When you're in online business, just getting traffic isn't enough to turn a profit, you need to make sure you know what your conversion rate for your visitors is, and you might get 400 visitors, but if you only get one sale is it worth it? Know how much your paying per visitor and what your conversion rate is, and also your average sale amount Is what you need to know if you're going to go out of business or not. Ok let's say you pay $1 per visitor to your site, and your average sale is $15 (profit before advertising), now you would need to turn every 15th visitor into a paying customer to break even, that doesn't sound like much, but when you can be getting a conversion rate of 1% or lower, paying $100 to make a $15 sale doesn't look so good.

There are 2 formula's you really need to know if you're going to be paying for traffic, Maximum advertising cost:

Conversion rate * amount per sale = max cost per visitor I.e.: 5% * $20 = 50c, if you had a conversion rate of 5$ and made $20 per sale – you wouldn't want to pay more than 50c a visitor Minimum conversion rate: ( average amount per sale / advertising budget) *100 = minimum conversion rate. Ie: = ($20 / $100) * 100 = 20%, or you need one in every 5 visitors to buy your product.

This is starting to seem daunting isn't it? Well you should also look at maximizing your SEO value of your website as well; this will help you get free targeted visitors to your website as well. A good way is to write a couple of articles, put some links in them, and put them on a couple of larger article directory sites, this will help build backlinks for you, and more importantly, will start bringing in traffic, the more you do, the more traffic you'll get in the long run. Another way is to swap links with other website, if this isn't an option for you, you might want to consider buying some links from websites instead, if they are websites with related content, you might find that they are cheaper than buying PPC ads though mainstream networks. The main point here, is no matter what option you choose to try and increase your traffic, you need to make sure that you are targeting your method at your content, otherwise the all the effort and costs in doing such will be lost which isn't a good thing at all.

One this to make note of, is stay away from blackhat methods of building up your site visitors, like hidden links and keywords in your pages, if you do this, the search engines will remove you entirely and you'll be totally lost in the search engines and will only have a choice of paid advertising methods.

Search engines main goal is to give their visitors what they want – content based on what the visitor searched for , and you want to sell the visitors the products what they were searching for. In the end it's all about targeting the traffic for what you are selling, and not trying to catch fish with your hands.