You have invested your time and money into putting up your website. Your prospective customers are out there, somewhere, and you want to make them aware of your site, what you offer and why they would want to visit.

You have some marketing ideas, but you don't want to waste money. How can you avoid mistakes other smart website owners make?

By reading this article, of course.

I'm going to outline several tactics that DON'T work. By the end of this article, you'll save time and money (not to mention avoiding throat-clinching disappointment and frustration) by skipping these Bad Ideas.

Bad Idea #1 - Let's get more traffic to get more sales.

Seems reasonable at first glance. But it's not always the best course to take. How well does your site sell now? What's the sales conversion rate of your website? If your website is inefficient at converting 100 visitors into customers, it will be inefficient at converting 20000 visitors into customers.

For instance, I may find a client's website converts 1 percent of their visitors to customers. If we can boost that number to 2 percent, they have doubled their sales without spending more money marketing. When they DO spend money on marketing, they still convert the higher percentage of their visitors to customers.

Bottomline: Take a look at your conversion rate before you increase traffic. What can you do to boost it?

Bad idea #2 - Let's just buy thousands of visitors.

Many website owners I talk with tell me they bought 10,000 visitors and didn't make ONE sale. You'd think they'd make at least one sale.

Any smart person would think a FEW people would buy. Why don't they buy?

You've seen popup windows. Many times these "traffic building systems" automatically pop open a browser window showing your website. That counts as a visit. Yes, a person who was not looking for what you sell. A person who was in the middle of doing something else. So of course they close the irrelevant window.

Bottomline: You have other options to build traffic. The goal is to get a return on your marketing dollars. You want the hordes of visitors coming to your website to BUY.

Bad Idea # 3 - Where can we buy some banner ads?

In the best situation you place your banner ads on sites that have visitors who may want what you offer. Even these banners typically get .3 of 1 percent clickthrough. That's 3 clicks per thousand views!

People tend to ignore banners.

Bottomline: Skip banners. If you absolutely want to do banners, only do them if they are free or pay-per-sale as in your own affiliate program. There are more effective marketing tactics to spend your time and money on.

If you have tried these 3 tactics and they didn't work, chalk it up to experience. If you haven't tried these tactics, great. Now you can use your time and money for marketing that DOES work.