A great website without customers is like a mega mall in the middle of a desert with no road leading to it. In order to sell you need customers, but how do you get the traffic to your website?

There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your website, in this article we shall examine the paid methods of getting traffic.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Nothing new to anyone on the net. Every major search engine offers it in one form or the other. A great way to drive traffic to your site. But only if you know how to use it.

You must select keywords that will drive traffic to your site but will not cause your CPC bill to skyrocket without converting prospects into sales. Your description must also complement your keyword so that it reinforces your products and services.

The persons who click have interest in your goods but are still prospects. What goods are they interested in however. If my food site should use a keyword phrase "oral pleasure" relating to food and tastiness, I might be surprised to get a lot of clicks but no sales. Why, you might ask? Most likely the persons clicking on my link got there while searching for adult links for oral pleasure.

Funny you might think, but everyday, advertisers haphazardly choose keywords that have no bearing on their site. They now start to receive customers but have no conversions as these were not targeted visitors. By now the CPC bill is high and sales are still low to non-existent.

So for my food site, a better choice of keyword would be "jerk seasoning", and if I wanted to narrow my target market more with specific searches, I would use "Jamaican jerk seasoning". This would be sure to send me only targeted customers searching for my products. My conversion rate will be higher out of this batch of qualified prospects.

2. Text Ads

Advertisers can sponsor text ads for varying periods on different search engines.
These text ads run from as little as $12 per 3 month period and give good exposure to a wide market, but is again dependent on keyword and description choices.

3.Buy Traffic

There are sites that are wholly designated to selling web traffic. The rates vary but traffic can be bought from as little as $2.99 per thousand visitor.

The type of traffic is dependendent on where the traffic is from. Traffic is generated from expired domains and redirected traffic. Traffic can also be classified into geographic regions and by shopping preferences. The more targeted choices are more costly but give a better quality visitor.

If your business is in the USA selling golf shoes, a US visitor who is a golfer is going to be a more qualified visitor than one who lives in Bahrain and does not know what golf is.

Some traffic sites send visitors based on auto generated views. This might boost the stats on your site but will not generate sales. You need to ensure that real people are viewing your site and not automated software. If you are going to pay for traffic then you need to get real traffic.

Some websites will tell you they are sending visitors, when they mean hits. 1000 hits is not the same as 1000 visitors. Everytime a visitor comes to your site they generate hits. Every image that opens generates a hit. So you can see the difference between the promise of 1000 hits vs 1000 visitors. 100 visitors just might, depending on your landing page, generate a 1000 hits.

4. Links

Joining paid link exchanges is a great way to get incoming links to your site. This method until recently was a good enough method, but Google's recent change to its view on paid Link Exchanges means that less value is placed on incoming links.

It is still a fairly valuable tool as the other members with whom you link, the traffic from their sites now have a link to you. The drawback is when your link is so far down the page that customers to that site will never have easy access.

5. Search Engines

Not by any means last or the least effective method. The major search engines will drive most of your traffic tot your site. Google delivers at least 60% of a sites search engine traffic, and so websites must be optimized and tweaked to achieve higher ranking in the engines. Higher ranking translates to appearing in the first few results. the higher up you rank and place the more your traffic from the search engine. With this method, optimization and submission of the site is paramount. A good SEO can tweak your site to make it search engine friendly including optimizing your meta tags such as Keywords, description and title.

Coming...
Part II : Free Website Traffic Building will deal with the free ways you can drive traffic to your site without spending a dime.