What good is a business without customers?

Whether you are an online business owner or you go to work everyday at your own 'brick and mortar' business, your business is NOT a business unless you have customers.

So, I thought I'd spend some time talking about what i personally think is the most important, and at the same time the most difficult topic - TRAFFIC.

If you're in the 'brick and mortar' world there are lots of ways you can get new customers. You can advertise in the media (newspaper, radio, TV etc.); you can have a Sale with huge signs in front of your store; you can distribute 'snail mail' brochures and flyers through regular mail or you can count on simple word of mouth as well as probably a number of other things. Well, the same applies to your website as well.

There are numerous ways to obtain traffic to your website but none of them by themselves are going to take your business to a high level of success in much the same way as just one type of marketing will create a dynamite 'brick and mortar' business. It takes a combination of a number of strategies to be successful. In marketing this is called a "marketing funnel".

Just think of a typical funnel with the wide end at the top and the small end at the bottom. At the top all of the various marketing strategies we'll discuss in this as well as other parts of this series start to drop new leads (customers) into the funnel with all of them eventually ending up at the bottom which happens to be your business.

It is the funnel concept that makes an online business survive long term. If one type of traffic strategy stops working, the others will pick up the slack. If you count on just one marketing tool, well, what happens if that one just stops working. The answer is your business dies.

So if there is one thing I hope you get out of this series of articles it is that you must attract customers to your new internet business by using a wide variety of tools. Keep what works and change what doesn't. Always look out for what is new.

Marketing is not a static concept. It changes all the time and if you want your online business to stay current and entertaining you must stay up with what is new not only as it pertains to what is contained in your website but also to the tools you use to attract new leads (customers).

In Part VI we'll lay out the various strategies typically used in internet marketing and give you some guidelines to go by in order to minimize the trial and error so often associated with being a new internet entrepreneur.