Traffic is very important for your Website and your online business. But, you don’t want any traffic, you want targeted traffic – people who are going to be interested in what you have to offer. There are many ways to get targeted traffic to your website free and paid.
Getting The Right Kind Of Traffic
The right kind of traffic is visitors who are not only interested in what you have to offer them, they’re willing and able to take the action that you want them to take. The wrong kind is simply the opposite – visitors who don’t take action.
Let’s say you have an affiliate review website. You post reviews and other content on your site, with affiliate links for those products. Whenever someone buys one of the offers, you get paid a commission.
If you generate a ton of traffic, but not very many of those people are either willing or able to spend money, you’re not going to make money.
You want visitors who are looking for a solution to their problem – and hopefully, the content and the ads displayed on your site offer that solution. You want to target the right people to get the maximum number of clicks on your content and your ads.
If you’re generating a lot of traffic looking for free solutions, or just looking for information, you may not get many clicks. So more traffic isn’t necessarily going to be more profitable.
Before you start doing any kind of traffic generation, make sure you’re targeting the right people for your offer. Otherwise, you’re going to be spending a lot of time, money or both with little or no return for the efforts.
Free Traffic Methods
Free traffic is certainly the most popular. Many Internet marketers just don’t have the capital to start paying for traffic, so free traffic is a better way to go.
Some marketers don’t really understand the economics of paying for traffic either, which is an entirely different problem. If you can make a profit, it’s really not costing you anything. You invest money to have a profit.
When it comes to getting free traffic, there are two types – short-term and long-term traffic. Some methods can generate visitors to your site in a very short time, almost instantly in some cases.
Other methods will take a longer time, but these tend to keep driving traffic to your site for a longer period of time, once they get going.
Short-Term Traffic Generation
1. Forum marketing
2. Guest blogging
3. Article submissions
Forum Marketing
Forum marketing is one of the easiest ways to get short-term traffic, particularly if you’re already active in any popular forums in your market.
Most forums will let you add a “signature” to your profile, which gets added to the end of every post you make. You can include a link to your website in your signature, along with a short call to action to get people to click through to it.
If you’re active on the forum and provide good value in your posts, people will click on your signature link. Particularly if you offer them something of value that’s related to the market, like a free report, webinar, or a free ebook.
The key here is to be an active part of the community and provide value first. If you just sign up for a forum, add your signature link and starting posting randomly with stuff like “Hey, great post!” then don’t expect much in the way of traffic.
Give value and help first, and people will respond by checking out what else you have to offer them.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is another great way to get traffic from a community of people interested in your market. A blog is a little less interactive than a forum, but it has many similarities.
Find some of the most popular blogs in your market and see if they accept guest bloggers. Some sites are up-front about this, with a page that explains exactly how to become a guest blogger for them.
Other sites don’t advertise it, but if you spend a bit of time reading through existing posts, you’ll be able to see if the same person writes them all or if the site has used guest posts in the past.
Generally, guest posts will have a resource box or author byline that gives more information about the author, as well as a link back to their website. If you see any of these, it’s a good indication that the site accepts guest posts.
The key to getting your post accepted is to offer a high-quality article that the blog owner would be crazy not to accept. Spend even longer than you usually would researching, outlining and writing these posts. While it means an extra investment in time, you can get a lot of traffic clicking through to your site if your guest post goes live on a high-traffic blog.
Also, your guest post will help you with SEO in the long term, so this is a powerful strategy.
Article Submissions
Article submissions, or article marketing, can be another powerful traffic strategy that will provide you will both short-term and long-term benefits. Much like guest blogging, the short-term traffic will come from people clicking through on your resource box links to visit your website.
By submitting your articles to high-authority websites (Article Directories), you can leverage their power with the search engines to get your articles ranked quickly and generating traffic. This direct traffic can actually continue for the long term if your article gets some traction with Google and the other search engines, but it also helps your own site rank better so it starts generating search engine traffic of its own.
Long-Term Traffic Generation
Three longer-term strategies for getting traffic to your websites:
1. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization
2. Social Media
3. Relationship Building
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is probably the most common free traffic strategy. There are dozens of techniques for improving your rankings in the search engines, and just as many products that teach you how to implement them. Some of these methods work year after year while others are more short-lived.
There are two main factors to SEO – on site and off site optimization. On-site optimization is things like using your keywords in strategic places on your pages:
-The TITLE tag
-In the page content itself
-Image ALT tags
-etc.
At one time, repeating your keywords over and over throughout the page (known as keyword stuffing) would improve your results but the search engines have evolved well beyond that. Don’t do this, just use your keywords and other related terms naturally in the content.
Off-site optimization really comes down to links pointing to your website. The more links you get, (Backlinks) from related sites that also have some power of their own with the search engines, the better your site is going to rank (and the more traffic you’ll get as a result).
This is where the short- and long-term strategies start to overlap a bit. If you’re using any of the short-term traffic strategies to get quick traffic to your sites, they will also help you with SEO in the long term.
The links in your forum signatures, guest blog posts, and submitted articles will all help push your site up the search engine rankings so while you might get a short-term jump in traffic when they first go live, they will keep working for you for a long time.
This is why it’s a good idea to keep doing those things, even when your site starts to get traction in the search engines. It will continue to drive both instant and longer-term traffic.
Social Media
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are a relatively new way to get traffic, and as a result, they tend to be misunderstood. A lot of marketers use them as a kind of “announcement” service, posting links to new offers, affiliate promotions, new blog posts and anything else they want people to visit.
But that’s all they ever post, and then they think social media doesn’t work because nobody ever clicks through on their links.
The fact is, social media is a longer-term traffic strategy. You need to build relationships with the people you follow before you can expect them to click on any of the links you post.
Treat social media like you would a “real life” meeting – offer value first and build up some trust with your followers before you start hitting them with a bunch of offers.
Relationship Building
Building relationships isn’t really a traffic generation method in and of itself, but it applies to virtually every other strategy to some degree. If you build relationships with the visitors to your website, or to the other places you post your content, you’re going to be a lot more successful in the long run.
When you have strong relationships with your visitors, they’re a lot more likely to return. And return traffic is one of the keys to a really successful website.
Look at it this way. If you get 100 visitors per day and you have no way of getting them to come back to your site after they click an ad or an affiliate link, you have to find 100 new visitors every day to maintain your results.
But if you get 100 visitors every day and get 10 of them into your “relationship funnel” so they return to the site, you’ve increased your future traffic without having to find “new” visitors. It’s over-simplified, but let’s assume that they come back the next day. Now you’ve got 110 visitors, of which 10 will again become return traffic.
One of the best ways to build relationships and generate return visitors is the list building.
Generating Traffic Through An Email List
One of the biggest advantages of building an email list is that it lets you control your own traffic. If you have a list of people interested in your market, it doesn’t matter if Google, Facebook, and every other traffic source shut off tomorrow – you can still generate traffic just by sending out an email to your list.
And if you have a brand new page or website that you want to direct traffic to, you can do that as well.
Even when you’re paying for traffic, it’s pretty tough to get visitors within minutes of finishing a new site.
You won’t be able to generate that “on demand” traffic until you’ve built a list and to build a list you need to get some traffic from other sources first.
Paid Traffic Methods
A lot of Internet marketers are intimidated by paid traffic. They might have been burned in the past, or they might be afraid of losing a lot of money.
if you do it right, paid traffic doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money to test, and once you figure out how to make it profitable
Pay Per Click
Pay per click, or PPC, advertising includes sources like Google AdWords. You pay a certain amount for every person who clicks on your ad and visits your website. That amount can range from a few cents to several dollars, depending on the market and the keywords that you’re targeting.
If you’re not careful, PPC advertising can chew through a lot of money in a pretty short time so it’s important that you approach it correctly.
Make sure you’re not targeting really broad keywords that are going to get a ton of clicks but poorly targeted visitors.
You should also set your daily budget to something you’re comfortable with. That way, if your ads just don’t convert for some reason, there’s a limit to how much you can lose.
Once you find a keyword/ad combination that is profitable, you can start to expand on it. Being successful with PPC advertising requires a lot of testing and tracking.
Banner Ads
People have been saying banner ads are dead for over 10 years, but the fact is they still work if you use them properly.
But if you pick the sites where you want to advertise based on how relevant they are to your target market and design your banners effectively, they can still produce a lot of traffic for a relatively little cost.
Like PPC advertising, start small and track your results. Once you find a banner and/or website that’s working for you, start to expand those successful campaigns to other places.
Paid Ezine Ads
Paid ezine ads are another “old school” traffic generation strategy that can still work very well. Basically, you’re paying for an ad to another marketer’s email list. This could be a small ad placed in a longer newsletter or it could be a “solo” ad that is nothing but your offer.
This is a great way to leverage someone else’s list to get traffic to your own site (and hopefully onto your email list in the process).
The key here is to target your offer to the audience. Make sure you subscribe to that marketer’s list yourself and read several of their emails to see what kind of tone they use, and what sort of offers they promote.
You want to tailor your ad to appeal to the people who receive that person’s emails, so make sure you offer something of value and that what you’re offering is going to be appealing to the people who get the email.
Facebook is a fairly new source of paid traffic and is constantly changing as more and more people start to use it. But with hundreds of millions of users, and the ability to target very specific interests and demographics, you should definitely include it in your paid traffic strategy.
Once again, it comes down to building relationships with people first so they know and trust you. Once you establish that trust, you can start to ease them over to your websites and other offers.
New traffic sources constantly come and go. While it never hurts to test new strategies and add them to the mix of what you’re doing, don’t let yourself get caught up in the latest “shiny object” that promises unlimited traffic with little or no work.
If you build your traffic generation strategy on a solid foundation, you’ll be seeing more and more visitors coming to your website for years to come.