Traffic, traffic, it is all about the traffic. It really doesn’t matter how great your product is, how long you have worked to put together just what people want and need, or even just how good your professionally-done sales page converts – if you are not generating traffic, you won’t make any sales.

So the million dollar question is, how do you get traffic. A lot of people are spending a lot of time developing their product, which isn’t a bad thing, but then don’t spend the time introducing the product to the world in every way they can. Then there is the time and money you have to spend after product development. So really, it’s the marketing that will make you the money.

And you are thinking, sure all Mr. Guru has to do is send a out a promotional email to his list and he will make big money. You don’t expect him to have to bend over backwards to market his products. But let’s look at two things that are wrong with this assumption.

1. Gurus spend a lot more time and money marketing their products than you know. They can hire the best copywriters to write the sales copy, have tools created for their affiliates, let the affiliates know all the details, oversee everything or hire a launch manager to do that, use social media to get the word out about the product, put together a series of emails, blog posts, questions and answers, and more. If it’s not a big seller, they have lost lots of money.

2. Gurus do have to make concessions to market their products because of the current economy and stiff competition. You might have noticed more people coming on line these days and they are seeking out ways to make money, but more people are keeping their wallets shut. There is certainly plenty of free stuff online to show them what they want to know (moving the free line) and they are already feeling the pinch of layoffs or decreased income. The competition is fierce, many products look so much alike that a marketer really has to make his stand out as unique, even the gurus.

So, how do you generate traffic? You might have heard of the different ways already – using social media, writing articles, doing Pay-Per-Click, backlinking, guest blog posts, getting affiliates/JV partners to promote, commenting on blogs, answering forum questions and putting your link in your signature, etc… and do not forget to use keywords, Wow, that is a lot of work!

Have you been trying to use all of these? You might have tried some of them, maybe a lot of them, but you are still unsure which one is the best. You might be spreading yourself to thin by trying to use almost all of them. You may not have enough time or money to do each traffic method justice.

Come up with a plan that you can put in systematically. After you have jumped in deep enough to a particular traffic method, then you will be able to analyze your results. For instance what if you decide for your new product to do article marketing, guest blog posting and forum answering.

Make a decision as to the number of articles you are going to submit, where exactly you are going to submit them and strategically place some of them on your site with some text anchoring and backlinking between articles. Be aware – you can not write just a couple of articles for this method to work. The more articles you have, the more traffic you can generate for your site.

If you want to do guest blogging, try contacting 3 or 4 bloggers who have good traffic numbers and have a decent page rank, and offer to write a blog post for each of them. Of course you want the subject to connect with your product and be sure you are writing different articles for each guest blog.

It will not be hard for you to get trapped in forums and wanting to read all that is there, so keep your focus. You are there to find questions that are related to what your product is about and finding answers for them. That is one of the ways to be branded as an expert. The better you can answer their questions the more people will notice you and that link you have in your signature.

Traffic will not come easy, you will have to work for it. You will be using different techniques. And you will want to give those techniques a chance before you give up on them. And remember just because something works for one of your products does not necessarily mean that is will work with another product in a different niche. It may take some trial and error before you get it right. Just don’t give up.