It is finally finished. Your site is gorgeous, appealing and downright amazing. With your graphics and images painstakingly chosen, you just know you’ll be rolling in the dough in no time flat. You submit your prize to the search engines and the directories and sit back to watch the money storm begin. You wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, a few weeks later, you know that a pretty site alone does not generate revenue by itself. The search engines aren’t going to do the work for you, so you’ll have to find a way to promote your site and get it in the public’s eye. A solid strategy is the only way to get the traffic your website and business deserves.

While there are countless was to promote your website, I will outline 5 of them for you to implement.

1) Incentives are a great way to increase web traffic. Offer something for free, either a sample or a report. If you are advertising a product for sale, try giving away a free sample to anyone who visits the site. Offering a free report or free sample is another way for you to send some decent traffic to your website. This tactic is called “moving the free line”. It is when you give the customer something for free, and in return, you incite an action from them, such as visiting your site.

2) If your company has budgeted some money for you to spend on increasing traffic, the best way to get more visitors is to pay for them. Many search engines offer pay per click services that charge only when a user ends up at your site. This tactic is a very effective way to target a high quality audience.

3) Networking is probably the most cost-efficient way to send a lot of web traffic to your new site. Meeting and developing relationships with other marketers is a sure-fire way to send a bunch of free web traffic to your site, and may bring in valuable revenue. If you can arrange it correctly, forming a partnership with another business with a similar target market is a great way to swap buyer traffic. This is probably the best way to increase not only web traffic, but also revenue.

4) Remember that content powers the internet. Writing and submitting articles referencing your products and services, and then promoting them to hundreds of websites and directories, will create a powerful flow of lasting traffic to your business. This is called “critical mass” in the web marketing world. The term refers to a state wherein you have your name, site, and product out there in so many different places, you could not stop the referred traffic coming to your website even if you tried.

5) Adding on to tactic 4, producing and syndicating online videos is another great way to drive up your number of visitors. Video traffic tends to be very responsive, and syndicating a large number of videos online is a guaranteed way to increase website visitors. Not only will you receive traffic from the online video community, but also from a variety of search engines.