After all the agonizing over website design, shopping carts and credit card processors, every website owner eventually comes to the startling realization that they need one more thing to survive – website traffic! A website without traffic is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard or like building an advertising board and never showing it.

Once website owners realise that traffic is vital to their success they start spending money trying to buy hits, unfortunately not all hits are the same.

A lot of webmasters in their haste to get any visitors to their site forget that its a lot more important to get targeted traffic to the site than just general traffic, and believe me there’s a big difference between the two. Just getting any traffic is the same technique TV advertisers use. Ads are thrown at people that are unaffordable and on the whole they show products that people don’t need.

Seeing as general advertising is not targeted it relies on the hope that someone who is interested in that particular product may be watching at that precise moment. Spam, banner ads, “safe-lists” and similar website traffic techniques fall into this “general” category. Targeted traffic is made up of people who are truly interested in what you are selling or what you are saying. These people have interests in common or they are trying to solve problems.

“Targeted” traffic is best because the people hitting your website have a much higher likelihood of actually making a purchase. Targeted traffic is provided by people following links on sites or finding you through the search engines when they type in your keywords, and even the relevant links you provide in articles that are followed to reach your sites.

If you don’t already know where to find the best sources of targeted traffic for your website, you will need to experiment with lots of different sources to find the ones that bring visitors who give you the most “bang for your buck.”

The fastest way to determine which avenues provide the most targeted traffic is by using an “ad tracker”. An “ad tracker” is a simple program, residing on your web server, that tracks how many visitors your site gets from a particular source and how many of them purchased. Though it sounds simple, most businesses don’t do this! Many businesses spend too much money on traffic generation without knowing whether it is cost effective, you need to know what percentage of visitors are buying so you can make a profit and not overspend on advertising.

Whether you use PPC search engines or ezine ads costing you money or you decide to go the free route with article distibution, blogs, free search engines, free links etc the one thing you must know is your most profitable sources of targeted website traffic that end up being a buyer or subscriber.

Failure to identify and track where your buyers come from and then calculate how much they really cost you ultimately translates into failure for your online business.