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Free Traffic Versus Paid Traffic

by guest on Dec.14, 2009, under Blog

As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. You need traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the holy grail by many marketing pundits. Without visitors to your site (i.e. web traffic) your website will fail.

Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. What’s not as obvious is how to get it. Experts each promote their own formulas for getting traffic to your website. 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 ideas are short-term. Some are barely legal. Others only work in certain countries. But all traffic to your site eventually comes down to these two kinds: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.

Some experts argue that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They maintain that all website 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. Organic traffic can have many different sources. It can come from people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. Organic traffic can come from someone clicking on a link found in a different website. Free traffic 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 natural traffic. Such traffic is free in the sense that you don’t pay a fee 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 website gets because you paid for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Microsoft Adcenter. Paid traffic can be from a banner shown on someone else’s website. Paid traffic can be from from someone entering in your website url from an advertisement in a magazine. There are several other ways you can pay for traffic.

Which method is better? Many would say that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free, or natural traffic can take a long time to get. For example, when you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, no one will put links on their site to yours. The search engines don’t know about your site either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even word of mouth (often called viral marketing) can take a while to spread. With paid advertising, you can usually start getting website traffic instantly. If you do it right, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that scenario, paying for your traffic is a lot better than waiting months or years 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 unadvertised site, carefully create a pay-per-click ad campaign to acquire instant traffic. Monitor your paid traffic closely at first. You may also want to test many different ad variations. Especially test which keywords and keyphrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and eliminate the duds. Then, start optimizing your landing pages for the money key phrases and seek out link partners using those profitable keywords and phrases as the link text to specific pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be dominating both the paid and free traffic sources.

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