You were told to build a website. Someone said, you need to be on the internet. Your business must be online to make tons of sales in the digital age. What they forgot to, or neglected to tell you, is just building it is not enough. Unlike the “Field of Dreams” baseball diamond, your website needs to have traffic coming to it before the “game” can start.
The problem is how do you get traffic to your site? What kind of traffic is best for your site? Is all traffic the same?
First off, not all traffic is not the same. There are many different types of traffic available to online marketers, considerably more so since the Internet began. There are two major types of traffic, Paid and Unpaid. (free)
Paid traffic generation is simply that, you are buying traffic to your websites. This can be a fast, but often expensive method for generating traffic to your websites. This is also no guarantee that the traffic will do you any good. Paid traffic can often be as targeted as a laser-guided missile or as devastating as a nuclear explosion. IT depends on where you get the traffic from when you buy it.
Common paid sources include Google AdWords and other PPC (Pay-per-click) sources. These charge you for someone clicking an ad. Other paid traffic include Popups, Popunders, Classified ads, Banners, and press release to name a few.
Free traffic generation methods have two distinctive advantages over paid sources, and one major flaw. The two advantages free traffic sources have are,
1: It’s Free.
2: It has Internet Stickiness.
Free sources are free. You don’t pay for them directly. You will however likely have to “spend” time implementing them in order for them to be most effective. This exchange of time instead of money can be great in some cases depending on your skills.
Internet stickiness is a great long-term side effect of most free traffic sources. These sources are often on the internet for years to come. For example, common options are article marketing, form posting, blog posting, audio files, posting video files to YouTube, and a host of other options.
The greatest impact that these can have are long-term traffic as well as potential for viral like traffic generation. If you post a great video on YouTube and it gets 10 millions views in a week, then that is super. That amount of traffic would cost a fortune to buy.
Regardless of which types of traffic you lean toward to get started, you must still be weary of the traffic you receive. Some paid traffic sources let you choose the types of visitor you get. These can often be targeted to specific niches, such as “dating”. Which may be more responsive to your offer. A million visitors to a cute cat video might not do single thing to help your “steel toed flip-flops” business generate any sales.
Traffic generation can be as complex or as simple as you make it. It can also be as cheap as free and more costly then you can imagine, consider which traffic method is best for getting traffic to your website [http://trafficguerrilla.com] and stick with it until your site is earning income.
Derek Wood is an internet marketer and off-line business owner who specialize in traffic generation and online business building. He has been actively building his internet-based businesses since 2003.
Build It And They Will Come - The Truth About Getting Traffic To Your Websites