A long time ago, at the beginning of the internet, people just built their web-sites and expected visitors to show up. And the amazing thing about this attitude is that there were so few sites out there that visitor really checked the site. Nowadays, marketing a site is a tough business. There are literally billions of sites out there and if you take a passive stance, your web-site will get not more than a couple of visitors every week.

Visitors or better said traffic is the most important factor in the monetization of your site. Your success depends on this. It is senseless to worry about the content and technical quality of your site if you don't manage to attract enough visitors to it. Additionally, traffic can be of different qualities. It can be composed by unique or repeated visitors. It can be US traffic or worldwide traffic. It can match a topic, when it comes from a niche site, or it can be general traffic, like the one from pop-ups and pop-unders. The best is of course the one that your site need. Be it US unique visitors interested in web-site design or international visitors interested in buying a laptop. Every web-site need something different.

However, how do web sites get traffic? Just to name a few ways of getting traffic: there is the organic traffic from search engines like Google or Yahoo. Under organic traffic is meant traffic generated through searches performed on these search engines. That is the best traffic you can get. It is free and it keeps coming in. For getting this kind of traffic your first and utmost target should be to get tons of content. Besides that, structure your site in a simple way that can be indexed. Search engines love content-rich sites that can be indexed. The second point to get this kind of traffic is to build links. You can exchange links with other sites and you can wait for other webmaster to link to your site. Exchanging links is less effective but easier. Getting your site commented on mainstream sites will increase considerably the hits on your site.

Another way of telling the world that your site is online is through social networks. In social networks people connect with other users sharing similar interests. So, if you build up your profile in as many social networks as possible and connect yourself to other people your are reaching similar other that are already interested in the topic of your site. This is a huge way of getting targeted free traffic to your site. It is not all about getting traffic, but also quality traffic. That is people that come over and over again.

And finally, a fourth way of getting traffic is writing articles about a specific topic matching your site and posting this articles to directories of articles. This way would cost you some time, however, as long as your article is online, it will keep sending you traffic to your main web-site.