How many people are online? According to Internet World Stats, the figure is well over 1 billion. And all you need to be successful with your internet business is for a small fraction of these people to visit your pages and check out your offer. No matter how many posts you will see in the various internet marketing forums, every few days (if that) someone will pose the same question. "How do I increase traffic to my website"? .

This can seem like a difficult task considering how many other web sites are out there. In July 2007 survey, Netcraft received responses from over one hundred and twenty five million websites; that was a one month increase of over three and a half million new web sites. While these numbers are daunting, keep in mind you are not competing with every site on the internet.

There are many ways to increase on line traffic. Three in particular have proven to be extremely effective. The only problem is they are not going to bring you more web site traffic overnight or the next night or even the night after that but they do work

1. Directory link Submission

There are thousands of web directories online. You can always find a company that will make directory link submissions for you at a fair price but even these places will not cover them all. If however you decide to do it yourself then you have got a long, tedious job ahead of you.

So why do it? Back links. Web directories are an effective way to get tons of incoming links to your site. This in turn leads to a higher page rank from the search engines. Keep in mind also that search engines are suspicious of any website that experiences a sudden spike in its traffic. Directory link submission allows you to increase web traffic more naturally which is more to their liking and your benefit.

2. Web Site Traffic Exchange

You sit there surfing and clicking until you feel as if you were born with carpal tunnel syndrome. You have also heard that a web site traffic exchange is useless so what is the point? The point is they are only useless to those people who do not know what they are doing. Do not use a web site traffic exchange to sell your product. Instead use them to capture leads for building your mailing list. Once people sign up to your opt in mailing list, then you can start sending them emails with snippets of information and a link pointing toward your website. This maybe a round about way for you to increase web traffic but in the process you are also building a responsive email marketing list. You may have to do a lot of clicking when you are just starting out but down the road it can pay off quite handsomely.

3. Reciprocal linking

Ugh. First you need to do a search to find a website in your niche. Than you have to make sure the site is not in direct competition with you. After that compose a personalized email to the webmaster requesting a link exchange, then wait for a response. Rinse and repeat. It is not worth the effort right? Wrong. Search engines take reciprocal links into consideration when determining your page rank. Yes back links are more valuable but a good from a high ranking website is still important. If you decide to go the reciprocal link route then try to at least trade with websites that are within your niche.

No these methods will not win any awards for speed, but that is the whole point. You are going to run across many ads that guarantee you overnight traffic. Very few if any can keep that promise. Besides you are building a business for the long haul. Just be patient and consistent in utilizing these techniques and you will get more web site traffic before you know it.