If you spend $50 on advertising and it generates more than $50 in net profits, that's a good investment.

Simple right? Well, through use of proper testing and a "scientific" approach to advertising, there's no reason you can't turn your original $50 ad into millions of dollars in profits. It's just a matter of developing a system that creates a profit, and then reinvesting your initial profits back into your business in order to further expand your advertising.

Assume that through proper tracking of your website traffic you're able to determine that 1 out of every 100 visitors to your site buys "Product X". Let's also assume that on sale of every Product X you make a $50 profit. Do you see that any ad you buy which delivers more than 100 visitors to your site per $50 spent is a profitable investment?

Promoting a site should be approached with this type of a scientific or mathematical attitude. Any advertising you do is either profitable or not, and you need to know which it is so you don't waste time and money.

Here's a somewhat simplistic strategy that you could use to get started:

1. Use a combination of free or low-cost strategies to promote your web site, generating initial traffic which will serve as a starting point.

2. Through proper tracking of your site, determine exact "value" of a visitor in terms of dollars and sense. This is absolutely critical.

The first thing you need to know, is that traffic hype is just that, hype.

Forget about click exchanges. You know sites where each time you visit another member's page, you earn a credit that guarantee's someone will visit yours. Yes, you will get hits, but they'll be worthless. The only reason these people are coming to your site is to get people to come to theirs.

Forget FFAs too. Maybe five or six years ago they worked, but not anymore.

Okay, so what does work? CONTENT! Good content is what brings people who are interested in a particular subject to a site. Your site needs to have a theme, with loads of content about that theme. All of promotion in world will do nothing, if you don't have something to pull your visitors in and keep them.