The whole purpose of a website is to get visitors. You can equate a website with a store in a shopping mall. No matter what you are offering: vitamins, ebooks, software, information or just advice, without anybody walking into your store, you might as well close shop. The mall is your environment, as the World Wide Web is the environment of your website. You have to advertise your offline store as you must your online website, and traffic is your life blood, as shoppers are to an offline store.

Without website traffic you may as well give up, as a shopping mall store would close its doors, so what can you do to attract the traffic that your survival depends upon? The answer to that question could fill a book - and a very large book! Much depends on how you look at it, but there are basically four different ways of directing traffic to your website:

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

We don’t have the time or space to go over all the techniques that you are probably use to hearing about. So let’s have a look at a couple of ways that are not talked about much but are very productive traffic generation techniques.

Search Engines

This is not about SEO because you will have read all you can about that. It works if you know what you are doing, but generally not if you just follow instructions by rote. However there are ways to use search engines to get to your web pages.

Smart pages is one technique that is used. Smart pages are created using keywords that people use in order to get information on the web. You create as many of these pages as you can using different keywords. Your visitors never see these pages, even though the spider can find these smart pages when they search the web. There is software that you can purchase to create these pages so you won’t end up with duplicate webpages.

When somebody using the search engine uses one of these long-tail keywords, the search engine is likely to have indexed your page using that keyword, and the visitor will be directed to it, right? Wrong! The visitor is directed to the landing page that the software directs it to. You can generate hundreds, or even thousands, of Smart Pages on your website, each based on a little used keyphrase, but when it is, the visitor gets to the page on your site that you have programmed it to: it could be your home page or it might be a squeeze page or a sales page.

That is just one of many techniques that can be used to direct search engine users to your website when they are seeking information with which you can provide them.

Online Advertising

There are many online advertising techniques that people use, including using blogs to advertise their URL and article marketing for the same purpose. Web2 sites have been used, but they are not very productive, but there are other options. You can get free links from your own Facebook page: for every website or blog you possess, and what about Twitter? You can advertise your website on your twitter posts. You can also use PPC, but not Adwords that can be expensive. Searchfeed offers good pay-per-click ads for 1 cent. If you use searchfeed, you can get by spending $25 a day, which equates to 2500 visitors to your website every day - for $25!

Offline Advertising

When advertising any product, any traffic that you can drum up is good traffic. Go to your local free newspaper, put an ad in it advertising your website URL. This has been proven to be a great technique for getting traffic to ones site. Sending out flyers through to mail, you can purchase mailing list on peel and stick labels of people that are interested in online business opportunities. Post cards are a great source of visitors to your website. Sometimes we forget that advertsing offline can be just as rewarding as advertsing online.

Buss Advertising

Many people are scared to try buzz advertising, but it can work if you have a good idea on your website. Audio postcards were a good idea that never took off - buzz advertising could have made them more successful. Get talking about your product, and get your friends and relatives to do the same. Leave business cards with your website lying around, and get posters going about it. The more work you put into buzz advertising, the more effective it becomes.

One thing that is for sure, is that you will always need traffic to your website. You will have to find what works for you. If you have not tried some of the ways mentioned in this article, you might be missing something who knows.

The importance of traffic cannot be overemphasized, and traffic generation techniques are of extreme importance to the future of your online business. Why? Because without visitors you might as well have no website at all.