A website without traffic is a useless sales tool for your direct sales business. This is where a lot of direct sales businesses will bite the dust. After they exhaust methods of selling to friends and family, their "business" sort of dries up and blows away. The truth is that building traffic to your website is somewhat like pushing a big boulder up a hill. In the beginning of your traffic building campaign, you must work extremely hard to get the big rock moving. If you work hard and put your efforts in the right place though, that big boulder will eventually crest the hill and begin moving under it's own power and that, my friend, is a beautiful thing.
There are several ways to get traffic to your website. One thing that you must always keep in mind is the quality of the traffic that you'll need to your website. There are services on the internet where you can pay a fee to basically have them send a certain number of visitors to your website. If this is the path that you decide to take, you'll want to make sure that the traffic that you get is highly targeted quality traffic. After all, you don't want some innocent bozo that's looking for a beer can hat to be directed to your Mary Kay site. That kind of traffic will not convert to sales and basically you'll just be wasting your time and money.
You can also go the route of buying advertising through Google Adwords or buy advertising space on other blogs and websites. This can be a very effective means of advertising your website, but again I caution you to do your homework before using services like Google Adwords. You must understand fully what you're getting into when your money is on the line.
Personally I like generating free traffic. Generating inbound links to your website are a great way to build traffic. To generate links, you can trade links with other website owners, or blogs. Again, this is effective, but it takes a great deal of manpower to get every single link to your site. My favorite means of generating inbound links is to write articles. I write articles on areas in which I have expertise or in areas where there is high demand where I can research the subject thoroughly. I then submit those articles to article directory websites like EzineArticles. In the resource box on each article I include two links to pages within whatever website that I am promoting. Once the articles are published by various webmasters, my links begin growing exponentially. This type of leveraging of your time and resources is the way you must think to be a successful stay at home mompreneur. More links equals more traffic.
You may not have the time to spend writing articles or may not feel confident in your writing abilities and that's perfectly fine too. You can hire writers at a reasonable price to write articles for you via Elance or even Craigslist. A quality article will cost you a bit more money to have written but you can usually get a good deal on a bundle of articles. Articles related to the content of your site or that would compliment your website will bring you a higher quality of traffic than completely unrelated articles.
Search engine optimization is another way to build big time traffic to your website. This is a highly effective way to build free traffic to your website but it's a difficult nut to crack for most beginning webmasters. Basically the concept is that you sprinkle keywords throughout your website that get a high number of searches per month and a low number of competition. Google offers a keyword research tool to use in order to help you in your research. To achieve and maintain a high ranking in the search engines, you will likely need unique content, a website that builds in content over time, and strong linking to your website. There are so many ins and outs to the process that it may be worth checking into hiring someone with experience in search engine optimization to help you in your endeavors.
As with anything in your home based business, find something that works and do it over and over again. Don't waste your time or efforts with any type of marketing that is not giving you the results that you desire. Most importantly however, is to do SOMETHING. Even if whatever you do is wrong, at least you've learned what not to do and you can move on to try something else and if you keep doing this over and over, you'll eventually find your way to success.
