We all know that if no one goes to your site it doesn’t have a chance of generating an income. Common sense also tells us that we need a steady flow of website traffic. If there was one single hard and fast rule in generating income for your website, which there isn’t, it would be a steady and continuous flow of traffic.

We want a lot of site traffic but not just any traffic, it MUST be targeted traffic. That term, targeted traffic, may seem to be getting a little old or worn out but it’s just as true today as it ever was. If your site is a tool to sell E-Book software, for example, what good does a thousand people auto-surfing for their own site visitors do? The fact they are jumping through hoops to get low NO quality traffic should be a pretty good indication they’re probably not buyers.

Generating targeted visitors to your site is just as important as sales copy, pricing and every other sales consideration - other than ROI (Return On Investment) of course. If you’re taking a loss then the whole business in in trouble.

The need for targeted traffic is the same as it always has been but many of the preferred methods of generating those site visitors is changing. Not completely, the traditional methods such as article marketing, ezine advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) etc. are still necessary but now we have many other options with the success of Social Networking or Web 2.0.

It’s a very exciting time, especially for those of us taking advantage of the Web 2.0 era. I hate that term, Web 2.0, it sounds like an alternate internet somewhere. I remember when I first heard the term I was wondering how they were going to keep it separate from the old web lol. Social Networking and Web 2.0 are the same thing if it’s still unclear. Not to complicate things but I prefer Social Marketing.

What makes social marketing exciting from a traffic generation stand point is just how ‘targeted’ it can get. When sites like MySpace started getting Internet Marketers excited, I jumped right in. Right from the start I could see how if not used properly the whole thing could be a huge waste of time. Those marketers adding anyone and everyone as ‘friends‘ in order to get their friends list up into the thousands were going about everything wrong. I decided to only allow other members in that had something to do with online business. My MySpace page only has less than 600 members but it’s targeted. I even had the Google PageRank up to 05/10 but I see it’s down to 02/10 now -slap:-( My niche is Internet Marketing so now if I send a broadcast it can be seen by several hundred other marketers and online business owners. For that broadcast to go out to ten thousand teeny-boppers, bands and spamming models (I’m being very kind with that term) would only be a waste of everyone’s time and completely ignored. So you can’t just sign up, jump in and start sending traffic to your site like many are implying, you still need to give it a little thought and planning to make it work.

MySpace was my first but it’s certainly not the only kid on the block. There are literally thousands of Social Networking sites out there. Many with their own twists and benefits. In fact, there are so many you could easily get caught up in another problem - no time for anything else. What good is the traffic if you never have new content for the visitor to see and you don’t have anything to offer? Combine all of the various sites out there for social networking, social bookmarking, Blogging networks etc. with the fact that you’re actually making new friends and having fun and you have the potential of becoming addicted.

Social Networking has turned the tables on large sites. Many of the larger sites that were dominating the search engine listings and there niche market have all but taken a back seat to someone that just runs a blog and it grew by accident. That’s got to hurt, right? You spend years developing an online business. Countless hours and a ton of money building traffic and growing your list and some guy with a blog comes around and kicks your butt right off the top search results! It’s just amazing to see someone posting daily to a blog and just being social skyrocket to a pagerank of 7/10 with RSS feed subscribers of twenty thousand or more. You see, it pays to stay on top of things. I can’t wait to see what comes next!

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