, goarticles, or SearchWarp. In these articles, you write compelling “useful but incomplete” (thanks, Jimmy Brown) information with a link to your web site or a specific web page (your subscribe page is ideal — you can build your email list this way). This serves as a valid backlink. Plus, since your article is syndicated, web publishers can re-publish your article in dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of places. This can directly drive a lot of traffic to your site, especially if your article is picked up by a big site.
• You can comment in forums, too. Just be careful. Forums became big SPAM sites, so many forum moderators will not only delete your posts if they consider them “too SPAMMY,” but they might also ban you from the forum! However, do some “lurking” in the forum you wish to post to beforehand to see what is acceptable. Read the Terms, too! Finally, ask questions and get involved before you make your “pitch.”
• Finally, there are “backlink building” tools and resources available that either automate some or all of the above (and more) or they give you sites where dropping a link back to your site is relatively easy.

Angela’s Easy Backlink Builder is a good example of the latter. Each month, her service provides you with 30 high Page Rank (a Google term) sites on which you can post your link back to your site (remember, link back to your subscribe page or to a page you want to get out there WITH a subscribe form on the page itself — you want to build your email list, too).

It can be difficult to process all 30 sites in one month.

Here’s a trick: Automate it (as much as possible) using a “form filler” like RoboForm or LastPass. Both of these utilities are known as password keepers, but they have excellent form-filling capabilities.

For example, typing in all the information to register at a site and then filling in your backlink information MANUALLY can take anywhere from 5-10 minutes. With RoboForm (the tool I use), it takes about 30 seconds. Angela sends each month’s backlinks in 4-6 packets. I do one packet at a time. In a few days, I can get the whole thing done.

Now, it’s a $5 a month service. First packet is free. The big question is, how many backlinks do you need?

I’d say 30 from a month’s worth of packets is a great start. Using the other methods listed above in conjunction with “backlink building,” you can get a ton of quality links back to your site in a couple of months. Your rankings in the search engines should rise pretty rapidly.

Build in quality, original content, and you’ve got a winning recipe for getting readers to your site. Next step, of course, is building relationships with your readers. How do you do that? That’s a topic for another story!

I’m going to share with you 10 traffic-building tips in each of 10 posts, for a total of a whopping 100 traffic-building tips in total. Does that sound good? Good. Here goes.

ARTICLE MARKETING

Adding articles to article directories is one of the best ways to build traffic and get your website spidered by the search engines. These two critical things will raise your site up the search engine rankings. Plus, by creatively using your resource box, you get a backlink back to your website.

1. Do your keyword research. You can get your site indexed for “long-tail” keywords very quickly by writing articles with juicy keywords that you want to get ranked for in search engines. I’ve seen results for ranking for keywords I’m targeting by submitting articles to directories in as little as under 1 hour at Google. There is really no faster way of getting ranked for target keywords than article marketing. But do your research! In order to get ranked quickly, you’ll have to choose keywords that people would use in a search query but that do not suffer from high competition.
2. Balance your articles for your readers, but keep the search engines in mind. What this means is that you write for people but you also write for search engines, which are definitely not people. Sprinkle in keywords that the search engines (SEs from now on) like but in a readable and natural way. Remember this, though: ALWAYS write solid content for your visitors’ sake. Content is, has always been, and will always be — KING!
3. Don’t waste time submitting your same article to dozens of obscure article directories. There is a temptation to write one article and submit it to every “Tom, Dick, and Harry” article directories. Don’t do it! Make your article submissions exclusive with sites like eZineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleDashboard, and SearchWarp. These are quality article directories with thousands of visitors every day.
4. Make the best Resource Box possible. This is your one chance to get your reader to act; and by “act” I mean to go to your website, fill out a form, buy something. In other words, to take an action that you want them to take.
5. It’s a numbers game, so submit MANY articles. Getting your site indexed by the SEs for highly desirable long-tail keywords is an arduous process that requires dozens of article submissions. Like I said before, make your articles exclusive to a particular directory. So, you’ll have to write a bunch of articles and submit them to article directories. See what happens. Watch your stats!
6. Re-purpose your content. Does this contradict what I’ve just said? No, not really. I am suggesting here that you not only put your article up on an article directory, but that you also put that article up on your own website. Don’t worry about the SEs counting those two nearly-identical articles as duplicate content. It’s only “duplicate content” if it’s on YOUR site more than once. This way, you will be leveraging work you’ve already done to building a long-tail keyword page on your site at the same time as you wrote an article for a directory that the SEs love!
7. Don’t give it all away. What do I mean by this? In your article, give enough information to entice your reader to visit whatever link you reference in your Resource Box. Get them to take your “Most Wanted Action.” In other words, give your readers “interesting but incomplete” information that forces them to take the next step of signing up for your email marketing list.
8. Become an expert. By writing dozens of articles that thousands of people daily have access to makes you an expert in your field. Capitalize on that fact!
9. Research your competition. Look at the most popular articles in a particular directory in your niche and find out what their keywords are, how they write about the topics, how they construct their Resource Box, etc. You want to find out how successful people are submitting articles so that you can mimic their process and make it your own.
10. Set up your article marketing profile. Put up a picture and some interesting facts about yourself. If somebody finds one of your articles, he may try to find you on the article directory website. No picture = very little credibility.

That’s 1-10 of our traffic building tips. We’ll bring items 11-20 next week.

While a lot of us “internet marketing” types like the “bum” method (basically, using free traffic-building tools like article marketing and directory submissions), there’s a lot to be said for paid advertising like Pay Per Click.

Basically, you get traffic 3 ways:

1. You pay for traffic with money
2. You pay for traffic with time
3. You pay for traffic with a combination of #1 and #2

If you want need traffic right away (bills are piling up, your mortgage is due and you just had to spend it on your car that just broke down, etc.), PPC is the ONLY way to go. You set up small advertisements (a lot like newspaper classifieds) and they run on other websites. You pay by the search term and any time somebody clicks on your ad, you pay a “click charge.”

It’s simple in concept.

But it’s hard in practice. And it can be COSTLY.

I’m getting ready to produce a small report that will give you the ins and outs of PPC marketing. It’s tentatively entitled, “7 Steps to Getting Massive Traffic Using AdWords.”

Subscribe to my list to get updated on when the report goes LIVE. Otherwise, just come back here and I’ll make an announcement after I let my subscribers know.

This is a brainstorm, not necessarily an ordered list of how to bring traffic to your website. It’s designed to get you thinking. I’m sure you can come up with a better list!

• Build backlinks by setting up accounts at different websites that allow you to put up links to your website
• Comment on other people’s blogs
• Submit your website to Directories
• Write articles pointing back to your website and submit them to article directories (called article marketing)
• Join a link exchange
• Set up a PPC campaign and pay for your traffic
• Submit useful posts and replies on forums
• Put your signature with a link back to your website on all your email correspondence
• Run classified ads
• Sell physical products on Amazon and eBay for a nominal fee. On that physical product, put your links back to your site
• Submit your posts to “social media” sites like digg, stumble, reddit, twitter (or better yet, get your friends and business partners to do it)
• Blog about your site. Make sure an RSS feed is available and prominently displayed on your blog.
• Squidoo
• Guest blog
• Hold a contest
• Give something away. Within the freebie, place links back to your site
• Advertise in physical media like newspapers, magazines, flyers, business cards
• Put video and images on your blogs and website. Search engines like Google love this!
• Do interviews on radio and television
• Attend fund raisers and hand out business materials
• Advertise in ezines
• Create “viral” reports
• Write and distribute press releases
• Make sure your website is optimized for search engines (SEO)
• Add “tell a friend” scripts to your blogs
• Answer questions at Yahoo Answers
• Write a useful post at Google Knol

That’s it for now. Let’s just say that you have to focus on a few of these and let the others rest for a bit. In order of importance, I’d say the SEO is near the top of the list. Then build backlinks by following the first 5 bullets. Set up a free blog or two and refer visitors of that blog to your website.