The key to successful marketing on the internet is to drive traffic to your website. Having a website that just sits un-promoted in cyberspace is not only a waste of time, but also highly frustrating.
I have been intrigued by the idea of internet marketing for years, but it has taken me a long time to overcome all the gumption traps involved in actually getting started (the biggest one being that I am a cyber-dinosaur — my only real experience using computers for anything other than glorified type-writing involved Fortran IV and IBM punch cards almost thirty years ago).
What I have learned is that the internet marketing process can be relatively simple. You have to find a market, develop a product, and build a website to promote your product and process transactions. But, all of your efforts will be useless if nobody visits your website.
I have been studying a course that discusses the problem of driving traffic to your site in great detail. There are at least six ways to increase the number of visitors to your site, including word of mouth from one web user to the next (you are reading this letter, aren’t you?), buying targeted hits to your...