The life blood of any website is traffic, not traffic in the real world sense, but a large flow of internet visitors to your website. The more visitors to your website, the more money you will make. But getting a large flow of visitors is not as easy as it sounds, it doesn't just happen, you have to make it happen, and here are 4 very effective ways of doing this:

1. Conduct joint ventures with other webmasters or list owners. Creating an effective joint venture is one of the quickest and most profitable ways of boosting your website traffic and massively increasing your sales.

A joint venture is simply an agreement made between two parties in which they both benefit. In your case, you have a product to sell and what you need to find is somebody who has a large list of subscribers and who is looking for good quality products to offer their list. You would offer the list owner a percentage of each sale in exchange for them recommending your product to their subscribers.

The key with joint ventures is to find list owners who are not direct competitors. For example, if you have a product related to puppy care you joint venture with somebody who has an ezine dedicated to dog breeding, or you could joint venture with your local vet.

2. Write articles related to the topic of your niche product and submit them to as many article directories and ezine editors you possibly can. Writing articles serves three purposes:

i) It sets you up as an expert in your niche. If your articles appear in many newsletters and hundreds of websites, people will perceive you as an expert.

ii) At the bottom of each article there is a brief bio in which you can place a link back to your website. If people are impressed with the content of your article, they will click on the link to your website to read more.

iii) Each of your articles that are published on the internet is one more link back to your website. The more links that point back to your website the more relevant your website will appear to the search engines and the higher your page will rank.

The key with articles is to submit them everywhere, to as many different places as possible. Submitting articles manually will take days, so use a paid submission service.

3. Promote your website using pay per click search engines. Your first task is to find as many keywords and keywords phrases related to your product (that people are typing into the search engines) as possible. We're not talking about ten or twenty, but hundreds, over a thousand if you can. Next you need to create a brief classified type advertisement which has a catchy benefit laden headline.

When you have these, enter them into your pay per click search engine and decide on a maximum bid for each keyword (the amount you are prepared to pay when a person clicks on the headline for your advertisement). When a surfer enters the same keyword phrase as one of yours associated with your advertisement, your advertisement will be displayed as a "Sponsored Listing" and if the surfer clicks your ad, you get charged the bid amount and the surfer is taken to your website.

4. Get as many links as possible pointing to your website. As mentioned earlier, the more links pointing to your website, the higher it will rank in the search engines for the keywords you have optimized the page for.

There is another side to having hundreds or thousands of links pointing to your website... You also get a considerable amount of traffic from people clicking on those links. This type of traffic tends to be very targeted as people won't click on a text link unless it is of interest to them.

Other than article writing, there are two major ways of getting links back to your website:

i) You can purchase text links back to your website from other high ranking web pages. The key is to buy links on pages with a similar theme to your website.

ii) You can create a reciprocal linking directory on your website. For each link you receive from another website, you will place a return, or reciprocal link back to that website. The ultimate link directories are categorized to help surfers find interesting links and also because links of a similar theme give the page they appear on the same theme, which is important for link relevancy and search engine optimization.