You must have traffic to make money. There is good traffic and not so good traffic. The good traffic is well targeted to what you offer. People turn to the search engines when they are looking for a product or service. Therefore it is important to come up on the first page of search results for a term or terms that people who are looking for what you have to offer may use in their search. Social networking can drive traffic numbers to your site, but that traffic may just be out of curiosity and they may not be in the market to buy anything at all when they visit your site.

A site needs to be put together with its traffic potential in mind. Keyword research will go a long way to that end. In order to have good, targeted traffic, your site must rank well in the search engines. You need to produce a site that can rank high in the search engines. Among other things you need to look at the competition for a niche that you are thinking of using. If there are several strong sites in the niche  you will have trouble getting on the first page of the search results. There may be hundreds or thousands of sites catering to a niche, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should not choose that niche. If there are a lot of weak sites in the competition you may still be able to rank well for the niche.