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"So how you are going to drive traffic to your website, then?"

I was meeting an assistant manager at a Business Center. I was there to sell advertising on my website, but the conversation had turned to websites he wanted to build.

The guy knew a lot about programming. He knew PHP, HTML, CSS and programmes I had never heard of.

But when I asked him how he was going to get traffic to his website, I got nothing but a blank look.

So here are the options:

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way of getting traffic to your website, because you only pay for the traffic when you make a sale. Of course it doesn't have to be a sale - you could pay out when someone joins your site, or signs up for a newsletter list.

Of course, you have to get affiliates first. Once you have put together an attractive offer, try signing up for affiliate directories, posting in affiliate forums and approaching sites in your niche directly.

Search Engine Optimisation

This is actually my preferred method, but it takes a lot of time and work - and you are constantly at battle with your competitors who are trying to keep up with you!

If you are new to Search Engine Optimisation, take time to learn the basics - and don't spend a fortune doing so. Once you have done that, sign up SearchEngineLand's daily email updates - this will help you to keep up with the latest in SEO developments.

There's one exception to the hard work involved. If you happen on a niche, and manage to get an almost exact domain name match, you don't need a lot of work to rank it. I've had a lot of success with one small (and ugly) site called Review Big Commerce. With an almost exact domain match (reviewbigcommerce.com) I have been able to appear in the top five results for my target keyword, review Big Commerce.

Guest posting

Guest posting combines SEO with traffic generation. Sometimes you will guest post just to get the link, other times you will guest post to get traffic as well. Whenever possible guest post on related blogs, but this is not always possible.

Advertising

Drive traffic to your site with advertising. Google Ads are a great way to do this. You pay per click, and you can control how much you can spend in any one day. You can even add code to track which conversions come from Google, so you can work out if you are turning a profit or not.

Make sure you make several versions of each ad you put up - Google will split test these for you to find out which is the most useful.

Capturing the Traffic

Once you have traffic, you need to capture it. You can do this by offering something free. For example, we offer a fantastic free e-book called The Electronic Cigarette on our new website - if you are a smoker make sure to check it out!

About the writer

James Dunworth is the IT Director of ECigaretteDirect, the electronic cigarette store.