better understanding.

[angienewton]

Welcome!

The best place to go is Lynn's blog http://www.clicknewz.com to get started. There is a search box and you can put in any topic you are interested in learning about.

[David Jackson]

what is the best way to build traffic to your website?

There is no "best" way. You have to do a variety of things, and you have to do them consistently over time. For starters, create a signature for this forum and include your website's URL in it. Write a press release, and get worldwide distribution through press release services like PRWeb and PR.com. Also, write articles and submit them to top article directories like EzineArticles and IdeaMarketers. Get involved with Twitter, Digg, and other social networking sites - as well as popular small business forums like this one. Create signatures for those forums as well. Start blogging.

I also recommend ezine advertising, pay-per-click, and text ads. Also, offline magazines and newspapers. I could go on and on and on, but that's plenty to get you started.

Regarding books, I can't really recommend just one book for you to read. There are too many good ones. Instead, I suggest you read as many quality articles and newsletters on marketing as you possibly can. A word of warning, however: There's a lot of misinformation out there. So, be careful what you read.

For example, online publications and authority sites like Sitepro News and WebPro News have quality articles written by reputable marketers who actually know what they're talking about. Finally, unless you're willing to pay for it, it takes time to develop quality, targeted traffic that you can rely on. So, do the things I mentioned and be patient.

David Jackson

[KathleenGageSpeaker]

There are countless ways but some of my favorites are

Blogging
Social marketing – utilize the power of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other locations your market “hangs out” in.
Article marketing
Sig files
FREE teleseminars
Forums specific to your market
Media releases

[Lynn Terry]

One of the things you'll want to do upfront is optimize your site properly to get indexed and ranked well in the major search engines. My favorite resources on that is SEO Fast Start, a free guide by Dan Thies.