Every business needs customers. More traffic equals more people to sell your products to.

Traffic is the absolute cornerstone of successful marketing.

But as with any business, not everyone who comes into your internet store will make a purchase.

Obviously however, the greater of number who do come in to browse your merchandise, the greater the number of people who will buy your products.

This is the simple premise by which all successful businesses succeed, because only a small percentage of the traffic actually buys.

The key is to get large enough amounts of traffic so that the small percentage of actual buyers will be enough to provide a profit after the overhead is paid for.

Most big companies rely on generating traffic of many thousands a day while only ten to fifteen percent or so actually buys. That small percentage is enough to provide them with good profit and to pay for the advertising.

In generating traffic, advertising is the key. The more people who know your site exists; the more people will go to your site. That makes sense doesn't it?

There are ways to get advertising for free, however, they generally do not generate the same volume as paid advertising. That is why all large successful businesses are willing to invest thousands of dollars in advertising with advertising agencies.

Paid advertisements (pay per click) for the internet include advertising by Google and Yahoo etc.

These kinds of sites have the capacity to get your ads out to thousands of people daily.

This is by no means a plug for any one site, but simply a statement of fact that buying ads is a profitable means of getting your product in front of a huge number of clients daily.

When you pay for your advertisements, you're basically buying traffic, and while it may not sound like the best business decision, paid advertisement generally provides a constant flow of traffic to your site.

You can have a profitable day every day, either in terms of sales or opt in subscribers. In addition, you have the ability to tweak and change your ads daily to increase customer response, as well as easily track your results.

You can set up several different ads and do split tests to discover the optimum set up. This can all be done very quickly and easily.

So whether the money you spend in paying for your traffic brings direct sales or subscribers, it will be worthwhile.

Remember this, every shopper who visits your store without buying is now aware of your existence, and he'll likely revisit if you send him a few advertisement brochures via your auto responder.

Later on we'll discuss the various methods of free advertising available and explore them.