The backbone of any online marketing effort is traffic. No matter how well your site converts, how good is your sales copy, how great your product is, if no one sees it, all is lost. Really, if no one reads your ads or sees your site, you will not make it online.

So you have to have traffic. Not just any old traffic, but targeted high quality traffic from people that are interested in what you are offering. Beware of sites that are willing to send you 10,000 hits for 25 bucks. You get what you pay for.

So how do you get good quality traffic?

1) Although potentially expensive, pay-per-click can be a really good traffic source. The key here is to highly target the traffic. If you are selling fly fishing equipment, you want to bid on "fly fishing", not fishing. You can experiment with different types of keywords, but only do it if you can effectively track everything.

2) Article writing. I especially like article writing because if someone clicks on a link of mine, it is after they have already read 300-700 words of mine. That means they like my style and want to know more. In a way, they already trust me.

3) Ezine advertising. This is also potentially productive, but testing is critical. Response rates can vary significantly from one ezine to the next and with one ad to the next. Start small in any given ezine, and once you have a successful small ad, then you can make it bigger or go with a bigger subscriber base.

4) Exchange links with other like-minded web site owners. I don't mean link farms or big link exchanges. What I do mean is trading links with sites whose customers compliment your own. For example, if you are selling fly fishing equipment and another company sells deep-sea fishing equipment, you can trade links with that site. You will not be directly competing with the other site, but you are targeting many of the same customers.

That list may seem small, but I prefer quality traffic over volumes of useless traffic. There are many traffic exchanges and list building programs out there, but my attitude is that most of that traffic and subscriber base are others just like you, trying to get traffic. Unless you have a product that specifically targets that customer, stay away from traffic exchanges.