For many people business success or failure rides on your ability to get traffic to your website. The best strategy to do this is a hotly contested topic across the internet, and with so many people selling information products on all kinds of different ways it can be really hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I always say in business you usually have to invest either time or money. My litmus test for most of these strategies is, will it take me time to do, or do I have to pay for a service. If it claims I don’t have to do either, I frankly tend to ignore it.

Most successful strategies usually involve both time and money, but always lean a little more in one direction. My favourite strategies always involve using more time. Usually the investment of time is at the start, and once the strategy is set up you can then leave it on autopilot and have all the free time in the world. With money strategies they nearly always involve a continuing payment for the service (such as a monthly subscription, paying for ads or clicks etc). Frankly, I prefer everything to become as residual as possible.

Money strategies might include google adwords, paying for advertising on a site, ezine advertising, paying a company to handle your search engine optimization. These all work and work well, but if you don’t know what you are doing you can really lose your shirt before you start to make money. If you are relying only on money methods, if you run out of money you tend to run out of traffic to your site. The upside to money strategies is that you get traffic going quickly. It can be the fastest way to generate some business for your website and get yourself off the ground. Never jump into money strategies without educating yourself. If you don’t want to take the time to learn about a certain type of advertising you can find companies that will set up and manage your campaigns for you. Even with this you have to invest a little bit of time to research the companies. I’ve seen people hand over their whole budget to a company only to have zero results to show for it. Put in the effort to find out what results other people have had using their service, and DON’T go by the testimonials on their website.

Time strategies are the real internet gold mine. The truth is, even when people are feeling poor they would generally rather throw money at a problem than have to invest a lot of time. So those people who are willing to put in the hard work have a much larger reach. I’ve heard marketing be compared to fishing, if you are paying using advertising or pay per click services you are fishing in the same fishing holes as everyone else and competition is fierce. You want to get out of the fishing hole and into the open ocean.

Time strategies help you to develop your voice. You can write a blog, write articles, make videos, create a branded webpage, use social networks, create relationships. Leads for your business that come through these strategies will already know you, have a connection with you, and see you as an expert or leader. They are far more likely to want to do business with you, and less likely to waste your time. The danger of time strategies is that if you let them they can take up all your time. So pace yourself, set aside the amount of time you want to spend on marketing each day, and use the rest for business (talking to people, following up, etc). Get the tools that will make it easier on you. Wait until you have done the research and know what tools will assist you best (I use article submitters and video submitters, its saves me HOURS of work).

If you’re time and money poor and still want to grow a business quickly here’s what I recommend:
-Create a manageable budget to start some paid advertising to get leads quickly so you can get to talking to your leads and doing business as fast as you can.
-Research the time strategy that most appeals to you. Set aside a small budget for the tools that will facilitate getting yourself up and running quickly with this.
-Set aside time daily to work on your chosen time strategy. Set yourself a daily amount of work, for example 1 new article and 1 video distributed to different bookmarking or directory services.

Remember, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Marketing can be really fun when you are doing it in a way that appeals to you. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing the results come in. And most importantly: Marketing is secondary, always put business first and focus on the outcome.

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