I think we can all agree that to make money on the Internet we need a money making website or blog. I am talking about having your own domain name pointing to your own website or blog.

The longer you are online trying to make money the more apparent it will become to you that you need your own website or blog. Replicated ones do not cut it as the competition to be profitable increases.

Speaking of competition what is it we are competing for? Traffic, or as we think of it, visitors to your site. This is Internet marketing simplified. Everything we all do is designed to improve website traffic. This is a very easy principle to understand. You might think of it as Internet Marketing 101, or Internet Marketing for dummies.

My Internet business will beat your business everyday if I have more traffic. My website can be horrible in content and design, and I will still make more sales, get more subscribers to my newsletter, get more referrals, get more repeat traffic, and so on if I have more traffic than you.

Yet in my 5 years marketing online I have seen more written on this subject that just about everything else put together. Do you get the idea that getting website traffic is going to be hard to do.

Even Internet marketers with large advertising budgets are not guaranteed success in getting traffic from the advertising they do. You can waste as much money as you gain from your online promotion efforts.

For this reason I have always tried to think long term when I promote online. I like to ask myself this question. “Is what I am doing today going to benefit me in the future?”

I have always tried to go for as much free or nearly free traffic as possible. I put my emphasis on getting links back to my site as many ways as possible. For me that has meant article marketing, social networking, forum marketing, blogging, and email marketing to my opt in list.

Doing it this way is a lot of work. Getting traffic one backlink at a time is not the fastest way to do it. That would be pay per click advertising. Getting my website address on someone else’s web page takes effort.

That is probably why search engines reward you so much for doing it. Anyone with money can buy their traffic. To earn it takes some skill and a lot of elbow grease so to speak. But for a long term solution to getting traffic you have to understand it will take effort and then buckle down and do it.

Hopefully this article will help you understand how hard getting traffic is going to be and how much work is in store for you. But the rewards are huge for those of you willing to do just that. Every backlink is potential traffic for years and years to come. That is exciting! Improve website traffic by going for backlinks.