If you’re a business owner with a website, you know that you need to get traffic to your website.

Website traffic is defined as real people actually visiting your website. You might spend thousands of dollars setting up the prettiest, easy-to-navigate site you can imagine, but with no visitors, you will not make money with that website. It would be similar to building a Macy’s -fully stocked and staffed- in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield.

There are numerous methods for getting traffic to your site. If you are in a hurry, the two methods I explain below should get your special attention.

First, you can borrow traffic. Most businesses can use some form of this method, and I encourage you to creatively adapt it to your specific situation. In essence, you simply get another website owner to agree to recommend your product or service to their “list” of interested individuals. This usually involves offering a referral fee or commission to get them to agree to this.

This particular method is effective for two reasons I’ll mention. Firstly, the website owner has already gathered the list of people who are interested in your specific topic, saving you the expense and time of identifying them. Secondly, in so doing you are “borrowing” on the goodwill of the referrer. Consider in your own experience. If you need to make a buying decision, do you place more weight in traditional, self-serving advertising or upon the impartial recommendations of friends and advisers? Most people choose the latter.

If you borrow traffic as described above, it will likely not cost money upfront, though in most cases you will pay a percentage of sales to the referrer.

Next, consider paid advertising. Your options for paid advertising are many, and at the top of your list should be pay-per-click advertising. Google and their Adwords program is where you should begin, and before long, take a look at Yahoo and MSN. The largest benefit to pay-per-click advertising is it allows you to restrict who sees your ads; in this case, only those people who type specific words into the search engine will see the ad.

Pay-per-click advertising is effective for many reasons. One reason is that you can match exactly what people are searching for. Additionally, pay-per-click advertising can be tracked. As an example, Google can identify which keywords generated the most “clicks” and using their conversion tracker, you can also determine which specific keywords led to a sales conversion.

The “pay-per-click” model does require a cash outlay, though Google generally won’t bill your credit card until the end of the month. At first, you will want to monitor your Adwords account frequently to ensure you are not spending more than you intend, although once you have your ads and website optimized, you will likely want (and happily buy) all the traffic Google can send you, because you know it will be profitable.

These are only two methods of getting traffic to your website. Future articles will reveal many more methods.