Why you MUST attract visitors to your site

For most people, the whole reason for maintaining a website is to make money, and it's a sad fact of life that, unless you have an effective strategy to attract visitors, and in particular prospective buyers then you will fail to achieve your objective.
Most large companies, both on- and offline spend huge sums in advertising and marketing strategies in order to maintain and increase their image and market position.
However, as a small, or medium sized marketer your advertising budget and resources will of neccessity be much more modest than those of the industry giants, but you still have to maintain an active profile if you expect to market your product...but how ?
The answer lies in generating effective low-cost, high volume visitor traffic to your site...obviously, not every visitor will buy, so the more the merrier !
Of course, the conversion rate of visitors to buyers will depend on the effectiveness of your sales copy, the attractiveness of your product and the appeal of your website.
These are variable, and should be regularly tested, but the one invariable is ... no traffic, no sales !
With that said, my subsequent postings will investigate strategies which are guaranteed to generate large volumes of traffic to your site.