You can’t learn Web 2.0 traffic generation techniques in isolation. That would be like learning to back out of corners without having learned to move the car forward! Web 2.0 is a term that covers a wide range of interactive Internet phenomena, and this is a quick tour to help you learn how and where to learn Web 2.0 for your business needs.

First of all, Web 2.0 or social media can only be an effective traffic generation tool when you have an effective lead capture system in place. Otherwise, you’ll just be collecting rain in a bucket full of holes.

You’ll need a squeeze page as part of your website so you can direct your Web 2.0 traffic to it and offer a free downloadable information product of genuine value in exchange for name and email address. Whatever your business, building a subscriber list of people who have signed up and are interested in your niche is absolutely ‘Base One’.

Forget trying to learn Web 2.0 to generate traffic until you have all of this set up correctly. Your signup form should connect to an autoresponder like Aweber, which will give you the html code that you can paste into your landing page. Then you follow up with messages offering free and paid products (where you have an affiliate link) to your list. Now to Web 2.0.

The first thing to consider is creating a blog. Search engines love blogs as their content is frequently updated, giving visitors a better experience – Google’s main driver, Yahoo! et al. Go to WordPress.org and install WordPress for free. If your hosting service has the ‘Fantastic’ feature, that will save you a lot of time, so much so that it might be worth switching to a host that does, like Hostgator or Godaddy.

You can also create a lens on Squidoo.com. This is a site where you can practically create your own mini-website with text, video content, photos, bio box (where you should of course put links to your site) and other features. Squidoo is a big favorite among search engines, just like Hubpages, which has similarities and some subtle differences. Investigate both.

To learn Web 2.0 in all its dimensions, I recommend you look at social bookmarking and learn how to do it and how not to do it. Some of the major bookmarking sites include Technorati.com, Del.icio.us, Digg.com, and Stumbleupon.com. They all deserve a look.

You should also not ignore the major social networking sites. Facebook has colossal traffic and offers a paid advertising feature that is just as targeted as Google AdWords but much cheaper. At the time of writing, they don’t accept Paypal yet, but plan to do so soon, hopefully sometime in 2010.

Don’t ignore Twitter. Like Facebook, it’s attracting a lot of marketers, some of whom are using it right! You’ll find that Twellow.com is a great resource for finding Twitter users interested in your niche.

With time and space competing with me, here is a short list of good sites for anyone wanting to learn Web 2.0 as a business tool: Scribed.com, Zimbio.com, Boxxet.com, Lifehack.org, Instablogs.com, Buzztracker .com, Flickr.com and of course YouTube.com.