The one nagging question that is on every new webmasters mind is "how do I get traffic to my website?" The truth is that unless you're going to spend a lot of money advertising you're going to need to work creating quality content and tracking every stat. A consistent, steady flow of traffic is not easy, and many people don't know where to start. That's why I've devised this step by step plan for generating traffic.

For the purposes of this article we will assume that you have already settled on a niche and domain name.

1. Before you do anything: start creating content. Write at least one article a day. If you see yourself needing to take a break try to write several articles in advance so you can take a break without losing days.

2. Submit your website to the top search engines and DMOZ, and then forget about it. Don't worry about getting your website crawled by Google -- it'll happen, just give it time.

3. For every day that goes by you should post at least one article to your website. I'd recommend getting a good content management system that has a "publish at a future date" feature, which will allow you to create a weeks worth of content, have it uploaded and automatically published on a set timeframe.

4. At the end of every article you should link to other articles on your website which have similar information on the subject you're covering.

5. Start submitting your articles to some articles marketing websites, such as EzineArticles and GoArticles.

6. For each article you submit for syndication, make Google Alert for the title of your article. Track which articles are being syndicated more often than others.

7. Keep track of your visitors! AwStats, Webalizer, or whatever stats package you use make sure you track what pages are the most visited. As time progresses some articles will become much more popular than others, which you can use to your advantage by linking those articles back to less popular (or just launched) areas of your website.

8. After 6 months go back and check that your website has been crawled by the major search engines, and accepted into DMOZ. If not, resubmit.

9. Continue to write articles every day. The Internet is full of information junkies, and your job is to feed that habit. You can't feed the information habit without content, so "build, build, build!"

Creating a steady flow of incoming traffic is not easy: there is no silver bullet that will suddenly thrust your website to the forefront of the Internet. You need to put a lot of effort into building your website in order to build your traffic.