Are you trying to promote your website, and it's not working? You can spend hours and hours adjusting the header, the footer, and the colors on your website.  You can test your site in different web browsers, check its HTML code and adjust the margins until you're blue in the face.  Your website could be picture perfect, and it could even have an eye-ball-magnetizing sales letter, but none of it will make a difference if you don't get much traffic! Read on to find out how to change that.

Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business.  After all, if you don't have traffic, you can't have any sales! And any old traffic won't do either. What you want is "targeted traffic."  What's that?  Traffic that is interested in what you have to offer.

This means, of course, that you need to learn how to drive that targeted traffic to your site, and lots of it. It's the mastery of that particular skill set that will make you a success in the world of internet marketing.

So how can you get more traffic?  You can pay for it or work for it.  You can even get free traffic -- the so-called organic traffic courtesy of Google and other search engines. However, generally you have to really earn that kind of traffic, and so it also falls in the "work for it" category.

Still, free is free, and if your budget is limited, you can increase your chances of ranking well by carefully optimizing your website for the right kinds of keywords and by building links through article marketing and social networking. And once your website shows up on the first page of Google, people will find you.

If that seems too complicated or too much work, you have the option of paying for it, generally through some kind of pay-per-click advertising.

There are a number of options. Google AdWords is the best-known, but you can also go with Yahoo or even MSN.  There is a learning curve involved, though, so better read up on it before you throw all your money at competitive keywords and end up spending a fortune for very little pay-off.  On the other hand, if you get it right, it can work like a charm and get you the traffic you want practically on demand and in record time.

If you want something in between those two extremes, and time isn't quite so essential, you can also explore ezine advertising, classified advertising, forum marketing, and social networking.  In fact, you should do those things anyway.

In addition, publishing your articles in article directories is not only good for making your site rank well on Google, but it can also drive traffic directly.  The best thing: once your articles are published, they may well continue to bring traffic and sales for years to come.