You know that you have to get traffic to your website and when it comes to getting that traffic you basically have two options, you can pay for it or you can get it free. However getting free traffic to your site requires an investment of time and therefore is not free, figuratively speaking.

In this article we’ll talk about the pros and cons of getting free traffic to your website and a simple game plan for driving a mass of targeted visitors to your site.

Let’s talk about getting free traffic first and see what we’re up against. First of all with free traffic there is a considerable time investment. While there are a number of tools on the market that can help with automating the process, you still have to generate lots of unique keyword rich content to work with for the traffic to stick.

In addition to generating loads of content, there is the issue of search engine optimization and designing your website in such a way that will attract the attention of the search engines and yet provide value for your visitors at the same time.

While free traffic does require a lot of hard work the ultimate benefit is that you can end up driving more targeted qualified buyer traffic to your site in the long run, even more so than if you paid for it. But it takes time.

Let’s have a look at paid traffic and see what’s involved. With paid traffic sources it comes down to tracking and testing your ads to make sure that you’re not throwing money down the drain.

You can buy traffic from Google through their AdWords program or you can buy it from ezines that have gigantic subscriber bases, but ultimately you must track your campaigns to make sure that they are profitable or you could end up overspending yourself out of business.

The upside to paying for traffic is that once you know how to setup profitable ad campaigns you can literally command a truckload of traffic to your website immediately. With an instant flood of targeted traffic being exposed to your offer, the potential for quick sales right out of the gate is very high and there is nothing like being able to get your first sale in your first week or two.

So a simple strategy for you to gain the needed experience in setting up profitable ad campaigns is to work at getting free traffic to your site first and establish some kind of traffic to your site before you go and drop a load of cash on paid traffic sources. Once you’ve established some decent conversions from your free promotions, then you can start to ramp up your profits with paid advertising methods.