A backlink is a link that leads back to you from other websites, one of your own, or even the same website. The benefit most people are familiar with is search engine optimization—the more people link back to you, the more popular and relevant you are as far as the search engines are concerned. Major search engines such as Google have more advanced algorithms that determine whether these links are from relevant sites and how current the information is. That’s why entire positions have been set up for people to monitor and create backlinks to make sure a site stays on top of the page

Second, and probably more obviously, backlinks send traffic your way. If a popular website links back to you, visitors to that site can also end up on yours. And if that website is in the same niche as you, you don’t just get visitors—you get interested visitors who may potentially want to do business with you. The fact that you were referred by a site they already trust also adds bonus points to your credibility.

Another important benefit of backlinks is networking. Often, when a site links back to you, it’s a sign of appreciation—you may have provided some useful information or given them good publicity. In any case, it’s a way to build good relationships with others in your field. Down the line, it can mean anything from more backlinks to promising collaborative projects. And just like in any business, that’s one of the things that set successful users apart.

There are several ways to get backlinks, but the most effective ones are the ones that take work and effort. Search engines are now programmed to see through tactics such as loading your site with backlinks or posting in forums just to make your signature hyperlink show up. Some people also try to rank highly but choose keywords with little competition or demand, but that doesn’t mean much either—you do show up on top of Google, but the people who do visit are probably not interested.

The bottom line is that backlinks are worth your time, and should be given at least the same amount of effort as other marketing tools. Don’t think of it as just another thing on your plate, but as the foundation for the rest of your marketing and a long-term investment in credibility.

Keyword research: It’s not as simple as typing up search terms you would use yourself. Read around to see if people are actually interested in the topic, and then do a few searches to make sure it hasn’t already been answered a thousand times. The more unique your post is, the more it will get around.

The headline: True, it has to be catchy, but it also has to attract search engine robots. You want to work your keyword or key phrase in and put it as close to the beginning as possible, while still sounding casual.

The slug: A post slug is part of the domain that contains the post itself. For example, a post titled “The Best Laptops for Poor College Students” might be assigned a slug that reads “myblog.com/the-best-laptops-for-poor-college-students.” For SEO purposes, what you want is a slug that contains only the important words, such as “myblog.com/best-laptops-college-students.”

Pictures and videos: We all know how much a picture helps liven up a post, but it also serves as an SEO tool. Work keywords into your alt text  and title tag—this will make it easier to turn up on relevant searches. When there’s a relevant video available, add it in—search engines equate that to being a good source of information. You can start making your own videos or embed other people’s, giving due credit.

Subheadings: Breaking up your text into schematic chunks makes it more readable. It also leads search engines down the right path: they scan the HTML tags from H1 onwards for relevant keywords. Use these tags instead of just formatting each level differently.

Linking: Both internal and external links are vital to a post’s rankings. When you’ve built up a good archive, always try to link to older posts whenever it fits—it keeps the search robots on your site a little longer. External links—those that lead to other sites—are less clear-cut on the benefits, but it’s a good way to network with other bloggers and build a good reputation.

Meta descriptions: This is the one- or two-line clip that appears just below your link on a search results page. Google only displays entire descriptions under 155 characters, but it puts keywords in bold so you may want to work them in. Try to lift it from your actual content so people can find it once they click.

The call to action: You don’t want people to just read your work and move on. You want them to buy a product, sign up to a service, or share your post—whatever your business model calls for. A brief sentence urging them to take action can make all the difference.

Make information accessible: Interested advertisers are just like any other user: if they don’t find what they need in five seconds, they’re off to the website next door. Put up an “advertise here” page and link to it somewhere visible—at the top of your menu or a prominent spot on your sidebar. On the page, put in everything they need to make up their minds, as well as contact information in case they want to get in touch.

Show, don’t tell: Not everyone knows how big a 125×125 ad is in real life. If you have spare placements, use them as displays for potential advertisers, showing them how big a banner ad is and how it would look on your site. You can also put up house ads—ads for products you sell on that website or another one you own. Offering free ads or a trial period can also increase interest.

Boast your site stats: By the time you’re ready for direct ad sales, your site stats will probably be worth showing off. Use it to attract advertisers. The first thing they usually look for is site visits: more unique hits means that more people will get to see their ad. You can put it up on your sidebar, and go into more detail on your advertiser info page—at the very least, provide data on readers’ gender, age, and location.

Have a niche. Use your site stats to create content that targets your readers. This will not only keep the same readers coming and build a loyal reader base, but also tell advertisers that they’re speaking to the right people. You can go off on a tangent once in a while, but keep the bulk of your content on the same general topic.

Look professional. Free blog templates are a good start, but if you can afford it, hire a web designer to make your site look professional. This builds credibility both from your readers and your advertisers. Readers want to know that you know what you’re doing, and advertisers want to know that you have a good relationship with your readers. It takes time and a bit of money, but good design is well worth it.

Many successful entrepreneurs got their start in affiliate marketing. For some of them, it continues to be a major source of revenue, but for most, it taught them the marketing principles they needed to build their own institutions. Affiliate marketing puts you in a good position to learn: you can start small and minimize your risk, while still being exposed to the challenges of getting noticed on the Web. When it’s time to market your own products, you have all the skills you need to get it right. Think of it as learning from more established companies until you’re good enough to be their competitor.

You can learn affiliate marketing on your own—there are lots of free or inexpensive resources online—or sign up for actual classroom courses. Each one has its pros and cons, and at the end of the day it comes down to your availability and learning style. Whatever you choose, make sure to look into the company’s history: since the industry’s boom a few years ago, a lot of self-appointed gurus have sprung up and began charging hundreds for a service that took them five minutes to put together. Look for reviews, contact former customers, and call them up for information and a look at their syllabus.

To do that, you’ll have to know the skills you need and see if the company offers them. Some of the key skills are list building, designing squeeze pages, and tracking and managing website information. It’s about as much tech-savvy as it is about marketing flair. The best affiliate marketers are good at both. If you’re struggling with one area, knowing at least the basics can get you a long way.

As we’ve mentioned, not all affiliate marketers stay in the trade for long, but that’s the best part. Whether you’re just starting out or have years of experience in online business, affiliate marketing can open new opportunities or even reopen old ones—and no matter what field you’re in, the skills you take away will be useful for yeas to come.

It all starts with a good website with regular traffic: you don’t get advertisers at your door for a blog that’s only five days old. Although there’s no official number, most people agree that a website becomes “marketable” when it gets at least 1,000 unique visitors per day. If you’re not quite at that point yet, don’t worry: there are other factors that can push you up, such as your Google PageRank or Alexa rank and the number of subscribers you have on RSS.

To get that kind of traffic, your content needs to be tailored. This means that you have to speak to a particular group of people, just as potential advertisers will be targeting a specific market. Diversity is okay—you can talk about food one day and spray-painting the next. But you have to be sure that they’re of interest to the same group of people. The market is at a point where you can never be too specific; as far as advertisers are concerned, the narrower your focus is, the better.

Next, you need an intelligently designed page. You may know how to get advertisers for your website, but how to attract them is another matter. There are two good reasons to invest in good design: first, advertisers want to associate themselves with professional (or at least professional-looking) hosts, and second, they want to have good visibility on your website. Obviously, you’ll need a good idea of what kind of advertising you will sell–banners, text links, sidebar ads—and design your site around it, making sure to keep your own content on center stage. And don’t forget to throw in a page for interested sponsors: an easy-to-find “Advertise Here” link with detailed information can go a long way.

Finally, you need an ad server software. This is a program that puts ads on your website and tracks statistics for specific ad types and areas. Some of them come with blogging platforms (WordPress’ WP-Ads is one of the most popular) and others are independent, with lots of variation in features. If you’re just trying things out, it might be a good idea to start with the former, and then move on to more advanced solutions as you get more advertisers.

As is often the case, more than a few site owners have tried to find easy ways to get these links. No one really wants to spend time posting on forums, commenting on blogs, and other tried-and-tested ways to get backlinks. Link building software promises to put the tedious work out of the picture and get your links up for you. The idea is that by paying to automate the process, all you have to do is wait for the traffic to pour in.

A typical link building system will post links to your site from content websites that are ideally relevant to your own. Many of the newer ones post one-way links, which means you don’t link back to them in exchange. This helps improve your search engine ranking, as two-way links are a sign that a website is in a link exchange agreement and isn’t worth as much. How effective this is depends a lot on the provider itself: how reputable are its websites? Do they have useful content, or are they just “link farms” that don’t attract the right traffic? These are just some of the factors worth taking into account when looking at link building software.

For most site owners, link building software is useful mostly as a data entry tool. Manually setting up links requires you to research relevant websites and fill out dozens of forms, a task that can take up six to seven hours a day for an average-sized network. Automating the process can save you a lot of time, but it shouldn’t replace research, quality content, and networking—the main factors that make link building effective.

If you think you can benefit from link building software, you may want to look into other features as well. Many programs set themselves apart from the competition by offering other services, such as article submission and email marketing tools. Others offer site analytics, but these are rarely as reliable as those of Google and Alexa. Look closely at the list of features and see which ones are most worth your money.

Using expired domain traffic works on the principle that a defunct website’s readership can be used by another. The first step is finding an expired domain that is relevant to your website—this ensures that the traffic that gets redirected is made up of interested readers. The domain must also have had a good following when it was still active; the more popular a site used to be, the larger the readership you can tap into. Popular domains also tend to have inbound links from other sites they used to associate with; if these links are still around, you also get traffic from a number of other places.

Next, you buy the expired domain and set it up to redirect to your site, usually with a simple php code. This is where relevance comes in. You’re basically taking an existing customer base and trying to replace their old haunt—and to keep them, you need to be at least as good, ideally better, than the previous domain. If you have a blog on health insurance, redirecting from a defunct fashion website won’t be of much value. A related domain, however, will ensure that the traffic you get is well-targeted.

Another strategy is to put content on the domain itself. Many experts recommend using the redirect code as a “filler” while you’re working on a content buffer; when you’ve got enough material, you can set up the domain as your own site. The advantage to this is that a well-known site may already have a good Google PR and Alexa rank, inbound links, and other attribute that can take months or years for a new site to build up.

Others suggest using expired domain traffic for satellite websites, or sites that are part of a larger network geared towards boosting one main site. Since satellite pages are secondary, it usually doesn’t make sense to put too much effort into driving traffic to them. Using free traffic from expired domains is a great solution: it gives you targeted traffic at a fraction of the cost and time, so that you can focus on providing regular, useful content.

One of the most popular ways is to set up a blog. For many people the blog is the business, and keeping it updated is nothing short of a full-time job. For others, blogging is a way to connect with customers and boost marketing efforts, essentially allowing readers to spread word around about the business. Whatever your purpose is, blogging can get you targeted traffic on a regular basis, especially if you’re able to provide useful content and address your readers’ questions.

Linking is another widely used traffic generation method, and for good reason. Having lots of sites link back to you means that there are more opportunities for people to find you online. Getting these links on relevant websites is even better, as the chances are high that you get highly interested visitors. Also, search engines take the number of relevant inbound links into account when ranking site popularity. This means that the more links you have, the higher up on the list your site appears.

Social networking is one of the newest but fastest-growing ways to increase site traffic. It’s a lot more work than it seems, but the payoff is well worth it. By setting up a Facebook page and Twitter account for your site, you can reach a lot more people, and reach existing readers in a more convenient way. It’s a lot easier for them to follow your blog or check your site for updates when they learn about it through sites they visit every day anyway. You can also expand your network through existing clients’ contacts.

On the Web, getting new visitors and holding on to old ones are equally valuable. You should invest as much time in one as you do in the other, no matter how big or small your business is. While it’s worth it to spend a few hours a day trying to drive traffic to your website, it’s important to follow up on them and make sure they’re not just one-time visitors. Remember, occasional traffic can bring you money, but it’s the loyal people who keep you in the game.

That’s the whole concept behind targeted traffic buying, an industry that promises to send thousands of visitors to your site for as little as $10. Ads such as “10,000 visitors for $10” have had bloggers and site owners wondering where to buy targeted traffic and how it works. Even with only 5% of visitors turning a $1 profit, that’s a return of $500 on your initial $10. Too good to be true, right? That’s because it is.

Companies offering targeted traffic work a variety of ways: by forcing visitors to your site through popup windows, squeeze pages, sometimes even false links. A few operate get-paid-to-surf schemes, paying people to spend a given number of seconds on a variety of websites. The most obvious flaw in this system is that the traffic is far from targeted—it’s hard to capture the interest, let alone the trust, of someone who was basically tricked onto a website. Another flaw is that search engines can flag a sudden surge of short-lived visits that seem to come out of nowhere, which means your ranking can plummet overnight.

What’s more, the terms of these services can be unsurprisingly skewed against the client’s favor. For example, on many targeted traffic contracts, there are disclaimers that say a visit will count even if the ad closes before it can load (often due to slow connections or lack of interest). Some even claim that the hit counters they provide may not be accurate. Then again, you can’t expect much from a ten-dollar service.

Experts are unsure whether buying targeted traffic is worth anyone’s money, but the general consensus, based on the evidence, is that it’s not. The best place to get targeted traffic is still from the tried-and-tested methods of networking and providing regular, useful content. It requires a greater investment in both time and money, but the returns are well worth it—and you don’t have to read through crafty fine print for your peace of mind.

Link building is probably the simplest form of traffic generation. You want to put as many access points to your blog as possible. You can do this by participating in relevant forums or posting comments on other blogs, and simply adding a link to your site on your signature. This takes a lot more work than it seems—you have to read other posts, research your answers, and build a connection with members of the community, all in the name of establishing yourself as an expert in your field. A link building service can do that for you, but it’ll cost you more and you’ll have to shop around for the best services.

In the last two years, social networking has been essential to getting blog traffic. Bloggers who are active on Twitter, Facebook, and other social platforms get several times more followers than those who don’t do much besides blog. You can link to your latest blog posts on various status updates—there are apps that allow you to synchronize your posts or cross-post between platforms in seconds. Many users don’t even check their favorite blogs regularly anymore—they just get updates on their social media feeds every time someone posts an update. Having a social media presence makes it easier to keep followers.

Finally, the most important aspect of increasing blog traffic is staying ahead of the game. To be able to post meaningful content on a regular basis, you have to read up on your topic and be among the first to write about it when something comes up. There are dozens of bloggers in any given field, and the only way to stand out—and therefore get the readership—is to post what people like to read. It’s a full-time job for some of the world’s top bloggers. But it’s all part of the business—as long as you have something useful to say, someone out there will want to listen.