It is important to analyze where your traffic is coming from so that you can analyze different metrics such as where most of your traffic comes from, and which traffic sources convert the best. Not all incoming traffic is of equal value, some traffic such as that of social media sources is widely known not to be as valuable as the traffic which comes from guest posting on authority blogs.
Furthermore, by understanding what the different traffic types are you can create a comprehensive marketing strategy where you make use of as many different traffic sources out there. It is important to have multiple sources to drive traffic to your website, because if for any reason one or even two streams of traffic were to go down temporarily then you will have others that you can rely on to keep your business going.
PPC Traffic
One of the most popular, yet expensive traffic driving strategies is Pay Per Click (PCC) traffic. This is basically where you take part in a program that puts your advertisements out among the search engines or other websites, and for each click that is generated and a visitor comes your way you have to pay a fee. This fee is typically only a few cents, but it can add up really quickly, which isn’t a problem if your traffic converts, because you make a lot of sales. However if you are unable to convert after you drive traffic then the cost of PPC can very quickly become overwhelming. Setting a marketing budget is important if you are to avoid any financial problems, and how to do that is explained in our article called “How to Set a Marketing Budget”.
The most popular PPC program is the Google Adwords program, and it has the capability to drive hoards of traffic to your website. However, the problem is that due to its popularity you will encounter competition for popular keywords, and as a result, the cost of each click can become too expensive for a campaign to become profitable. Having said that if you try hard enough you will be able to come up with a selection of keywords that are cheap enough for the cost of investment to be worth the effort.
Search Engine Traffic
One of the cheaper traffic sources out there is search engine traffic, in fact if you were to carry out SEO for yourself then the costs are next to nothing and you can drive traffic to your site in higher volume. However, for most business owners having the time to learn SEO, and then implement its strategies, is too time consuming which is where a good quality SEO service comes in. You can outsource all of your SEO so that you don’t have to spend countless hours leaning all of the strategies that must be put into action to have success with SEO. Do take into consideration that unlike PPC, SEO is a long term game because it can take a while for results to kick in.
This is because after you make changes to your website so that it is better optimized for the search engines you will have to wait for the search engine spiders to crawl your website, and even after that they will hardly give you a huge boost in rankings right away. It is usually a more gradual process where you rankings slowly rise over time, as opposed to instantly jumping to the top 3 spots, which is where you want to end up.
Social Media Traffic
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have a huge number of users and you can tap into that insane amount of traffic by creating a strong presence. In order to create a strong presence you need to create a professional profile that allows visitors to get a good idea of what your business is about, then you need to make frequent posts that your potential audience will find useful. The frequency of your posts will dictate how engaged your social media audience will be.
Posting infrequently will result in them losing interest; however, posting too often is also ineffective because most people will only have a certain amount of time per day to read updates. This balance is essential when trying to drive traffic. There is one issue with social media traffic which is that it doesn’t always convert well when compared to the other forms of traffic. This is because people browsing social media websites are not in “buy” mode for the most part.
They are simply checking out updates, communicating with their friends and so on. However, if you can capture the e-mails of the incoming traffic, and have a great e-mail marketing funnel setup then you can make a good return from social media traffic. It is all about the execution, and with enough traffic you will be able to get a good return on the investment that you make into social media.
Guest Blogging
A very powerful form of traffic generation involves creating very high quality articles and spreading them like wildfire over the internet. Ideally, what you want to do is get them indexed on your own website first, and then approach publishers in your niche that would be willing to accept your articles as guest posts. The links embedded in your articles is how you will get traffic from the websites that the article will be published on.
If you manage to get your guest posts published on high traffic websites then it can create an avalanche of traffic for you. What’s more is that this type of traffic is usually of high quality because it converts well. Another benefit of this type of traffic generation is that it is a long term strategy that can bring results well into the future. This is because a particular publisher might agree to accept the articles that you produce at an ongoing basis. If you that found the information on traffic generation was very useful, and would like more internet marketing advice, then you can download the “Small Business Digital Marketing Checklist”. It is packed full of great ideas that will enable you to market your business successfully.
