by Pamela Heywood

There are no secrets: there are no magic formulas. Forget about making money fast while you sleep. Sure, you can automate processes so that your business continues to operate while you are snoring away, but there is no substitute for your initial application and hard work.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it isn't difficult. The even better news is that most of it can be done for FREE.

OK, assuming that you have built a Web site appropriate to your business (no, one of those self-replicating ones will NOT do!) and that you are publishing a regular ezine. Both need content: both need quality, but there's plenty of help out there to achieve it.

Now what you need is traffic, or in less technical terms, people looking at your site, your business, what you have to offer.

How?

Every single day we are bombarded with plans and schemes which claim to beat the system, drive masses of traffic to your site, make you rich overnight, all your dreams come true so that you'll live happily ever after. All similarities to a fairy-tale are decidedly intentional.

It is confusing. Where do you start?

Now I am not saying that these things don't work, except the ones which are undoubtedly scams! Generally, every single one will give you some benefit, some link out there, but no single one is the magic answer. No matter what they claim. Doing them all will take time, but if you work through methodically, each and every one will help you in some way.

So to eliminate some of the confusion, here is my Five Point Plan for organizing your promotion and traffic building efforts. It isn't the be-all and end-all either, but it is a good, organized start to a regular process. Incorporate one item from each step each and every single day and you will keep making a little progress and after a while it becomes self-perpetuating.

1. Build subscribers to your newsletter and keep sending them back to your site for something; offers, content, freebies. These will be your best customers: your best sales force. Concentrate on building rapport with them and above all make it real easy for them to recommend your site. Consider http://recommend-it.com and give them an incentive for doing so.

2. Submit to search engines once a month. Your daily chore is to ensure that your site is fresh, your META tags in place, your links live, etc. I recommend http://SelfPromotion.com You can use it for FREE or pay a small amount to have your details kept in the system to simplify repeat submissions. You will find all the information and guidance you'll ever need right there and this service works. You get listed.

3. Concentrate on getting reciprocal links with other sites which are similar to and complimentary to yours. There are specialist directories for finding people who want to swap links, try www.swap-resources.com or use the search engines and find out who is linked to your competitors. Write and propose swaps to the webmasters. You'll get as much, if not more, targeted traffic from these links than you will from the search engines, plus having links back to your site will improve your ranking on the latter because of the way the link-popularity algorithms work. Make sure those who link to you are listed on the search engines. Do it for them if they are not.

4. Once a day, submit to one links network, classifieds or FFA network or some such similar entity. Again, this takes a few moments and is a no-brainer. It won't get you direct traffic because mostly no-one sees them, but it does help keep those links topped up to improve your rankings.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 incessantly.