The traffic already exists, either on other people’s sites or through online connections, that are plugged into terminals that go directly into a person’s home or office. In this respect, you don’t have to create traffic; you have to learn to build tributaries that lead from that large ocean back to your online offerings so that existing traffic has the opportunity to flow back to you. The inlet that brings this traffic from the ocean to your tributary is the numerous backlinks that you post all over the Internet in various places. It’s these links that will bring traffic from one area of the WWW to your business website.

Taking this metaphor a step further, each individual who is searching the Internet can be viewed as a drop of water that has the capacity to flow from one area of the Internet to another. If you also take into account not only the behavior of each individual, but also the way the water is distributed on the Internet, you will find that people congregate in various areas, and some places are not meant to hold traffic, but to distribute it even more, like search engines.

Ultimately, a search engine will list results from a search that is done using a set of keywords, and based on that result, the drop of water or individual typically chooses a few places to hop to next. That’s one way that water is moved across the network of tributaries on the Internet.

The other way is accomplished when the force of gravity itself pushes water from one area to another. On the Internet, this occurs when so many people find something of value that they start posting more and more backlinks back to the same area. When that happens, the popularity of the Web page increases and more water or people flow back to the site on the strength of mass exposure alone. We will explore these two mechanisms in depth to show you how to get more traffic to your site.

Lastly, another way that is not as natural as the two ways mentioned above is to pay someone to come in and dig a tributary, or tons of links back to your site. If you do this through marketing strategies like affiliate and referral programs, it’s considered okay. If you do this through spamming and coercion, you’ll end up getting into legal trouble. It’s important to note that when you are trying to get attention to your website, what you do has to fall between good, legal behavior. Cybersquatting on someone else’s trademark name as your domain name to grab traffic, for instance, may be doable, but it’s going to get you into trouble and should be avoided.

Tomorrow we will take this a step further towards targeted traffic! Stay tuned.