However, if you can drive hundreds and then thousands to your site on a daily basis you could join the top earners on the internet, leave your job and earn a superb income working just a few hours a day or less. By the way, the top earners rake in 6 figure incomes a MONTH!

There are 2 choices, traffic you pay for and free traffic. No question, you may think, free traffic must be the logical way to go! However the free traffic usually requires patience and most people want to make money online fast!

Let's look in more detail at both.

Firstly paid traffic: This includes things like pay-per-click campaigns that lots of the search engines enable. For instance, log onto Google or MSN or Yahoo and, as an example, type in to the search box ‘flat abs'. You will see lots of information come up about how to get a flat stomach, and down the right-hand side of the page there will be small adverts. These are paid for by website owners who are selling things relevant to ‘flat abs'. Every time someone clicks on their advert, they pay the search engine a fee. You can get excellent results because the traffic is what we call ‘highly targeted'. In other words you are not just getting any old visitor, you are getting a visitor who is specifically looking for what you are selling, so they are likely to buy.

Paid traffic also includes visitors who come from online classified ads, ezine adverts (online publications), paid emails and so on.

Free traffic includes the following: articles, forums and traffic sites.

If you can write about a subject you know well, this can be a great way to generate traffic. Once you have written your article, which will include a link to whatever you are promoting, you can get it published online. Your article can then be reproduced by any number of website owners and online publications. Imagine the power of having your article reproduced in an online magazine that goes out to thousands of subscribers every week! Or, imagine that a popular website puts your article on their site. All of their visitors will then see your article and a proportion will follow the link to what you are selling.

Forums reach a huge audience, but may not be for everyone. My Space is an example of a very popular site that has forums. You need to use these sites properly to get good results. In other words, you need to get fully involved with the online community, it's no good just plugging your site as people will see straight through you.

Traffic Sites are sites where you can generate traffic for your site by spending time surfing other people's sites. This can be effective, but also time-consuming. There is software that can help massively with this (see my ebook). Also you can build downlines with many of these traffic programs and this can enable you to create an avalanche of traffic.

The very best way, in my opinion, to generate high amounts of free traffic long-term, is through what is called SEO (search engine optimisation). This is where you create a website that is search engine friendly, and is a whole specialist area. I have a free ebook all about just this on my site as it is too complicated to cover here. The result of good SEO on your website is that, in time, (usually many months) you will rank high in the search engines which means that you will get masses of free traffic.

For instance, when you do a search on, say, MSN or Google for anything – as an example let's say you do a search for ‘flat abs' the search results come up on the page and the site that is in the top slot will obviously be the site that many people will click on. Sites on page 4 or page 12 etc. are not likely to get many clicks at all. The person who has their site in the number one slot is getting loads of free traffic, purely because they have taken the time to do good SEO on their site. SEO includes what you do on your site as well as what is called ‘off page optimisation'. This is basically links, and the more quality sites that link to yours, the better. There are some clever ways to achieve this, all covered in my book.

To sum up, there are ways to generate immediate traffic but these will usually cost you, and there are the longer term methods which require work, knowledge and patience, but which are very well worth it in the end! Good luck with making money online.