Once you have launched your website, your attention shifts to traffic building and sustaining the traffic. Traffic is the most important aspect of any e-business, as the number of people visiting your websites coverts into the revenue you can generate from your website.

Like any long-term activity, you need to have a plan for traffic building. A traffic generation plan essentially charts out the things you need to do and when you need to them. The traffic generation plan gives direction to your efforts and you will be able to achieve your goals more effectively.
Given below are some of the key components of a good traffic generation plan.

Set your goals
Whenever you make a plan, you do this with an intention of achieving some goals. So the first step in making a plan is to set your goals.

For a successful traffic generation plan, set goals based on your immediate, near future and long term goals. The first goals will of course be building the immediate traffic for your newly launched website. Then comes the traffic goal for the period immediately following the launch phase till say may be six months. Then come the long-term plans that would be the minimum traffic you must have everyday to profitably sustain yourself.

Achieving your goals
What use is a plan if you are not making any efforts to achieve your goals. A good traffic generation plan should include the steps you should undertake to get to your goals like a road map. When you know what you need to do, you can actually begin to do it.

For instance, your website is about to launch, your target to get the maximum visitors in first few weeks. For this you need to plan for promotions through various media like other Internet sites, newspapers, and special promotions and so on.

For the long run you need to sustain a minimum traffic of say 50 visitors everyday. So you will need to continuously market your website through various methods like forum postings, affiliate marketing and so on.

Review your plan
Review your traffic generation plan from time to time to see if it is working. If your plan is not working and you’re not generating the projected traffic, then you need to make changes in your plans. It is important to get the traffic or in the least make the projected sale.

Checking on your plans will allow you a chance to adjust your path to get what you want. Remember that plans can be changed and adjusted. Goals are important not the plan.

Websites do not come for free and you have to have enough traffic to cover your costs. A good traffic generation plan will ensure that you have regular flow traffic for years together. The more efforts you put in your plans, the faster you will see the results.

You too can have more traffic than you can handle, no matter how much traffic you get today, or even if you’ve never been indexed in the search engines before by simply visiting quality video content sites such as YouTube.com or Metacafe.com and entering ‘traffic generation’ into the search box.

Worried about the next Google slap? Do you only rely on Search Engine traffic? Don’t know where to start when you need to drive traffic to your site? If yes, this article is for YOU! Whatever you do on the net, you will always deal with Traffic Generation…the holy grail.

To make it short, you have 2 main types of traffic :

1) Search Engine traffic
What is it? : organic traffic coming from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN

Pros :
- This traffic is free
- Traffic is highly targeted
- Volume of traffic can be very high

Cons :
- you don’t control it
- you rely on robots to analyze your site and deliver some traffic
- you need to get indexed…without being de-indexed (once again, you rely on search engines policy and algorithms)
- short term

2) Referred Traffic (I know Search engine traffic is also a sort of referred traffic, but let’s put SE traffic apart from this category)
What is it? Traffic coming from third party sites (other than search engines) and is a result of a “manual / human” action.

Examples : article directories, social bookmarking services, forums, partners, text link ads, banners, directories, rss…

Pro :
- you control it
- you have a lot of means to develop it (almost unlimited ; a lot are free)
- it’s highly targeted
- You can pay to get better targeting and control over your referred traffic
- Long term

Cons :
- Time & resources consuming
- Repetitive tasks

Now, through my membership, my forum, my readings of other forums, I know that most webmasters mainly rely on search engines traffic, our first category.

The aim of the present article is to throw the light on a different angle of the Traffic Generation big box!

Summary : the right way to get into traffic generation is to forget about search engines.

Focusing on search engine traffic gives a too narrow vision of traffic generation. It does not reveal all the opportunities existing outside of the search engines (understand all the way to generate Referred Traffic).

In addition, as you’ve seen from the cons above, you accept to rely on something you never control, and this is a HUGE risk in your marketing strategy.

Warning : I do not say, you should not care about search engine traffic. I say that it should not be your priority, and the first door you try to open when dealing with traffic generation. It’s a question of point of view.

Now, on the other hand, focusing on developing what we called Referred Traffic is a more positive, constructive and profitable attitude and marketing strategy.

Not only will you build traffic for the long term, but you will also “manually” control your traffic, either by submitting your content, your sites, your feeds, or by exchanging links, content, traffic with partners, being active on forums, blogs…

Doing it this way will give you a lot of power and effectiveness. Those sources of Referred Traffic only vanish…if you decide to let them vanish. Once again, you control everything.

Now, you have some positive side effects :

- By building Referred Traffic, you give a lot of food to search engines to index your site, understand them, and rank them well…

- …thus developing naturally your Search Engine Traffic!

Try to develop Referred Traffic by submitting your sitemap to Google, and you will understand the difference between the 2 approaches

Google and other search engines tend to change their algorithms quite often to produce more relevant content for users of their engines. Sometimes, your site is getting de-indexed in a day just because of this.

Are you lost, is your site dead? It could if you only relied on Search Engine traffic. It has no impact if you focused on building Referred Traffic.

In one case, you feel bad and like if you had wasted your time. In the other case, you don’t even notice it (on the long run ; of course, you can see a fall in traffic coming from a given search engine)

But even then, your site has a lot of chances of being re-indexed when you’ve build Referred Traffic, simply because the search engines food is still there! And this is a HUGE difference and one of the most valuable asset you can develop.

If you’re still with me, you should now understand my point : when dealing with bots, you need to act as a human…which means you should not try to talk to them Give them some “bot food” that you build naturally by developing a Referred Traffic Generation Strategy.

Here are 10 easy “pieces” to do what we described above :

Once you have a site…

1) Find some related blogs, read them, identify trends, and post comments (no stupid comments, no spam of course) with a link back to your site where you’re also discussing the topic

2) Do the same with related forums. Use search engines (!) to find relevant forums. Register and start being active on these forums. Use your signature to put a link back to your site

3) Create a blog (if you don’t have one) and post on a regular basis on it. Use a service like feedburner to syndicate your content with other webmasters.

4) Submit your feeds, blogs, and site to niche directories

5) Find “authority” sites in your niche, analyze them and contact the webmasters to :

a) propose a link exchange (you should first put a link to their site),

b) if you’re selling a report or an ebook, propose them to become an affiliate (give them a fre.e copy of your ebook first), and make it easy for them to manage their promotion

c) if they have a newsletter, read it, understand it, and then ask the webmaster if you can have a sponsored ad into it, or even better a solo ad where you could advertise your site, newsletter, ebook…

d) propose content exchange with link back to each other’s website

e) build a relation with them

6) The most effective : write articles and submit them to article directories (some with big traffic, and some niche related ones)

7) Social bookmarking and social networking :

a) build a Squidoo lens (see Squidoo Profits for more details: http://www.squidoo-profits.com). You can find many sites like Squidoo and build pages about your niche on these ones too. You can link them to your main niche sites, you can link back to your blogs, or even to your other “squidoo” like pages, thus creating a “niche social net” all relevant to your niche.

b) build a myspace account and create a profile around your niche, then build your “list” of friends around this profile

c) submit your site to social bookmarking services (digg, technorati, del.icio.us …)

d) You can also comment on the most popular entries with a link back to your site, blog, or squidoo lens.

Use videos and sites like youtube.com (and similar) to drive traffic to your niche site. Produce a short video (2-3 minutes) around your site, your niche and you. Link to your Videos from your “niche social net” (see 7) ) Also, ask webmasters to put a link to this video (once you have build a relation with them) – Or they can upload it to their server and brand it with their affiliate ID, if you have an affiliate program

9) Make it viral : your best source of (new) traffic…is your (current) traffic!

Use some “Tell a friend” features on your site to have them promote your site. You can provide incentives (such as a free report, a coupon for your ebook…)

10) Paid Traffic : yes…all the above techniques do not cost a penny…(unless you pay for advertising on a partner’s site)
You can pay to get targeted traffic : you can advertise through text link ads, banners, that will appear on high traffic sites.

You should seriously consider paid traffic. Do not see it as a cost, but rather as an initial investment to boost your site.

Also, if your site is correctly monetized, then paid traffic is the easiest way to get some quick metrics about this, and to make it profitable quickly.

As you see we could easily expand this list. But, those are, in my opinion, the most important sources of Referred Traffic.

Now, compare the above list with Search Engine traffic, and you will see why your approach should focus on generating Referred Traffic and not Search Engine Traffic. This type of traffic will come naturally anyway…