Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously said “Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door”.

Even in pre-Internet days that wasn’t true, it was only ever half the story. People need to know that we are where we are, and that we have what they want, otherwise we’ll never even contact those potentially adoring customers and clients.

Alas, many people adopted Emerson’s mindset in the early years of the Web when they thought that simply building a website would automatically give them an online presence whose very existence would increase their bottom line.

It came as a rude awakening to realize that all the money spent on designing, developing and hosting a website was for nothing without the required traffic.

A website is nothing more than a piece of “Virtual” real estate that exists only in the ethereal world of the web, and unlike it’s physical counterpart on the High Street, customers cannot simply wander past with cash or credit cards ready to buy from us.

In fact, we can have the best widget in the world, the one thing that will banish poverty, cure every disease known to mankind and shower us with the wealth we so richly deserve for developing this masterpiece, but if our customers can’t find us, we, in effect don’t exist.

The Web is a vast network that’s growing larger by the day. Even as I write this, tens of thousands of people worldwide are only now gaining access to the Internet for the first time.

If we don’t make serious efforts to attract people to our websites then our efforts to date are sadly going to be wasted.

Many inexperienced marketers are still trying to carve out a niche for themselves in cyberspace and yet are still unaware of the importance of directing traffic to their websites.

Traffic is the ‘lifeblood’ of every website and as an Internet business owner we need every visitor we can get.

There’s nothing mysterious about traffic, it’s nothing more than the stream of visitors to and from our websites. We can use a variety of methods to first inform and then attract these visitors to our sites and we’ll be focusing on some of these methods here.

All traffic is wonderful but “targeted traffic” is King and this is what we’ll be going into in depth.

Visit again soon and we’ll expand our knowledge and strengthen our skills in this fascinating area together.  Keith