To find out what is the most effective way for generating traffic to your website, consider 3 things:

- Your Market

- Your Interest

- What's Working

1. Your Market

Ask yourself where your prospects are, where they hang out and what do they read.

This information is very important because it tells you where your prospects are most likely to read your sales message.

If they stay at home most of the time, then you need to sell them via direct mailing. If they read a lot of magazines then you need to place your ad in the magazines they read.

You can use pay per click marketing if you know that the majority of your prospects searches the internet for information.

So understand your prospects first and then work on the traffic generating tasks.

2. Your Interest

This is very important if you're working alone and don't have any staff. It is best to work on marketing that you are interested in.

For example, if you hate writing then it's not advisable for you to write articles daily and submit them to article directories. Your only alternative, if you have the money, is to outsource the task.

This is where a lot of online entrepreneurs make the mistake in trying to generate traffic to their website. They work on their marketing doing tasks which they find boring, don't like or even hate doing.

If you don't have any passion in your work, your prospects won't feel passionate about your products. Your feeling is reflected in the ad you write.

3. What's Working

The best way to approach traffic generation is to try one method and put your best effort in making it work.

When your marketing is live, you must monitor the results and determine if what you're doing is effective. Spend a lot of time working on one traffic building technique and decide if it's working for you, before working on the next method.

If you find that a particular method is effective in driving traffic to your website, put all your effort into it. Do more of it and try to improve the performance.

For example, if you find that placing a particular banner on targeted blogs drives a lot of traffic to your website, then find more targeted blogs and do the same thing. Change a few minor things in your banners and see if it improves the conversion rate.

Once you find something that is working then put all your effort into it and scale it up.

This is how you find out what the best method is to generate traffic to your website. If other people tell you something that works, you can try it out but don't believe them totally. The reason is, your business and prospects may be different to theirs.

Once your have a traffic generating method that is working well, automate it. Outsource it to freelancers so that you can focus on other traffic generating techniques. Once you find another method which brings you a lot of traffic, try to combine the two methods and leverage off each other and come up with your own traffic generation system. Rinse and repeat.