Are you chasing search engine traffic and pondering your options? Almost anyone on the internet these days would love to increase traffic to their website regardless of their "niche".

Clearly search engines have the potential to deliver a steady flow of targeted traffic to your website. Listed below are several suggestions for efficient use of your money when it comes to getting traffic to your website.

Here are 3 basic areas to consider:

1. Placing some key targeted pages on the internet that are SEO optimized to draw traffic back to your primary website.

2. Using Google "pay per click" campaigns with your favorite suite of targeted keywords.

3. Placing carefully targeted content on your website homepage.

If you are working on a limited budget it may be best to consider Options #1 and #3 as your first choices. The pay per click traffic generators can get to be very expensive in a short time, and these will continue to cost you money while each campaign is active.

If your focus is on pay per click, be sure to spend adequate time and effort to research and generate a list of relevant and effective keywords. There are many tools for helping with this task available on the internet and once your campaign is launched you can start to monitor and test your conversions. If you are promoting your own product you can always reinvest your earnings to continue your campaign and grow your income.

You can also consider generating leads via an email campaign. Tthere are basically three avenues you can explore: email signatures, joint ventures and safe lists. One word of warning though, and that is avoid spam at all cost, one spam complaint can seriously damage your online business. You should familiarize yourself with the laws concerning spam, and at the very least ensure you include a un-subscription link in ALL your marketing emails. Due to spam, it is advisable that you avoid buying leads, no matter how reputable the company, buying leads can easily lead to a spam complaint, you have been warned!

In its simplest form, email marketing is a matter of putting a signature in all your emails that contains a link to your main product.

If you are looking to vastly increase your list quickly then a joint venture (JV) may well be the key you need. In its simplest form, in a JV you supply the product and a fellow marketer supplies the leads and you share the profits. Hopefully, you will then get the emails of your fellow marketer’s customers, so you can then mail them with further offers.

When considering a joint venture there are many considerations you have to think about, but the main one, before you consider contacting anyone about mailing to their list, is "what's in it for THEM", not "what's in it for me". NEVER write to a fellow marketer unless you can offer them something of value in return for their help, and that is not necessarily just a share of the profits, be inventive!

Finally you have safe lists. A safe list is a list of people that have agreed to receive marketing emails in return for being able to send their own marketing email. The value of this form of marketing has never been that good. After all you are trying to sell to people who are only interested in selling to you!

Another option for drawing traffic to your website is based on the use of custom written articles and other targeted content. You can use your budget to have some unique articles written on your favorite key topics, but this can be very expensive and time consuming. Articles such as these can be submitted to article directories and published on other content hungry websites.

The best alternative for content may be that of Private Label website resources such Infogoround.com. Using PL content services, even on a limited budget, can easily provide thousands of articles that can be put to good work in drawing targeted traffic to your website. Imagine hundreds of new articles each month on a topic of your choice...articles that you can use just as if you had written them yourself! And of course PL content can be added directly to your own website or used in a variety of other ways for drawing traffic (blogs, newsletters, etc.).

One other highly effective way of generating interested leads is posting in forums that are related to your area of business. Include a link to your site in your signature and people interested in your sphere of business will often click it if your forum post was interesting.

INo matter what lead generation technique you employ you will need a way to capture your leads email address when they arrive at your site.

The traditional method has been to use a pop up or pop under which contains some incentive to get someone to sign up. With the invention of pop up stoppers their effectiveness has dwindled and therefore unstoppable pop ups (also know as hover ads or slide in ads) have evolved. This new generation of pop ups are built into your webpage and as such cannot be stopped. Simply do a search on Goggle for "unstoppable pop up" and you are sure to find a software solution to produce these types of pop ups for you.

The other alternative is to use what is called a "name squeeze page".

In essence a name squeeze page is a web page whose sole purpose is to capture an email address.

They generally contain a small amount of information about the product or service you are selling as a "teaser" for the reader and will contain a sign up form, with a message like "to find out more simply fill in the form to be immediately directed to further details on this amazing product".

A name squeeze page not only helps build your list, this information can also be used with certain software to help personalize your site for your visitor, a technique that has been shown to increase sales. Again, simply do a search for name squeeze page generators.

No matter how you generate sales leads there is one thing always to bear in mind, and that is to be effective your leads must be in your targeted market. If, for example, you are selling internet marketing products, then it's no use advertising on a site that is all about scuba diving!

When you start to build your online business, ensure you include a well thought out sales lead generation strategy from the beginning. Do not make it an afterthought; this should be in place from the very beginning if you want your business to be a success.