Driving Traffic And Building A List - Two Most Essential Activities For Any Online Business

A few months ago, I bumped into a good friend of mine. His name is Jaz Lai and he is a very successful internet marketer for a few years now. One of his specialty in developing his online business is consistently building a huge list of subscribers base through various traffic generation methods.

As we were chatting away, what he said next startled me.

He said, "Without traffic and a list, any online business is as good as dead!"

I was scratching my head and thinking to myself, my website looked nice with great content. So people should automatically become attracted to my website right?

After all I have already done the hard work of setting the business up. So what's the problem? After pondering deeply on his direct remark, I have to agree with him.

Drawing an analogy in the offline retail business, a shop is just like your website. Your shop can be the best looking one out there but if there are no traffic generating activities like putting in effective advertisements and promotions on a consistent basis, no prospects will visit the shop and hence no sales can be made. It is really very fundamental to any business.

So what is a subscriber list and how important it is?

In the offline world, we call them prospects. On the internet, it simply means people who has decided to submit his/her email address to an opt-in form (also called a squeeze page) after clicking invitation links from emails, Facebook, articles, blogs or through many other traffic generation methods. The subscriber is usually given a benefit like a free informative e-book or report for subscribing.

After this the subscriber usually gets regular promotional email offers and valuable information from the sender. And some of these subscribers will turn to buyers. The bigger the subscriber base an internet marketer has, the greater the chances of sales conversions because you can sell them (who are targeted list) many different times and many different products.

So you see, it is purely a numbers game which is quite similar in offline businesses.

This type of email marketing is not spamming since the subscriber has accepted the offer to be sent emails and he/she is given the liberty to continue receiving emails from the sender or to un-subscribe at any time if he/she wishes to.

Email marketing is still an excellent and consistent method to engage with internet users since most people who surf the net uses email as a normal form of online communication. It has been around even before Facebook and Twitter. So you can imagine the millions of users in the world using emails each day.

There are many methods to generate traffic. Some are free methods while many are paid ones.

Free methods like article marketing, social media marketing and joining forums normally take longer time to build traffic since they can only grow organically through search engines.

The paid ones especially using pay-per-click advertisements in Google or Facebook will get your webpage instant visibility and therefore are faster in getting more traffic. Whichever method to use, the key point here is to be focused, consistent and persistent in taking action to see the desired results.