Here’s a blog post on introduction to online traffic.
Every website needs traffic! And every webmasters, online marketers and entrepreneurs are all crazy about finding the best traffic source to their website or sales page or landing page. Therefore, there will always be a huge demand for Internet Traffic! If you are good in traffic generation, you already got a market to tap into! But let’s not get carried away and get back to our main topic. The problem is there are a boat loads of websites in the internet and the competition to capture visitors’ attention and engagement on your website is going to be very fierce and extremely competitive.
To standout among your competitors, you must learn and develop skills to advertise and bring visitors to your website AND get them to stay engaged with your website content. There isn’t really any short-cut or secret to do this; you must be patient, learn it step by step, be creative and be consistent Every Single Day, got it? There are also tons of way to drive traffic to your website and the following are just some of the most current and popular methods used now and is proven to their core. Let’s get into it:
Some free traffic ideas:
Social Media (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc.)
I am sure you do follow some Youtubers or Instagramer and the like. They are called Content Creator. What they do is, they create videos in YouTube, make post in Facebook or Instagram or Twitter in the topics that matters to them or within their interest. They draw attention of the visitors through their content and anyone who likes what they see will eventually start liking and follow the creator. They need to post content consistently to build the visitors interest who will be their potential followers moving forwards. This is how the content creator build their list of followers. The more people like them, the more will be their followers! And this is where they can become very influential after gaining trust and interest from their followers who will support and perhaps buy anything that is being promoted. There are in fact people who are called “Instagram Influencer”. Many advertising companies do hire Instagram Influencer to help market their products and services. There are also several stories where Instagram Millionaire is made just by being an Instagram Influencer! And best of all, the follower you build from social media method is free traffic. How good is that? Lastly on a side note, you can also purchase ‘Shoutout’ from Instagrammers with many followers. Due to their status, once they give a shout to all their followers, it is very likely many of their followers won’t mind taking a few minutes to check out what is being recommended by their favorite person 😉
Website and Blog
This is like one of the oldest form of traffic generation which has been used until now and is still one of the best way to get traffic organically. This method will never be obsolete. Website owner needs to consistently create content and post articles to their website. The idea is to get ranked as high as possible in search engine in order for the website to get noticed easily. With this done, the website will received visitors through search results. Having a website or blog is like having your own home. You can host parties at your home right? Having website is like you can host anything too such as getting visitors to signup your email list, writing product review on the item you are promoting, share about your favorite topic and life etc. You can do many things by having a website and best of all, this is also a free method to get traffic.
Article Submission
This is one of the oldest and classic way to drive free traffic to your website or sales page. You just need to write an article related to your website or product and remember to include a link which will direct the readers to your website. As simple as that. To make it effective, of course you need to write consistently and submit your article on daily basis or every other day. Ezine Articles is the most popular platform to do this.
Forums
You can join Yahoo or Quora for example. It’s a free platform where people post their questions online and other members will be answering or sharing some answers to their best ability. You can join these forums and make sure you frequently contribute good and quality answers to the other members’ questions or in any discussion. Once you established your reputation in the forums, people won’t mind checking out the product that you are trying to promote. Remember, these are just forums for people to seek answers, please do not take advantage by trying to hard sell anything just to keep your profile safe.
Some paid traffic ideas:
Pay Per Click (PPC)
This is one the most popular paid traffic method and commonly used. PPC advertising is where you get to publish your advertisement across the network of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other alike search engines. Google Adwords is the most famous of all and also most costly to run your PPC campaign. Here is a list of other alternatives PPC which is recommended by many and can help you save some cost apart from using Google Adwords.
Google Adwords – not affiliate friendly. Often reject affiliate link, splash page, landing page. But is the best PPC.
Bing Ads – accept splash page and affiliate link easily. However, lower click rate and traffic.
Leadserve – pay-per-lead advertising platform. You only pay per email submitted to you.
Adknowledge
7 Search
Adonion
AdOnnetwork
Bidvertise
BuySellAds
AdRoll
Admonster
Media buy/ Ad-Exchange Network
Opt-Intelligence operates a cost-per-subscriber ad exchange that provides solutions for both advertisers and publishers mainly in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. Opt-Intelligence is the leading opt-in email list growth facilitator and operates the largest exchange of its kind. It’s patented technology displays targeted advertisements to visitors on third party websites and mobile apps. The visitor voluntarily chose to sign up for an offer and asks to receive marketing emails or social media posts from the marketer. It serves clients from a wide varieties of industries such as retail, lifestyle, food & beverage, finance, health and market research verticals. This is one good method if you want to grow your own list of email subscribers.
Webmaster or Blog Owner
Another way to get traffic effectively is to approach website or blog owners. If you found a good website and is related to your niche, try contacting the owner and ask if he can display a banner, text ads or mention about your website in his blog. You will pay him a fix daily or monthly fees on the price he is charging you to place your ads in his website. This is a good way to get targeted traffic because the readers or followers there are already a regular visitors, meaning they often return to the same blog because they are interested with the content. If you place your website in this kind of platform, you are also exposing your website to an already interested crowd.
Solo Ads/ Email Traffic
Solo ads is a one time email blast from sellers who send your offer to an email list that they owned. These are really high quality traffic and high chance of conversion but still, sales is not guaranteed. No one can help you to get a guaranteed sale, you must know this. Even if you did not get any sale out of it, you will get many subscribers. Many big time marketers actually use these methods largely to collect email subscribers and build a large list fast. Charges normally goes by the number of click. Orders start from quantity of 100 clicks and every multiple of 100 clicks. Each click is charged within $0.50 to $1.00 or even more. You must learn a few simple guidelines before buying a solo ads. You can google for the tips. There are some sellers who just send you cheap or junk traffic that they purchased at a far cheaper price from a bulk traffic website, be careful with these providers. You are paying a lot for these type of service and you must make it worth. Below are my recommendation and also popular websites where you can find good solo ads sellers.
Facebook public group – join ‘Solo Ads Testimonials’. Many buyers and sellers are networking in the group. You can find your vendor based of the feedback from buyers. This is really a reliable place to find good vendors. Visit www.facebook.com/groups/SoloAdsTestimonials/
Udimi – another popular website where you can find high profile solo ads vendors. Find out more at udimi.com
Safe-swaps – you can swap email list with other members. You need to pay a monthly fees to use the services. It is expensive if you are not actively needing the list. It’s free to sign up and feel free to have a look at what they offer safe-swaps.com
Important Note: As solo ads are expensive services, don’t be easily tempted with cheap solo ads package from any random website where they offer you, for example 400 clicks for the price of $25 to $30, it’s half price from what you generally get from a 100 clicks package. Or they mentioned to guaranteed you sale, possible? I only say this because myself was tricked before by cheap traffic or bulk and cheap services and that’s why I am telling you from experience. As good as it may seems, probably it is not good. Good luck in sourcing your solo ads!
Conclusion
The traffic methods are not limited to just the above. Those are the few popular and common ones and widely being used now. It is up to your personal preference and budget to choose between a free traffic or paid traffic method, or you can definitely do both to optimize your results. And of course you should also learn what type of website is best to deal with what kind of traffic. As an example, I would recommend a blog to get traffic organically by doing a good SEO and target keyword research. This is because a blog nature is supposed to be providing content and people go to blog for information. So a blog has good potential to draw visitors organically. Secondly, for a sales page I would most likely send paid traffic such as pay per click advertising for example. A sales page is not a full website and not fully optimised with SEO and therefore, reduces its’ chance to be found organically as compare to blog. Thirdly for a landing page or squeeze page, I would send solo ads (email traffic) to it. A landing page is just a very simple one-page site where its’ main purpose is to collect name and email or just an email. You cannot depend on SEO to get visitors to this type of page and you definitely need to do something to drive visitors to your landing page.
If you are able to drive a large amount of traffic organically and free, it’s definitely the best way to go. But if you don’t have a blog or your blog is not getting much visitors, then the second option is to buy traffic. Buying traffic is the fastest way to build your customers list if you are collecting their emails and driving free traffic is definitely going to be a long process unless you have a very popular blog with large volume of visitors per day.
I hope you have an idea on internet traffic and know how to start looking for traffic for your online business.