The first big mistake I see many first time content website owners making is not paying for traffic in the early stages of their website's life.

I know, I know, free traffic is the way to go if you can get it and many well thought out websites will eventually start to receive lots of free traffic from the search engines.

The problem is that it can take many months for that free traffic to start showing up, and in the mean time, many people find themselves discouraged and often give up, just before they start to see results.

We certainly live in a microwave World these days...we want everything now, preferably yesterday, as cheap as we can in many cases, and we can't wait for anything.

I've seen many people work for 6 months building up a great theme based content website, and just when they were about to succeed and the free traffic was coming over the hill, they lost enthusiasm for what they had created because it wasn't making money quickly enough.

Listen to me carefully here...

It's OK to pay for traffic to start the ball rolling.

You've got to do it intelligently of course, or you'll have a whole lot of pain with not much to show for your money. But buying traffic using carefully selected keywords on Google and Yahoo Search is a legitimate way to start making money from your website sooner rather than later.

As I said, it takes knowledge and a strategy to make it work, but it is a way to quickly make your new site profitable and rekindle your enthusiasm if you're waiting to see results.

Having too many visitors is a problem most website owners would love to have. A large and growing stream of traffic allows you to set up systems that produce ongoing income streams and put them on autopilot.

So remember, once you have a few properly set up pages (and you have a way of capturing your visitors' name and email address), pay for traffic and start building a relationship with your visitors through your newsletter straight away; don't wait for search engine traffic to turn up because it can take several months for that to happen...

Another factor to consider is that search engine traffic is notoriously unreliable. If you base your entire future on a continuous supply of search engine traffic alone, you're on very shaky ground.

Every time a search engine changes it algorithm, your page rankings can change wildly which can play havoc with your income (and therefore your lifestyle).

You've got to diversify your traffic streams and small PPC ads are one way of doing this.

And one final tip.

Dont just send visitors to your website and hope they spend their money with youits a huge waste of time.

Make sure you send your visitors to an opt-in form where they have to subscribe to receive a mini course, a downloadable ebook or some other form of gift from you instead.

Getting your visitors (especially visitors youve PAID for) onto a list should be your preferred response if you want to build a long term, viable Internet business.