The name of the game in Internet Marketing is traffic. If you have a website, but no one is visiting it, you don't have an effective marketing vehicle. You need lots and lots of qualified traffic to your website in order to generate leads and make sales.
Of course, for those with big budgets, there are firms you can hire to optimize your site for certain keywords and hopefully get your website to show up on the first page of the search engine results for those keywords.
However, for most of us solo-professionals and small business owners, we don't have thousands of dollars to hire a firm to do this for us. The last SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm that contacted me about getting my website onto page one wanted a couple thousand dollars to start with and about $1200 a month ongoing after that. I don't know about you, but that's a little rich for my small business marketing budget.
So what are your other choices? Are there ways to generate traffic that don't cost an arm and a leg? Absolutely! I have successfully used Article Marketing to generate tons of free traffic to my websites. I've also pursued link exchanges with other websites, issued press releases online, and done my own keyword research and site optimization ... all with pretty good results, especially for a newbie (I've only been marketing online for 2-1/2 years).
If you type "twin stories" (one of my keywords for my Twin Connections website) into Google, my Twin Connections website
shows up several times on the first page of search results.
If you type "small business marketing help" (one of my keywords for 10stepmarketing) into Google, my 10stepmarketing Website shows up on the first page of the search results.
And the best part is, all of these online traffic generators are FREE!