Just about everyone trying to break into the online marketplace knows that the key ingredient for success is traffic. However, any old traffic won't do - it must be targeted traffic, i.e. people who have come to your website because it is about a niche in which they are specifically interested; better still, people who actually want to buy what you have to offer.

A great design, lots of content, hours of work and lots of money thrown at your website will all be for nothing if you can't attract targeted traffic. Traffic means potential buyers; buyers ultimately mean profit for you and while the dot com boom is over, many individuals who concentrate on a specific niche can make a decent living.

This is why your traffic must be targeted traffic, visitors who already want whatever product you have on offer. To find these potential customers, you need a marketing campaign which is precisely aimed at them.

It is an unfortunate reality that in order to make money, you have to spend money and perhaps the best way to spend the majority of your budget if you're just starting out is by advertising. In fact, advertising by some means or another is essential; otherwise nobody will know that your website is out there. The right type of advertising can increase your traffic enormously and with high volume comes targeted traffic (customers), if only a small percentage.

The best known advertising of this type, known as pay per click or PPC is Google Adwords. Using this program, you bid a price for a keyword or phrase and if your bid is high enough, your advertisement will appear on the front page when someone searches for that keyword or phrase in Google. This means that (a) you don't pay unless someone clicks on your advertisement and (b), if they do click on it, they really want whatever your keyword suggests.

Once you have targeted traffic, you can gather statistics on ratio of visitors to sales, you can test different keywords and see which attracts the most visitors and more importantly, buyers. The Adwords program itself gives you lots of information on the number of times your ads are shown, the number of clicks and consequent click through rate. There is also information on cost per click and what the average position of your advertisement is when it is shown.

The great thing about this form of advertising is that you don't pay if your ads aren't shown, you don't pay if your ads aren't clicked on and when you do pay for a click, you know that you have target traffic.