To have a successful website, you need targeted traffic, which means traffic that really WANTS to be there. The folks visiting your site need to be interested in what you are selling or promoting.

Internet marketing involves a number of different ways of generating traffic to your site through website promotion techniques and here are 3 of the most important ones.

1. Email Marketing
   Email marketing involves gathering a list of leads and emailing them on a regular basis. What you need to do is  place an optin form on your website (using Aweber or Getresponse, these two being the mostly used autoresponders around) and people can sign up through there. You will then need to send out informative emails on a regular basis and occasionally send out an offer containing your affiliate link. This is how you will build a long term customer base and sell to them. It will also bring the leads to your site as you can link to your site from your email newsletter.
2. Article Marketing - or bum marketing
   Article marketing means you will be writing articles evolving around your niche topic which you will then submit to various article directories such as ezinearticles.com and isnare.com. As these directories are visited by thousands of web publishers, they are able to use your articles on their sites whilst keeping your website link at the end of the article. Bum marketing has really proved to be a very reliable and important way to generate traffic and backlinks to your website.
3. Online Advertising
   You might opt to advertise in ezines or on other websites. This is a great way to get traffic to your site specially when you are advertising on popular websites. Of course, those sites should be somewhat related to your niche so people actually click on the ads and come to your site. It will cost you a monthly fee to place a banner or text link on a popular website and that is not cheap, but in most cases it is really worthwhile doing so.