You've likely heard it or even said it a thousand times, “I can't get enough traffic!”

When you begin to realize that there are literally hundreds of tactics to drive traffic to your pages, you often go for the cheapest and fastest strategy you can find, in the hopes that you'll soon be swamped with visitors interested in what you have to offer.

This seldom turns out well. What you'll get, if anything, is a bunch of visitors who stay a few seconds each, seldom engaging or doing anything else worthwhile on your site.

This is primarily because you have neglected to figure out exactly what type of traffic best includes your audience, and how to effectively get it. What's really needed here is a plan that takes into account who your chosen audience is, and where they typically hang out. Then you can begin to craft a strategy. Let's look at what you need to do to make it happen.

Related: Here Are 7 Ways To Create Content That Drives Traffic

Building traffic with right audience

Before you go spending money or time, get great answers to these questions.

1 – Understand your audience

This is key to knowing how to advertise effectively, paid or not. Are they male or female? Young or old? Rich or poor? Create a detailed customer avatar that you know inside and out before you spend a dime!

Related: See How to Track your Website Data

2 – Discover where they hang out

Your audience congregates somewhere; it's your job to find out where. That might be on a social site, forums, or popular website. Get this intelligence and act on it!

Related: Learn Social Media Marketing For Your Business

3 – Tools you can use to help

Probably the best tool to use currently is Facebook's Audience insights. You need an ad account to use this, but it's free. There is so much available demographic information here it's downright scary. Another tool is Alexa.

Related: 7 Great Tips For Your Facebook Business Pages

Okay, next step?

Now that you've gathered your data, you have to decide what traffic method will work best for your given audience. That could be Facebook ads, or ads on LinkedIn, Pinterest or Twitter. Perhaps a content marketing campaign aimed at securing search rankings for your keywords. Or maybe a video marketing initiative.

Whichever method it ends up being, the point is to make sure you have targeted your audience as best you can BEFORE you begin to market. It's all about finding the best return on your investment you can!