One thing that I am asked about all the time is how you get traffic to a website.
I tell people that there is no quick way and that it is a series of things that get me traffic. Most of the time a website actually hurts itself and gets penalized. I more or less find the reason why the site is not ranking well and I fix that problem first. Sometimes websites don't do basic SEO and that will hurt them. Sometimes website owners don't know what they should rank for or track what is working and what isn't. If a website owner doesn't know these answers they are missing opportunities to get traffic and money from that traffic. Getting a few links to a website and doing some social media work can come a long way when it comes to improving a website ranking and actually get traffic.
Your website needs two things, a way to track your website visitors and a way to find out what people are searching for. For tracking visitors I use Google analytics and for seeing what people are looking for I use a combination of things like the Google adwords tool and/or SEM Rush. The thing that you want to do is make really good pages that people are searching for and solve their problem. This may be by linking to your product or an affiliate site that sells it.
My goal is to make a good page that builds trust and have the user sign up for my email newsletter. Repeat traffic is easier to convert since you have built trust already. In the process I also want to build a loyal following that will come back to my site and tell their friends about it. Every website needs a few pages like about us, contact, privacy policy etc.
The about us page should be about how you are going to help the user and then some personal stuff about you. I find that making the page personal helps a lot. It shows your readers that you are real.
I will make videos for YouTube and have my website url in the description so people watching the video come to my site. I will use Twitter and Facebook also to build a following. All these things add up to traffic.
Most website owners need to get links to their website. Most have no idea how or why they need this. What I suggest is writing articles about your niche and finding other website owners to give that content to put it on their site with a link or two back to your site within the article.
You can also get links back to your site by making the best article ever and putting it on your own site and alerting the media to it. Try to get to know your local newspaper reporter and when you have news let him know. It is a good two way street to be living on.