Marketing your own website is the second most important step of site building process and is defined as techniques and strategies that get traffic to your web pages. Traffic means visitors; people who see and visit your website. Therefore, without traffic, your website is like a dead web page on the world wide web.

It is traffic that may bring you profit. If your website does not get seen, how would you be able to sell your stuff on your site or promote other´s products and services? So, in other words Traffic = Money.

While this step will determine your future success in some extent, you should know that marketing a website is not a simple job. In fact, getting traffic is a very overwhelming task and if you don´t exactly know what to do and how to do, you are wasting your time and money building a website.

To be honest with you, getting traffic and website marketing is achievable. The point here is not actually getting traffic. It is important to receive high-quality traffic and targeted visitors to your website. That way, you can convert that traffic into profit and earn too much money.

So, I would not prefer to recommend you to buy bulk traffic which many beginners do these days. Trust me, it does not work. Do you really think some page views or hits to your website is traffic? Your site should get real and highly-targeted visitors. Period!

Like I said before, marketing a website should also be started and monitored from the very first steps of building your web pages. It is true that I have put this step as the third one of the entire process, but you should follow all steps together from the starting point. Later on, you will find out why it is important to do so.

When it comes to marketing a website, there are literally thousands of methods, techniques and strategies that may help you get traffic and market your web pages. In my personal point of view, you don´t need to implement all of them. Actually, you won´t have enough time, money and energy. Just focus on one or a few methods and you will get better results. 

I am going to introduce some of the best and most effective marketing methods and then let you choose the one that suits you, your needs and resources. In the next posts, I will cover each and every method more deeply.

1. Search Engine Marketing (Search Engine Optimization = SEO)

It is by far the best and most effective method of website marketing. In this method, you will actually get FREE traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. So, the volume and quality of traffic is too high and your visitors are much targeted. This method is based on a number of actions that help you optimize your website for search engines and improve your site rank for specific keywords in the search results.  

2. Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click Advertising = PPC)

This method is also based on getting traffic from the search engines, but not FREE. In fact, you pay for this kind of traffic when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit your website. This marketing model can also be very effective because of the volume and quality. But, you need to act very carefully in order to reduce the risks of money loss. The largest providers of this kind of advertising model are companies like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

3. E-Mail Marketing

In fact, this method is one of the most profitable methods of Internet marketing that uses e-mail as a means of getting traffic to your web pages. If you have a list of subscribers that allow you to send them e-mails, then you have a great opportunity in front of you. The volume and quality of traffic in this method is totally based on how well you have built your list and developed trust. If done properly, it can bring you incredible results.    

4. Social Media Marketing

This advertising method is the newest model of Internet marketing and it is defined as a number of actions that achieve branding and marketing goals through the participation in various social media networks. This technique can integrated with other forms of marketing such as search engine optimization, viral marketing and word of mouth marketing. Therefore, this method gives a huge opportunity to advertisers and marketers. If you do it properly, the volume of traffic will be extremely high, so will the quality . Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Squidoo, Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr and Second Life are just a few examples of social media networks.

As you see, the sky is your limit. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of marketing methods that can help you get traffic to your web pages. The above-mentioned methods are the best ones to get started and focus. There are even more effective methods that I will cover later such as Article Marketing an Forum Marketing. So, stay tuned and subscribe to my RSS Feed in order to not miss the latest posts and updates.

Regards,

Hooshmand Moslemi