How do you forecast traffic?
There are going to be a lot of different variables to consider, but the first way to think about traffic generation is by channel. Since you are just starting, I would assume that you will not have a lot of brand related searches at the beginning but that will increase over time. Brand related searches (people typing in the name of your company or service) can result in Direct, Organic, and even Paid Search traffic generation. No matter the channel, I would try to estimate this traffic separately from other type of traffic. The next channel to think about is referral (and potentially social) to think about where you are going to generate traffic not relates to search traffic. Are you going to have any partnerships or advertising on 3rd party sites that will generate a little or a lot of traffic. If you are going to have a very active social media strategy, you need to estimate this traffic as well. For organic search, it is best to focus on a specific niche and try to win rankings and traffic. It can take a year to establish organic traffic patterns and this is the one channel that I see people most often over-estimate when it comes to traffic estimation. For Paid Search and other forms of Advertising, this is sometimes the easiest to estimate but it does end up showing up as one of the more expensive channels. All in all, there are different tools that you can use to estimate the various channels and market opportunities to estimate traffic generation possibilities. There are a lot of variables though and get some professional help in advance if figuring this out before-hand is essential to funding or investment. Otherwise, work up some traffic models via XLS and build them much the Analytics programs do it (e.g. Google Analytics) as there have been experts before you and I that think it is the right way to think about website traffic model.s