If you are in it for the money-E-Commerce, gathering leads or advertising your offline store, your site's life-blood is Qualified Traffic. Let's start with "Qualified". To me "Qualified" for Pepsi may mean all current drinkers of that venerable drink as well as all Coca Cola drinkers. That's pretty much anyone I have ever met. In fact, even if you only drink milk, Pepsi brand building may yet convert you from a lactarian to a Pepsierian. Incidentally, my site is likely to rank high on the term Pepsierian, given I seem to be the first person to use that term. Pity, no one ever searches for this term. More to the point, if they were to search, I wouldn't be able to sell them anything, or convert them since I would have no clue what a person searching for this term is actually looking for. Well, you get the idea. So, for sites like Pepsi where the target is everyone and their grandparents, one measure for traffic is "Daily Reach". In the case of Pepsi it is about 150 people per million according to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.pepsi.c om/home.php ) . It's also the 13000th most visited site in the world. By way of comparison, Coca Cola is the 9000th most visited site with just about 200 people per million. Google is 3rd, with a daily reach approaching 300,000 per million. Say, one in 3 users of internet uses Google at least once daily. Not bad! At this point, we will ignore how easy it is to manipulate Alexa rankings and why a certain type of site ranks higher. The point is, all the rankings have to be taken with a grain of salt. More on that in a future article, when we discuss phenomena like "Google Bomb". We will also discuss the motivation behind cheating. Of course statistics like "Reach Per Million" are awfully depressing if your site is about the problems faced by Inuit community in Congo. That community (as far as I know) is so small that even if your site was an "Authority" on that subject, you wouldn't get very far. The "Inuit Community in Congo" example is pretty contrived. So, how about a real site? What are the steps that we need to take to build some real traffic? Broadly speaking, we get traffic from the following sources:

1> Search Engines: The search engine displays your site as the most relevant for the search term. This can be a result of your site ranking high on the search engine due to it's ranking, relevance and popularity, bringing "Organic" visitors to your site. It could also be because the site owner pays the search engine, usually on a "per click" basis. 2>Affiliates: These are other websites that act as a front for you, or which display your advertisements, or the latest fad of "Pre sales pages". These can be banner or textual advertisements. The affiliates websites usually expect a percent of sales("Pay per action") or charge a fixed amount per month. They direct their traffic your way, and are compensated through a pre-arranged agreement. Some of the affiliate sites have lots of context sensitive contents. For example, this affiliate tickets selling site, http://www.ticketnest.com is chock full of information about various bands and theatrical events. 3> Email Advertising: This works well in some cases. However, this channel is often abused by spammers and is beyond the scope of this article. 4> Offline Advertising: This includes newspapers, TV, radio, magazine advertisements, exhorting people to visit you. 5> Offline brand: We didn't hear about Pepsi from their website. It's hard to imagine, but there was a time when we were drinking that stuff but had never heard of the world wide web. Too bad, my 11 month old son would never be able to say the same. The offline brand of WalMart may convince users to visit their website.

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