Free Website Traffic Versus Paid Traffic
If you own a website, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the holy grail by many business gurus. Without visitors to your site (that’s what internet traffic is) 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. Experts each promote their own formulas for getting 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 methods are trendy. Some are shady. Others only produce traffic in certain niches. But all traffic eventually comes down to these two kinds: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.
Certain SEO gurus say that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They say that all web traffic costs you something – whether time, effort or money. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” to describe the term search engine traffic. Natural traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not buy outright. Natural traffic can have many different sources. It can come from the search engines. Free visitors can come from someone clicking on a link found in a different website. Natural traffic can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a neighbor, in a published article or on a radio computer talk show. All of these forms of traffic are natural traffic. These forms of traffic are free in the sense that you don’t pay someone to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.
Paid traffic is exactly the opposite. It is any traffic you receive because you paid for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Yahoo Search Marketing. Paid traffic can be from a banner you purchased on a third-party website. It can be from from someone entering in your website url from an ad you bought in a magazine. There are numerous other ways you can pay to get traffic.
Which method is better? Many would say that the “free traffic” was better. In many cases it is. But free (natura) traffic takes time to establish. When you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, no one will link to your site. The search engines don’t know about your site either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even viral marketing (word of mouth) can take a while to gain momentum. When you pay for your visitors, you can usually start getting traffic immediately. If you do it right, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that example, paid traffic is a lot better than waiting years for your site to become profitable.
The best strategy, however, 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 unadvertised site, the first step is to construct a pay-per-click ad campaign to acquire instant traffic. Monitor that traffic closely at first. You may also want to test many different ad variations. Especially test which keywords are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, start optimizing your landing pages for the profitable keywords and start a linking campaign using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to internal pages on your site. Within 3 months to a year, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and free traffic sources.