What do online businesses pay the most attention to and spend the most money on? Their website.

This should be obvious because a website is the unique place where a business can display its products and services. It’s the home base where you make sales and take orders.

There are two fundamental methods of acquiring website sales:

1. Generate traffic to your website (traffic generation)
2. Convert your website visitors into customers (traffic conversion)

Every company, individual, or entity that has any kind of Internet presence competes for online time and mind share from internet users. Don’t expect anyone that visits your site to remember you, its your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.

You can generate traffic to your website by:

• obtaining high search engine rankings
• investing in pay-per-click advertising campaigns
• affiliate marketing
• online video marketing
• blogging
• direct advertising
• joint-venture endorsements

Related: 9 Informative Elements of a Successful Website

Have realistic expectations

It usually takes up to a year or longer for a website with a newly registered domain name to gain any kind of search engine ranking for main keywords, typically showing up in search engine results only for keywords that are not competitive.

When you are a new business, getting started online is like being at a stadium full of screaming fans and expecting to be heard. You typically need to pay for advertising space in order to be seen and recognized.

If you don’t already have an online presence, or know someone who does, most of your traffic generation will need to come from PPC and direct advertising. Once you get the ball rolling you can skillfully build your social media pages to help drive referral traffic.

Observe and Evaluate

As your website gains in popularity and is getting shares on social networks, you can decide whether to cut back or accelerate your advertising strategies. After building a significant following on social media, you will find it much easier to land affiliates and endorsements.

Before you even consider spending money on website advertising or traffic generation, you should first make sure your website contains several informative elements. If your website is nothing more than an online brochure, users will spend less than 10 seconds on your website before leaving.

Your website must serve a function and fulfill a need

Fulfilling a need is generally achieved with a highly informative blog, video library, or collection of productivity tools. If you are a web designer, for example, you could create a form that finds the best web hosting provider for a user based on their required budget and technical requirements.

The bottom line is people go online to find information, not be sold to. When someone is shopping for something online, they are generally seeking information, not advertising, about those products and services. You must identify the needs of your target audience and find a way to satisfy it by using your website.