You hear a lot of success stories about businesses making good on the internet. Unfortunately, there are thousands of stories in the opposite direction. Many have unsuccessfully launched an online business only to have a trickle of visitors and fewer sales.

Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the eagerness to succeed and the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

Traffic is Number 1. Without traffic, all your effort will just go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn't have anyone to sell your products to. In the internet world traffic is the walk in customer. The more traffic you have the more people will see your product, thus generating sales .

Like any other business though, not everyone will buy, but the greater the number that do come in to browse , the more people will eventually buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

So, how do you get traffic - traffic large enough to make a good profit. Many big companies generate huge amounts of traffic and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buy, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others. Yes that’s right; sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people who know that your site exists; the more people would of course go to your site, that’s common sense.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, this does not generate the same high volume as the paid methods. These paid advertisements include advertising schemes by Google and Yahoo.

Search engines are the easiest and fastest medium in finding what a person needs in the internet. Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many people. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors so it's easy to understand why so many companies will pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide information to the millions of users they get each day. They provide links to many sites that the user may be looking for. If your link pops up in the high ranks of the search results page, you get a great chance that they will go to your site. While search engine optimization is a cheaper and low cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will be on the top ranks and much faster.

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may not sound like such a good idea, but the results tell a different story. When you pay for your traffic, you are guaranteed a consistent traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be in vain. You will get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result to a great boost in your sales figures. Paying for your traffic is a really good idea if you can afford to pay for it.

If on the other hand, you want to use all free traffic, it'll be a much slower process, but it can be done using search engine optimization, article marketing, promoting to directories, using forums, trading links and many more methods.

Whatever route you decide on, pay close attention to your keywords, optimize your website, organize your promotions, stay positive and determined and before you know it, you have a successfully monetized online business all your own.