Dr Ken Evoy, an e-commerce expert, points out that in the offline world a store will thrive if its located in a high traffic area.

However, in the online world every store starts in the exact same location. It's up to the business owner to drive traffic to an online store.

Amazon.com and Ebay.com are two of the largest online stores on the internet. Two of their highest traffic sources are from affiliates and search engine rankings.

Hundreds of thousands of website owners have signed up for amazon and ebay's affiliate programs.

Affiliates receive a uniquely coded affiliate link which they post on their website. A site visitor clicks on the link, visits amazon or ebay and if she makes a purchase the affiliate earns a commission.

This whole process requires powerful affiliate management software that can manage thousands of affiliates.

Dr Evoy, who manages one of the fastest growing affiliate programs on the internet, reviews a number of affiliate management software programs in his comprehensive internet marketing manual Make Your Site Sell.($29-95)

Evoy sold a million dollars worth of expensive penny stock software which was the inspiration for Make Your Site Sell.

Amazon and Ebay's other high source of traffic comes from search engine rankings. If you type in the title of your favorite book at google.com, I'm willing to bet that one of the top ten results will be from amazon.com.

Dr Evoy's approach to search engine optimization is to give the search engines exactly what they want relevant, useful and high value content. Make Your Content Presell explains the entire process.

Evoy has a number of case studies at his website that describe how his clients have built successful internet businesses.

In September 2002, Marney Makridakis had an idea to start an online magazine for writers and artists.

As at December 2005, she earns a full time living from her online business. (ArtellaWordsAndArt.com). Her store sells 700 products, has 12 online discussion groups, 2 blogs and six fully paid staff members.

In March 2002, Jim Nelson started jugglenow.com. 5 months later he was receiving 1,053 visitors a month from the search engines. He then started selling juggling supplies.

A year later he was receiving over 3,000 unique visitors a month and selling over 100 products in 4 different countries. He has sold juggling supplies in all 50 states and every continent except Antarctica.

In summary, if you want to start a thriving online business you will need to drive traffic to your store. To do this you should copy amazon and ebay.com and drive traffic through affiliates and search engine optimization. You can learn how to do this from Dr Evoy's comprehensive manual Make Your Site Sell and from case studies from his successful clients.