Is quick, cheap and easy website traffic possible?

The short answer is no. You can achieve tremendous website traffic quickly, or you can achieve tremendous website traffic easily, but everything has a cost. When you utilize techniques that may save time, you’ll likely have to invest greater manpower. When you utilize techniques that may save you a lot of work, you’ll likely have to invest greater financial resources. The choice is your, but there is always a price to pay.

• One option that can work very well in some industries, provided that you have the budget and the manpower to manage it is PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing. By signing up with a search engine to display contextual ads based on search terms entered by their visitors you can reach a very targeted prospect and you only pay when they actually click on your ad. You also need to be aware that some of your competitors may click on your ads; some just out of curiosity, some out of malice, though the percentage of this happening is usually very low. To prevent this, you can ban certain IPs.
• If you’ve built an opt-in email list, you can utilize it to drive traffic to your website by publishing and sending an email newsletter. This can be an easy way to promote a particular product, service or event, from time to time, however, using it to promote your business in general typically take a moderate amount of work to develop the necessary content on a  regular basis. If you have the manpower, it is definitely worth considering.
• Display advertising (banners, rich media, etc.) can be a powerful tool not only to increase traffic, but also to fortify your branding efforts. If you plan to utilize this medium, be sure to focus on quality over quantity. Advertising on websites that are geared to your ideal prospects will be far more successful than advertising on websites based strictly on the volume of visitors they have.
• Redirected traffic is usually very cheap, and there is a reason for that. It is almost completely worthless. Not only is the traffic extremely untargeted but more often than not, you don’t receive anywhere near the number of visitors that they claim to send you. Avoid this medium like the plague.

Marketing your website is more like a marathon than a sprint. The business owners that develop extremely successful websites do so by working hard at it day in and day out. Over time, this dedication is what allows them to make their way to the front of the pack while others are quitting all around them.