You are Kneau Reeves. This is a hostage situation. You need traffic, lots of traffic. What do you do, hot shot? What do you do?

There are several methods for generating traffic to your website, and this post is about knocking them down. Let's examine the drawbacks to all the tools in your internet marketers handbag. And then I'll tell you the lazy marketers way to internet traffic.

Organic Search Results
Organic traffic is the holy grail of internet marketing. If you go looking for it, be sure to bring a shrubbery. You need time to build organic traffic. Anyone saying they get good traffic from organic search two weeks after launching a website is probably targeting a long tail keyword that no one is looking for.

Backlinks
Backlinks are the key to Googles organic search results. So get out there and spam every forum, blog or directory you can to get those backlinks. There are even websites telling you to use PAD submission software to spam. After a couple of weeks you wind up pretty unfulfilled.

Social Media
Sounds easy right? All you gotta do is quit your day job, get a divorce, lose your friends and hang out at Twitter building new virtual friends. Did you ever wonder why the top posts that are supposed to have such great content usually stink? The guys that rule the top of the social media sites belong to social media cliques where it's quid pro quo (you digg my post and I'll digg yours). Social media websites even tell you flat out that's how it works. And worse, they squash websites that offer to digg you in exchange for cash. I totally understand why this is banned, but isn't it hypocritical to ban diggs for cash but encourage and reward begging for diggs from your virtual friends?

Article Marketing
That's sooo 2004 dude. Article marketing websites are now the spam of the spam. It's the fastest way to disappear inside a pile of crap since Windows Vista.

The Lazy Marketers Guide to Internet Traffic
I am an American. It's my right to have whatever I want, as soon as I want it. I have been conditioned through television and advertising to have no more than a 30 second attention span and to crave instant gratification. I am used to spending massive amounts of money, and I'm prepared to go to into debt to have the next IPod, IPhone and IWhatever. You too? Then the obvious solution is PPC advertising. Google Adwords delivers traffic today with no (or very few) questions asked. All you have to do is pay for it.

In order to run a business online or be a successful internet marketer, there are a few tools you're going to need. The cost for brand name software tools are often too expensive, especially when every dollar counts. Fortunately, there are alternatives to the big software names. Not only are these alternatives capable of filling your needs, but they are a also free.

FTP Utilities
Everyone needs an FTP program right? FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. It's an add-on for your Firefox browser. It starts as a new tab within your Firefox browser and you FTP right from your browser.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684

AutoMailer
Marketers need to manage their email lists. Rather than pay a monthly fee to a service like aweber.com, here is a free (GNU license) PHP script you can install. poMMo is versatile Mass Mailing software. Add a mailing list to your website, or organize stand alone mailings. Unique features such as the ability to mail subsets of your subscribers set it apart from alternatives.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pommo/

Antivirus Software
You really can't afford to work online without some virus protection. ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003 and Vista. ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use it absolutely free of charge.
http://www.clamwin.com/

ZIP Utility
You absolutely needed a ZIP utility to work online. 7-Zip is open source ZIP utility software. Most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license. You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don't need to register or pay for 7-Zip.
http://www.7-zip.org/

Spreadsheet and Word Processing
You'll always use Spreadsheets and Word Processors. OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It's a replacement application for Microsoft Office, and can even use Microsoft Office files.
http://www.openoffice.org/

Adobe PDF generator
The Adobe PDF format is everywhere online. PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Video Capture Utility
Do you need to create a video? These days more and more tutorials are in video format. Jing is free program that lets you record video of what you do, or what you see. The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.
http://www.jingproject.com/

Graphics Editor
Would you like an alternative to the very expensive PhotoShop? Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
http://www.getpaint.net/

Photo Editor
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
http://www.gimp.org/

Encryption
Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.
http://www.truecrypt.org/

Websites thrive on traffic. Business websites need customers. Blogs need consumers to read them and subscribe.

As a website owner, you'll probably spending a large portion of your time driving traffic to you website. There are several ways to bring traffic. You can optimize pages for the search engines. You can write articles and submit them. You can use social networking to build relationships on the internet.

One very important method of driving traffic is Google Adwords. Adwords has one important difference from all the other methods mentioned. Adwords costs money. You design an ad for your website, and then Google places your ad on their search engine results, in the paid or sponsored links section. You pay Google every time someone clicks your ad.

However, Adwords has advantages that offset the costs. Why should you use Google Adwords to drive traffic? What are the arguments for Adwords?

1) Google Adwords will start sending your website traffic immediately.
It takes time for a website to rank high enough to appear on organic search results. It takes time to write articles and submit them. It takes time to build a social network. All the other methods of driving traffic require an investment of time. These alternatives require hours of work to establish, and then may take weeks or months to show results.

Adwords will start sending traffic to your website today. As soon as you create a campaign and an ad, you can begin getting traffic.

2) Google will help you every step of the way.
Google makes a significant portion of their revenue from Adwords ads. Google makes money by you participating in Adwords and wants you to succeed. Google publishes user guides, blogs and other information to make using Adwords as easy as possible.

3) Adwords provides the information about your campaign that you need to succeed.
Adwords provides keyword research tools so you know what consumers are searching for. Adwords helps you evaluate your campaign after it is created. Adwords supplies you with the impressions, click through rates and costs of you campaign. It informs you of the Quality Score for your ads, on a scale of 1 to 10. It offers advice on how to improve the Quality Score.

4) You can control the cost of Adwords with the proper strategy.
Knowing how to obtain a good Quality Score for your ad can reduce your cost per click. A well optimized campaign can deliver traffic for just a few cents per click. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide describes step by step how to optimize your ads.

5) Anyone can obtain the top ad positions.
Adwords values quality over price. Adwords doesn't simply award the highest ad position to the highest bidder. The ad quality score is the primary factor in ad positions. That means you can advertise in highly competitive markets, using a good Quality Score to beat out other advertisers who are simply spending more. The Free Adwords Strategy Guide reveals exactly how to get a good Quality Score.

Internet Marketing is not easy. You may find it hard to get an internet business up and going. Here are some reasons why internet businesses fail.

1. No one wants your product.
You should really concentrate on a market and audience, not a product. When you find a market of consumers who have a need, and you can fill that need for them, you are on your way to success. Rather than selling, you are just standing in front of the traffic and letting it come to you.

Take a note from Bert Ingley who makes well over six figures a year selling Madden Football information online. Bert himself will tell you he visited Madden Football sites, chatted with players, and posted in forums long before he had a product. He came with his product AFTER he learned what the people in his market wanted and needed.

Could you do the same? How much to you know about your potential customers? Google you own keywords. Visit related websites, even your competition and see what people are saying. Post on forums. Chat with people. Answer email questions. The more you know about your potential customers, the better you'll be able to market to them.

2. Talking about features, not benefits.
You probably concentrate on features of your product or service in every other aspect of business. You are probably adding features to product as the market demands or standards change. Many of your thoughts may be feature oriented.

In marketing, you never want to talk about features. Instead, you need to talk about what the feature will mean to the customer. Will it save them time? Will it make their task or life easier? Will it save them money? These types of things are benefits. In your marketing, you want to talk about benefits, not features.

3. Trying to do it all yourself.
Many times you may try to do it all yourself. You may not want to relinquish control or spend the money on outsourcing.

But, back to Bert Ingley again, he hired a professional writer very early on. Sure Bert new his product and his market. However he also knew that others were more knowledgeable and also better writers. Bert outsourced the writing and he concentrated on the marketing.

4. Not being patient.
Internet marketing is not easy. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes time to write articles, build an email list and split test messages.

Adwords began calculating Quality Scores for ads for each consumer search in the later half of 2008. Part of the new calculation is page load time. You'll learn What is page load time, how does it affect your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What does page load time mean?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render after it is requested. The life cycle of a page is straight forward.

1) The request for the page is made

2) The server will perform any server side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database. When the page is completely constructed, it will proceed to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server side rendering, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages have server side processing.

3) The server begins transmitting the response over the internet

4) The client computer receives the response

5) The client begins rendering the response in a browser window. Additional requests are made for flash scripts, graphics and javascript.

6) When the page is completely rendered, and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.

Adwords must really be measuring the time from the request until the response is read. I doubt Google can actually be attempting to time to render the page on the client, and make the child request for graphics and so forth. Google would have to add some javascript code to the page in order to know when the client side rendering was complete. I seriously doubt they would do this.

How does it affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time.

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down Advertisers using server side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. A server side redirect would be when the destination url is requested, the server side scripting language redirects the request to another url. This really performs two request, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page is an advertisement page that is shown (briefly) before the content, and may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes to much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.

What can you do to improve your page load time?

1) Optimize your server side scripting
If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database, and your code for speed.

2) Get dedicated web hosting
Most cheap web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites from many website authors are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, like bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow your page load time. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides at. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.

3) Compress the size of your page
A web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer over the internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing whitespace. You can remove any unncessary HTML tags. You can use relative urls instead of absolute urls. Do anything to decrease the size of the file.

4) Lose the Flash Animation
Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side, so it may not factor into the Page Load time. But then again it may. Either way, Flash animation tends to be slow, so get rid of it for the sake of your customers. Sure it looks great, but you can't afford to lose sales because nobody waits around for the Flash animation load.

5) Strip out unnecessary elements from the page
Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize javascript or CSS includes. Additional requests need to made for these files, so keep it to a minimum.

6) Optimize your page
As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout.