TRAFFIC TACTIC #1: PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be both a long -term and a short-term strategy. This is because you can control your campaign at will. It all depends on your budget. If you are prfiting from your campaign, you can run the ads for as long as your budget will allow, then pause your campaign at any time (and, of course, you can turn it back on, too, when you are ready).
Pay-per-click advertising is often referred to as performance-based advertising. In other words, you pay for results and not for exposure. To put this in context, think of tradicional newspaper classifield ads where you are usually charged per word to run your ad. Similarly, you may have come across some web sites that will let you run a banner advertisement for a specified amout of time when you pay upfront. The problem with that form of advertising is that you have no guarentee of results. You could spend hundreds on pay-upfront advertisements and end up going broke if your ad performs poorly no one responds, no one clicks on your link, etc.
The PPC model of advertising, however, gives advertising like you the advantage by letting you control costs. Instead of being charged for publication or ad exposure, your ads are run for free. You do not actually pay anything until someone clicks on the link to your web site - hence the "pay-per-click".
PPC ads are delivered by pay-per-click search engines like the folling:

• Google - The google adwords program - Google Adwords is the current leader in the pay-per-click industry. It has the highest volume and traffic quality. However, it is also the most competitive and the most expensive.
• The Yahoo! Search Marketing Program - This program includes all of the engines formerly participating in the overture program. There is high volume and traffic quality, but careful research is still required to find the cheapest click.
• Miva - An Excellent program that is currently underutilized. Your competition will be lower.
• MSN - This program is microsoft's attempt to muscle away some market share from google and yahoo!. Still relatively new, so there are lots of opportunities for cheap traffic.

These are the four major players. However, there are also a handful of smaller PPC engines (with slightly lower volume) that offer high-quality traffic and super cheap clicks:

• Enhance (www.enhance.com)
• GoClick (www.goclick.com)
• 7search (www.7search.com)

You should use a mix of PPC engines in your traffic campaign, especially if you want to get the most traffic possible for your budget. Do not rely only on one PPC engine. Also, make sure you use both the large and small networks. The best thing to do if you are new to all this is choose just one of the major players, and one of the smaller players. See what kind of results you get, and then decide if you want to run your campaign on additional engines or drop one from your campaign to save money.