There are many ways to get traffic to your website or blog, and quite frankly you don’t need to know all of them. Just master 2-3 methods of getting traffic and forget the rest. You’ll do much better with them in the long run instead of chasing after the latest new craze.

I personally use only 4 traffic-generating methods:

PPC or Pay-Per-Click

I use this when I want to test a product idea or market profitability. I also use it on testing existing products because it’s fast, accurate, trackable and predictable. However, it’s also very expensive.

I only use Google Adwords when testing a new product, simply because there are not many better PPC services when you want traffic now, including Yahoo Search Marketing or formerly known as Overture. Overture is also more expensive than Adwords, slower and more complicated to use.

However, Adwords is not for beginners. What used to be simple “pay-and-play” with Adwords is now a intricate, complex system that takes a lot of trial-and-error to master. While you’re mastering Adwords, you generally lose a lot of money. If you do it right from the start, you may actually end-up making a slim profit in your learning stage.

So, go with Adwords but if you’re a beginner don’t pump all your money here. You may want to check out Perry Marshall’s Adwords book.

Email Marketing

All my marketing efforts go into building my own opt-in email marketing list. Some of the people on this list are customers, but the majority are prospects who for some reason of another have not bought anything from me yet.

With this list my formula is simple: 80% content and 20% selling. Sometimes I do both in a single email, where I give some content and direct them to an affiliate site for the entire package.

I use Aweber and Marketers Choice, and generally get open rates of 30%, with good click through rates as well.

When you’re using email marketing, remember that a certain percentage of people will opt-out of your newsletter or ezine. It’s unavoidable, so don’t get upset when they do. I get opt-out of about 12%.

How do you get opt-in subscribers? All you need to do is to make sure that:

• Your page is designed to capture your visitors details – single page, optin at the bottom, with an “offer” works the best
• You get traffic directly or indirectly to this page – direct ways will be to make it the main page, and indirect ways include putting a form on your blog, on your thank-you page etc.

Needless to say, email marketing tactics don’t work well if you page is too packed with all sorts of stuff that throw your visitors away to other affiliate sites. Go for the optin first, and promote later.

Blog, Tag, Ping

It sounds like three different things but for me it’s the integrated power and synergy of them, which I consider as ONE method. I use WordPress blogs to set-up my content websites to get more traffic to the products I am selling. WordPress is relatively easy to set-up and is highly customizable, so I know that no matter what I want to do in the future (add audio, video for example) there’s always a plugin somewhere that I can get for free to do the job.

By tagging and pinging, I can get my sites indexed in Search Engines in less than 72 hours. You may want to see Sean Wu’s Tag And Ping for more info. Don’t expect tag and ping to bring in thousands of visitors because it won’t. It will however play an important role in the overall search engine attractiveness factor of your blog or website.

I don’t care what others say – for me though, blogs are the easiest way to generate traffic to your website, and scalable enough to cater to a growing amount of pages and traffic. Over the past 5 months I have revamped most of my sites using WordPress.

Writing and Publishing Articles

One of the best ways to get long-term residual traffic to your websites, and more importantly, tons of “back links” that can improve your search engine rankings dramatically, is to write and publish articles related to your market.

The trick to writing articles is to write them constantly, which really sounds easier than it is. If you’re not outsourcing the articles, you need to write and publish at least one new articles every two weeks.

But writing the article is really just one part of the traffic building campaign. You still need to publish your article to as many sites as possible.

There’s one service I currently use to publish and syndicate all my articles, which is Article Marketer. The service will syndicate all your articles to other article directories, and depending on your niche, this could mean 20 – 300 instant back links to your website. Some of your articles, if they are good, will end up in other people’s ezines and blogs.

With a free account at Article Marketer, you will only get distribution on the “partial list”, but an upgrade for a reasonable amount of money will give you unlimited article submissions to a list of more than 5,000 websites.

Each article you submit comes with reporting features so you can check exactly how many sites have published your articles.

All your articles will be examined and approved by a human editor. If you don’t upgrade it takes up to two weeks, but upgrade authors can expect 24-hour approval of their articles. You can post as many articles as your want, using any name you want.

Some of you may have many websites and not comfortable with using your own name for some of the articles you publish, so this is the ideal service for you.

If you’re marketing a lot of content-based sites and you’re looking for long-term results, Article Marketer is the cure.

I hope these tips have helped you in some way ot another to find the missing pieces of your web traffic puzzle.