Traffic to your website is essential for any online sales, but there are many different ways to generate traffic. Clearly, not all your visitors will buy from you, but with no visitors, you are guaranteed no online sales.

Cost Per Click (CPC) campaigns (run through search engines such as Google) will drive highly targeted traffic to your website. In the main, the consumers using search engines to find the products they want are clearly ready to buy. By bidding on the right keywords, you can drive great amounts of targeted, ready to buy customers to your site but this does need to be done with care. The article 'Tips for your CPC ad' will provide more information on this.

Article, such as this one, are a great way to not only drive traffic to your site but also provide your visitors with added value to their website experience. If you take the time to help people by providing information, they will in turn be more likely to buy from you.

Giving away free information does not need to stop at just writing articles. We all love free information - so make this 'free report' or 'free email course' a selling point of your website. If you give away a free report or email course on a subject related to your website, this again increases your credibility and consumers will be more inclined to buy from you. When you send an email or write an article, make sure you add a link to your sales website at the end of the message, to boost online sales.

Website traffic package companies drive traffic to your website, and there are many businesses offering this service to make sure you shop around. I would advise you shop around to see just how targeted the traffic really is and the quality of the traffic too. By this I mean the length of time the website will be viewed by the visitor before it's classed as a 'hit'. Some companies say the site must be viewed for a certain amount of time before it is classed as a 'visitor' but some do not offer this feature. These businesses often provide a range of methods of website promotion methods, so make sure you use the methods most suited to your product/service and, of course, your marketing budget.

Traffic exchanges are another way of getting large volumes of traffic to your website. I believe this should only be seen as a 'useful extra' when it comes to marketing, I would not recommend using it alone. An exchange works by submitting your website to an exchange site who host many, many sites, all covering different businesses. You are then required to surf other peoples sites (normally for about 10 seconds) as others will do for your site. Credits are earned by surfing other peoples sites and then translate into the number of times your site will be shown to other people such as yourself. Clearly, the draw back is that your site may only be viewed in order to receive credits by those people who are surfing, rather than them looking with interest at your product. However, this method could well result in sales, so it should not be dismissed out of hand, but used cautiously.

Remember, the key to success for your website is to have a broad marketing mix and to test and record everything you do, so you can discover what works and what doesn't.