On the internet web site traffic is king. In many ways traffic is like a currency on the internet. If you are a website owner, the more traffic you get, the more prominent your site will be. For some this translates directly to making more money and growing their online business. Without traffic your website has very little value to anyone but you – and maybe some of your closest friends.

Having a good or informative website is by no means an indication or a guarantee that you will get traffic. Internet web site traffic is extremely valuable and the competition for traffic is fierce. To get traffic to your website is not an easy task and it usually requires a fare amount of time and money.

If you run an online business then, building traffic to your website is arguably the most important thing you can do for your business. The golden rule is to spend 20% of your time growing your website and 80% on growing your traffic. When done correctly, building traffic to your website is a long term investment and one from which you will reap the rewards for years to come. Building traffic is by no means an overnight exercise, but something that takes time and patients.

Aesop, in his fable of The Goose And The Golden Egg, illustrates a very important approach to online traffic. In the fable a very poor farmer one day discovers that one of his geese lays golden eggs. At first he could not believe his luck, but upon closer inspection he realizes that it really is gold. Overwhelmed with joy, every morning he would go and get his golden egg. For a while the farmer was quite content with getting a golden egg every morning, but as time passed he grew more impatient and more greedy – he wanted more. Puzzled and frustrated by why the goose will only lay one egg at a time he gut open the goose in an attempt to get more, only to discover nothing.

Your website is your goose and if you treat it properly it will continue to produce golden eggs for you. The way you feed it is through funneling traffic to it and this is a gradual and consistent process. If you get impatient and you ‘cut it open’ you might just kill it off completely and along with it your golden eggs.

It's true that there are a lot of quick fix ways of getting traffic to your web site, but many of them might kill your website. Building good solid web site traffic, on the other hand, will continue to bring you traffic for years to come. It is vitally important to think long term. Quick fix solutions rarely last long term. Investing the time in long term solutions will eventually pay off and when they do, they tend to keep delivery day in and day out.

Those who always jump unto the bandwagon to follow the 'latest' black hat techniques for getting traffic, tend to make a full time job out of it – they have to. As soon as the one source dries up they have to move on to the next just to get some traffic. Those who focus on long term and solid sources of web site traffic do the work once and the results keep paying off over and over again. This is what working smarter and not harder really means. Initially it might require more work and a steeper learning curve, but in the long run you always get more for less.

Internet web site traffic is something you need to build and you need to do it consistently. In the end you get to determine just how much traffic you get. Traffic is the lifeblood of any website and on the internet there is no free lunch – you have to go and get the traffic and above all, give your web site visitors a reason to come back.