Free Web Traffic Versus Paid Traffic
If you own a website, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the most important thing by many marketing experts. Without visitors to your site (i.e. web traffic) you will never get them to buy your product, or click your link, or sign up for your newsletter.
The need for website traffic is obvious. The real question is how to get it. Everyone seems to have different techniques and philosophies on how to get traffic to your site. Some people feel that search engine traffic is best. They use special programs like SEO elite to optimize their site (look here for a full SEO Elite Review). Others feel that paid traffic is the best, like pay-per-click traffic from Adwords. (If you go that route, be sure to read the Adwords Help page).
Many of the techniques are trendy. Some are shady. Others only work in certain countries. But the majority of traffic really comes down to these two kinds: free (natural) traffic, or traffic you buy.
Some experts argue that free traffic is a myth. They say that all website traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” as a synonym with search engine traffic. Natural traffic is website traffic that you did not buy outright. Organic traffic can have many different sources. It can come from the search engines. Free visitors can come from natural links on other sites. Free visitors can come from someone entering your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a coworker, in a magazine article or on a radio show. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. They are also usually free in the sense that you don’t pay someone directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is just what its name says. It is incoming traffic your site receives because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Microsoft Adcenter. Paid traffic can be from an ad displayed on a third-party website. It can be from when someone types in your website url from an advertisement in a newspaper. There are many other scenarios that you can pay for website traffic.
You may be wondering which way is better? At first glance it may seem that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free(organic) traffic also can take some time to get. You see, after you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, no one will put links on their site to yours. Major search engines don’t know about it either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even viral marketing (word of mouth) takes time to gain momentum. When you pay for your visitors, you can usually start getting traffic immediately. Yes, you have to pay for it, but if done correctly, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that case, buying traffic is a lot better than waiting for your site to become profitable.
If you now think paid advertising is better – hold on. The wisest path is to use (both|both free and paid traffic techniques|paid and free traffic techniques|both natural and purchased traffic methods} in combination with each other. If you have a non-optimized site, carefully craft a pay-per-click ad campaign to get initial traffic. Gauge that traffic closely at first, and run some split tests to determine what works best. Especially test which keywords are most profitable. Refine your campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, tweak your landing pages for the profitable key phrases and find a way to get quality backlinks using those profitable keywords and phrases as the link text to relevant pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and free traffic sources.
Related posts:
- Three Ways to Get Quick Targeted Traffic Have a great website for your business or income opportunity,...
- Drive Traffic with Free Classifieds Lots of site designers are using free classified partner programs...
- Employing Google Adwords To Drive Laser Targeted Traffic The biggest well known secret in generating wealth in the...
- Wheat-Free Versus Gluten-Free Diets Within this post I hope to instill in you a...
- Top 5 Ways To Generate Low Cost Web Traffic There is one component all people aim for when trying...