Everybody wants traffic! That elusive baitball of humanity thats out there on the Net, somewhere. Whether you're a blogger, a recruitment company or a purveyor of ornamental rugs, at some stage during the life of a website, your attention will turn to attracting visitors. The reason for this is simple - traffic is proportional to revenue. How you monetize that traffic is up to you and your specific website.

There are many, many ways people have used in order to build traffic volumes and depending on your precise needs, some of these methods will work better than others. Let's take a look at a few important ones:

There are pitfalls and downsides to all of the above methods. Advertising can be fraught with peril if you're not keenly in touch with who is viewing your ads, how often and what your CTR (Click Through Rate) is. If you're not careful you can burn through a lot of cash without attracting the right type of people for your venture.

It can be really tricky to find the type of advertising that will work for your website. A good example of this is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon will display your site to its users for a 5c charge. It's a good deal because its users actually visit your website directly as opposed to seeing an ad on another website. Or is it? The problem is not that people don't visit your site in droves, it's their state of mind as they're doing it.

Stumblers are doing the Internet equivalent of channel hopping, looking for something of immediate interest. An instant fix, if you will. The second they see a page that doesn't have flashing lights or some outrageous comedic value they're on to the next page. In other words:

So even though this method of advertising sounds very attractive, it is only effective in certain instances.

Links also have a downside for the unwary webmaster. Obtaining the right ones can be a tedious and time consuming task, and there are plenty of unscrupulous enterprises out there, geared to offer you tonnes of great links. In fact, why would anyone offer you tonnes of great links unless there was more benefit to them than you? Think about it - if a really succesful business owned many prominent websites, what benefit would it be to them to give your relatively tiny website all these backlinks? Links should be viewed as things that are earned.

Blogging and community activity are resource and labour intensive and take a fairly long time to show results. However, they are probably the most reliable in terms of generating interest and traffic in the long term. They probably also carry the least amount of risk.

So which method is right for you? The chances are, all of them - in measured and controlled doses. It's a real balancing act and something that requires perseverance and imagination. To top it all off, you have to have a website that can hold visitor's attention and get them to return time and again, otherwise you can drive all the one-time traffic in the world to your site and it won't help to build a steady stream of revenue.