This post is about the bare basics of the web: traffic. Yet, this is often the #1 challenge for any web site. If you have just built a site and don’t know why you aren’t making money, read on.

In order to make money, your site needs visitors.. so where do they come from?

1. The Search Engines.
Pros: Once you rank, it isn’t too difficult to get visitors to click through onto your site.
Cons: Your traffic can fluctuate violently if you lose rankings, and you have no recurring visitors.

2. Links from other sites.
Pros: These natually help with #1
Cons: Require you to publish high quality and/or original content to get the links that can really send you a good volume of traffic.

3. Pay per click advertising
Pros: Immediate delivery of highly targetted traffic. Get an Adwords account and you can have targetted traffic within hours or less.
Cons: Very expensive. Often impossible to have a positive ROI for publishers relying on advertising for revenue. (If you are an affiliate, break even or profit is realistic.)

4. Print advertising
Pros: Visitors who may be missed through methods 1-3
Cons: Extremely expensive, lots of waste through untargetted audience viewing your ads.

5. Word of Mouth
Pros: Free once you have a site that people want to tell their friends about.
Cons: Forgetable domain names will kill you, so will dashes and non-dot coms. (I’ve pointed out before, poker sites advertise non-gambling dot nets on American television because people just type in the dot com anyway.)

This list really is not complete. I could add video, radio, billboards, and more. However, these are the 5 big ones you should know about. If you are not working hard on #1 and #2 you will have a very difficult time succeeding online. #5 should follow naturally.