SEO is often a painstakingly slow process, especially in the beginning. And while simply understanding the variables of time can do wonders for your SEO processes, we also understand that there are times when you need targeted traffic sooner rather than later. That’s why we've listed some of our favorite resources for paid traffic that will bring you the immediate assistance you need.
 
As should be the case with any form of marketing, you’ll need to monitor your traffic and cost per conversions when utilizing any of the items on this list. Consider that some avenues may come with great exposure for branding, but perform poorly in terms of immediate conversions. For this reason, you should test the waters and see what’s best for your business. You might find that some advertising channels simply waste money, while others bring amazing results, and a few will be perfect for creating long term interest. If any advertising gives you the addition of a permanent relevant link to your site, it's also a big bonus for SEO which will bring additional traffic from organic search rankings.
 
So without further ado, here is the abridged compendium of Ashop’s most highly recommended paid traffic sources.

Industry Specific Newsletter Campaigns
Newsletters are an easy and effective way of staying within the sphere of your customer’s attention spans. What’s even better, to receive your newsletter in the first place, these contacts must have already shown interest in your products. That means you’re actively advertising to people who already liked your product/service enough to opt-in for your newsletter and/or make a purchase from your online store.

Social Media Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts on social media appear to users in their newsfeeds. This is a form of content marketing that allows your brand to tell a story rather than show an advertisement. The idea is to engage your customers and potential customers with content relevant to their interests and your niche. The more they engage with your content, the more of it they’ll see in their news feeds. Though these are still fairly untested waters, with over a billion users on Facebook and 500 million on Twitter, sponsored social media posts reach a gigantic audience to whom you can’t afford not to advertise.

YouTube Video Advertising
 
YouTube is the second most used search engine in the world. Right under Google, it is the top destination for people looking for tutorials, entertainment, education, and by default: advertising. YouTube is one of the many television alternatives of the future, and it will be a big player in advertising for a long time to come. With over a billion unique visitors rolling through YouTube per month, it’s a huge source of exposure with multiple options for advertisers. You can develop your own video content to build your brand, advertise in-slate (this is where you choose from one of several long ads or have shorter ads interspliced with the video,) have your videos appear in the display on the right side of the YouTube screen, or have your them appear before the beginning of a video. There are a lot of different options and not all are created equal. Research on which is best for you before committing to a particular strategy.

CPV Networks
These are basically paid popup ads. Whenever a user searches a specific keyword that you’ve targeted or whenever they’ve visited a targeted URL, a popup ad that will lead them to your site appears. Every time your webpage is viewed as a result of the popup, you’ll pay a small fee. Hence the title: Cost Per View. In this way, it’s very similar to the PPC advertising discussed below. A few of the major CPV networks you might have heard of: Lead Impact, Traffic Vance, and Media Traffic.

Paid Celebrity Tweets
 
Nothing like a good old fashioned celebrity endorsement. This is kind of like the commercial of the future. Celebrities command large amounts of social media influence do to their cult of personality status, and the cast army of Twitter followers in their thrall. A proper endorsement from a well known celebrity can go a long way for your business' buzz and popularity. Just think about Michael Jordan tweeting how comfortable his Haynes are and you’ll begin to get an idea of how this might work.

Comparison Engines (e.g GetPrice, Shopping.com, Nextag, Google Shopping) 
CSE’s are a big source of revenue to any major online retailer. Listing your products on a major feed can provide you with an immediate boost to your traffic and conversion rates. What’s even better is they don’t take that long to set up. You just sign up for a comparison shopping engine, follow their instructions to meet their requirements, connect them to your product feed, and you’re off to the races. Check out the Ashop blog’s more in-depth analysis of Comparison engines here.

Search Engine PPC (Bing, Google)
Pay per click advertising can be a powerful addition to your traffic attraction strategy. Listing your products or advertisements at the top of major search engine results pages can result in a multitude of clickthroughs, each of which will cost you a small amount of money, usually between 10 and 90 cents. The higher the bid on your clickthroughs, the more exposure that product or promotion will get. What’s important is to optimize your landing page in conjunction with PPC advertising. Otherwise, you’ll get a ton of clickthroughs that will cost money, but if your landing page isn’t optimized, you won’t necessarily see a corresponding increase in your conversion rates.

Affiliate Marketing (Shareasale, cj.com) 
Affiliate marketing is a popular method of attracting traffic to your site because of the relative ease involved. You simply make other marketers do the work for you, and reward them based on the results that their efforts produce. Amazon.com has a very famous affiliate marketing program. The way it works is Amazon let’s an affiliate sign up to the program, the affiliate may advertise Amazon products on his/her site, email, or any other internet marketing campaign and any purchases made off of clickthroughs from that affiliate’s traffic sources will result in a percentage commission for the affiliate.

Mobile App Ads
Mobile application adds are quickly becoming in-vogue for today’s internet marketers. Today’s consumers are on the go, and often decide to make purchases on a whim from the convenience of their mobile devices. It’s not at all uncommon for a young professional to do some online shopping while riding the train to work. What is uncommon? Small businesses with mobile optimized websites or advertisements. Investing in mobile optimization for your landing pages and for targeted mobile advertisements over social media networks is highly advisable.  

Remarketing (Google)
This is an interesting tool in the Google Analytics suite that can help you target and identify potential customers. Its functionality is twofold. It first lets you advertise to people who have already interacted with your site, either by visiting, spending significant amounts of time on a page, or putting items in their shopping carts without ever buying. Reaching out to those who’ve already interacted with your site can be just the push they need to go ahead and make the purchase. Secondly, remarketing will allow you to target customers browsing different sites on the Google Display Network. If they have been looking into product pages similar to those in your niche, you can deliver highly relevant and accurately targeted ads to them. Advertising to those who already have interest in your products is like preaching to the choir. They’ll be putty in your hands.

Content Ads (more about branding, not great for conversions) 
Microsoft’s Bing search engine is able to analyze the content of websites and publish text ads that are highly relevant to the content on the site that the users are looking for. This matching is achieved through the keywords that the ad is optimized for, so make sure you’ve got your keyword optimization down to a science before attempting to utilize content Ads.

PayPerPost (Good conversions if correctly done)
This unique web service sort of streamlines the content marketing process. By hooking advertisers up with bloggers from around the world, Pay per Post works exactly like it sounds it would. The service allows advertisers to set up a job for perspective bloggers to post about the advertiser’s product or service. It’s highly customizable, as you can negotiate rates, set word count caps, define your message, segment the different blogs you’d like to use, and so on.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the ways you can drive traffic to your site through monetary means, but it is an excellent start. If you utilize even a few of these different traffic sources effectively, there is honest potential for thousands more unique visitors giving your site a look.