If you're reading this, I likely don't need to explain the fact that unless a site has visitors, the rest of it is absolutely meaningless. You can hire professional designers, and experts to write articles and web content, but unless you have visitors, it's just another package of junk cluttering the internet. How to break out of this junk pack, and be seen and read, is at the same time easy and difficult. Easy because there is a logical way you can go about acquiring and building traffic. Difficult because there are about 100 million others who are doing the same thing.

Before we go about trying to build traffic, let's do a little analysis of the kind of traffic you need. There's targeted traffic, which means that the visitor coming to you from that source likely is looking for exactly what you have on your site. This would be from search engines, web directories where you are listed in that category, forums which serve your industry, or sector and ad branding campaigns, where you advertise products alongwith your website.

Then there's general traffic, which means the visitor could be from anywhere, even a totally unrelated site, and may or may not have any interest in the things your site has to offer. This can happen when you buy traffic from traffic sellers, do direct mail campaigns, and your link appears on pages such as news pages, which draw a general audience.

The thing you have to remember about traffic is that these are human visitors, and you need to cultivate them, and keep them coming back for more. This is what we call 'repeat' or 'bookmark' visitors. If you have a 100 visitors this month, and 10 of them keep coming back, means that next month you'll have 110. The month after that 120. And so on. This is just the basic calculation. The number of new visitors also has to increase exponentially each month, and we'll be looking at ways to achieve that.

The amount of money you earn depends directly on the number of 'eyeballs' or visitors you have. So say you're earning $150 from a 1000 visitors, the best thing you can do is increase the number of visitors to say, 5000. And then try for more. And so on. Design, content, hosting, etc. is all fine for finetuning what you offer, but ultimately, what you earn comes down to how many people visit your site. Simple Math.

Lastly, you need to study and analyze your incoming traffic. What is your clickthru ratio? What is your sales conversion ratio? Where is your traffic coming from? Which of your pages are the most popular? Which ad banners work? How much traffic do you have? Is it going up, or down? How much does each visitor cost you? All of this, and more, can be accomplished by means of traffic analying tools such as Webalizer and Google Analytics.

Alexa Rankings For HubPages

As of date, Traffic Rank for hubpages.com, according to Alexa, is 4,533, which basically means that it's darn good, and gets a heck of a lot of visitors and page views.

Let's get down to the meat of this article. How do you increase your traffic? It's a simple question of letting people know that you exist. As of date, the best source of traffic is from the search engines. From Google - To be specific. There are two ways you can get traffic from Google - Work hard or pay for it. Working hard means building your site and content on your page in a professional manner and following the SEO advice given to you by Google. If this sounds a tad difficult and time consuming, you can buy traffic by means of an Adwords campaign.

Another thing you have to do is find link partners. Meaning you need to find websites and webmasters, with sites related to your subject matter, willing to link to your site. Please note that while exchanging links is not strictly a wise move, there are directories, such as Dmoz.org, and the Yahoo! directory, where having your link can bring a healthy rush of visitors to your site. You just have to expand on this concept and keep adding to the list of sites which link back to you.

As an example, here's one startegy which worked just fine for me. I not only submitted my site to both Dmoz and Yahoo, but I made a list of all the sites in both directories which fell into the same category as mine. I contacted each site and asked for a linkback. There were about 200 sites, and some 20-25 agreed, in return for my linking to them. End of the day, I had my site listed in Dmoz, Yahoo and a lot of other sites which were already in both directories. As a result, my Google traffic shot up, and my pages began to be ranked high for important keywords. Of course, all this took time ( about 8 months ), and effort ( I had to create a directory to add and maintain the links ). But it was worth it.

I have been working with websites for over 8 years now, I have seen a lot of traffic to my sites and I have a golden rule. I add one new page of content a day, and I request at least a couple of websites to give me a linkback everyday. You do that for one year, and you have a website with over 350 webpages and maybe a 100 sites linking back to you. Even if each of them, on average, sends you 4-5 visitors, you have over 500 visitors a day. Add to that the visitors you get from search engines and other sources, and you very easily breach the 1000 visitors per day mark in a years' time. That's 30,000 visitors in a month. Even if your website is the same as a 100,000 other websites.

Other than this, there's lots of ways to increase your traffic. You can write articles for other sites and recieve bylines with linkbacks to your website. You can write and submit press releases, and you'll get a decent bit of traffic from Google News. You can network with other webmasters and like minded people on forums and blogs, where you advertise your signature. You can use Myspace, Youtube and other social networking tools, and try to get some viral traffic.

All this adds up, and combined with a well run and targeted Google Adwords and/or Overture campaign, can turn a run of the mill website into a money making machine.