Let's assume that you have decided to create a website.

Your aim is to sell something or to tell someone about something.

The first steps include :-

• Deciding on a domain name,
• Creating the look, feel and functionality of the site,
• Creating the content of the site,
• Paying a business to host the site and send out your pages to people,
• Monitoring the performance of the website and making changes over time to adapt to changing circumstances.
  

Having done all of that, you must ensure that the people you want to sell something to or inform actually know about and make a decision to visit your site.

Obviously your mission has failed if potential visitors to your information do not visit.

Let's make a second assumption. The assumption is that your website has information that people will actually want to see.

How then can you make people visit your website ?

It is almost a question that could be put to marketing or IT students. For a website owner it is more than academic. You actually want real life visitors.

Here is how you could go about getting traffic to your website.

For the purposes of this article, we assume that  you have unlimited cash and human resources.

If that is not the case, select what can be achieved with what you currently have available.

• Send out a Press Release
• If your site is locality centric, hire a billboard and place a large banner on it.
• Pay for radio or TV advertisements promoting your website.
• Hire a drive around mobile sign.
• Place advertisements in National, State and Local newspapers.
• Create and send out Newsletters to selected email recipients.
• Pay Google, or Yahoo to place advertisements on search result pages.  ( PPC )
• Pay SEO businesses to ask, beg or pay for links from quality related websites where the visitors that you want already go.
• Pay writers to create well researched articles about your topic or site product so that search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo, will decide that your site has excellent information that will be of interest to people who trust them to send them to sites with good information not available elsewhere.

You really have two choices

• Buy visitors by paying for search engines , advertising, writers and links
• Acquire visitors to your website by creating articles, information and data                                 ( aka content ) yourself and wait until search engines find your site and then ignore you for a while and then decide include it in search results.
  

Time is money. Do you buy quick results or wait a reasonably long time for search engines to send visitors to your site.

Google, MSN and Yahoo need a reason to recommend your site. You must have information that people want.

Plan B is to pay for visitors by Pay Per Click which gets you visitors without necessarily having any content with value.

You need to make decisions. You will have to spend money.

No one ever said that owning a website was easy.

Greg Rogers
PirateWEBS.com  Great websites created cheaply