It is essential when setting up a new website that you have a marketing plan that outlines the key stages you need to go through to drive traffic to your website. Having a marketing plan will avoid distraction and deviation and will also help you establish your budget for advertising your website. Your budget will ultimately determine which of the advertising methods
you can use to generate traffic to your new site.

In this article I outline some of the vital steps that you should take to create your marketing plan and build traffic to your website. I am assuming that you have done your research and established that there is a market for your product.

1. Establish your objectives and targets early on in your planning. After you have designed and built your website for your online business, you need to establish your target in terms of the income want to generate from your internet business. This will be a determining factor in the volume of traffic you require to make the necessary sales you want to make. Your objectives and goals will guide you in deciding the level of promotion you need to do to advertise your website and build traffic to it.

2. Where and how are you going to drive that traffic? Establish your advertising budget from the outset. This is one of the most important steps to make sure your advertising budget will allow you gain the rewards you established above. There are many ways of driving traffic to your website; some are affordable while others are expensive. You need to decide what your budget is and therefore what methods you can employ to drive traffic to your website.

3. Invest in the necessary tools that you need in order to advertise your website. Place a form on your pages to capture leads and follow-up with your prospects, for this you will need an automated email system or auto-responder which captures your prospects email address and automatically send your emails on a frequent basis. In those emails you will want to have a link to your website and invite your subscribers to visit your website. Establish all the tools you must have on your website to make traffic generation easy and effective.

4. Establishing what your short and long term advertising strategies are. The fastest and easiest way to generate traffic and leads for any business is pay per click (PPC) advertising because it can bring you immediate results. PPC can also help you drive targeted traffic to your website. However, you also need to have some marketing strategies that will generate traffic to your website in the long term. Pay per click advertising is normally considered to be the short-term solution for generating targeted traffic and leads fast, ideal for a new site but it is also considered to be one of the most expensive ways to advertise your business. It is therefore important for you to have other affordable ways of generating traffic, which will drive traffic to your website in the long term.  Article marketing, blogging and forum participation are some of the least costly ways of generating traffic to your website.

If you follow the steps outlined above they will help you decide on the best marketing tools to use for driving traffic to your website, before you begin spending cash on any strategy for generating traffic to your website.