Building your website is simply not enough, as many of you will undoubtedly have realised by now. Affordable website promotion that will increase online traffic is the next step and you don't want to chance getting this wrong.

You need to ensure people can find you. Lots of people. Without targeted traffic, your groovy new website will sit forlornly on the Web like some neglected wallflower, unnoticed and unloved.

No matter what kind of website you have, be it a community fan site, business or affiliate site, you NEED traffic.....and masses of it. The only question you have to ask yourself is: what are you prepared to do in order to get a huge increase in traffic?

It's perfectly possible to increase online traffic without spending a dime. But...isn't there always a but....you have to be prepared to devote lots of time and energy, and have buckets of patience. It's hard work for sure, and can take many months before you start seeing your website climb in the search engine rankings.

If you have a little money to spend, things get much easier. You can let others do all the hard work of finding the best traffic generating methods and let them give you a blueprint to follow - for a fee of course. This drastically cuts down the time and effort needed on your part, and before you know it, you'll see an increase in online traffic that will have you gawping in disbelief.

You can of course get more or less instant increased traffic by using Pay Per Click. Most common is Google's Adwords system, but if you don't thoroughly research your keywords you can end up broke. When you know what you are doing, adwords can be a wonderful addition to your traffic generating methods.

Of course, if you are absolutely loaded you could pay someone else to do the work for you, but I see little point in that. Provided you have a moderate amount of spare time you'll do a much better job if you apply the techniques yourself. It really isn't hard at all.

These days you can get some fantastic website promotion tools and video programs which demonstrate, step-by-step, exactly what you need to be doing, leaving no room for confusion. I confess I love videos, as ebooks often leave me a little unsure as to whether I've followed an instruction correctly. With a video to watch and learn from, that problem is now removed. Yay for technology!

Website promotion software is quite sophisticated these days and can automate the 'grunt' work for you, which even if you have the time to spare can be very tedious work. Keyword research for instance: it would take days to do thorough research on various keywords for your niche. Automated software can reduce that to hours, or even minutes.

Google and Overture have their own free tools if you lack funds, but they are limited. They are still useful until you can afford to purchase something better. Obviously if yours is just a hobby site and not intended to earn an income, then it isn't necessary to spend money on professional keyword research tools.

New software programs are now starting to take advantage of Web 2.0, automating the whole process of promoting your website. The cool thing is you don't need to be a techie geek to understand these programs, as they are very easy to use; they will certainly get you free back links on high quality sites. This will help your Search Engine ranking and increase online traffic enormously.

Again, it can be done for free: for example a very popular site is MySpace. If you don't already have an account there, create a profile and make sure your website link is in there. You have immediately got a free link back from a site with high PR rating. Build connections there and your link will spread like wildfire. Takes time and effort, but it's well worth it.

Rinse and repeat for similar sites, and all the social bookmaking sites that are springing up. Or get some automated software to take the hard work out of it. As always, the choice is yours. Without traffic, your site might as well not exist.

Build it. Learn traffic generation methods. Promote your site. Then and only then, will they come.

To learn simple, effective techniques to generate long term traffic solutions for your website, visit: http://www.easytrafficexplosion.com