What You Need To Know About Website Traffic…

Ultimately, at the end of the day, there are only 2 types of traffic. Free and paid – I’ll dive in a bit deeper in just a moment, but the real point of this post is not only explaining the different forms of traffic, but to also instill the importance of keeping it super simple…

Let’s break down these 2 categories of traffic…

Free traffic consists of things like:

Article marketing
Forum posts
Classified ad postings
Answer sites (like answers.yahoo.com and wikianswers.com)
Press release submissions
Blogging
There are several others, but this is a good starting point.

Sources of paid traffic:

Banner advertising
PPC (yahoo, google, facebook advertising, MSN, Adbrite.com, etc)
PPV (pay per view – examples: zango.com, clicksor.com, etc)
Buying ad space on a site or blog
There are a lot of forms of paid advertising, these are a few of the common ones that I use or have used.

Is one better than the other?

The short answer is “No”, however, they each have their own positives/negatives.

With “free” advertising (really no such thing as free), there is a cost associated. With free traffic, you’re essentially trading time for traffic. Free traffic can be very time consuming, but does produce results. You can spend say 45 minutes in writing and submitting an article to directories and in the coming days, weeks and months, maybe get 5 or so leads from that one article. Not much leverage here, but a little…you spent 45 minutes to generate about 5 leads (note: this number could be higher or lower – I’m just using some “rough”, yet realistic numbers here).

Same type of logic would apply if you were using Yahoo Answers, submitting press releases or posting in forums or creating classified ad listings at places like Craigslist or Kijiji.

So, generally speaking, free traffic comes at a price…it’s typically slower at generating traffic. The good news is that you can generate SUPER targeted traffic and it didn’t cost you anything financially.

With paid traffic, you can generate more visitors…faster. Plain and simple. Although I’m not any more attached to one form of traffic compared to another, the important thing to understand when you’re generating visitors to your site is to keep it simple and start with ONE form of traffic…then ramp up once that technique has been mastered.

Bottom line…it really doesn’t matter HOW you get traffic, but it’s a MUST if you’re looking to generate an endless supply of leads with prospects that are looking for what you’ve got. Pick a starting point…dive in and go for it. Make no mistake…when you live in a state of “lead abundance” you can literally write your own check.

Now, it’s a point of monetizing that data. And that process is much easier than learning how to generate an avalanche of leads every day.

Think of this like an octopus…you start off with one tentacle (source of generating visitors), get good at it…then expand and create more tentacles. After several months, you should be getting traffic from several different sources.

Eventually you’ll have a “virtual machine”, generating you traffic (and leads) on almost autopilot – 24/7. The great thing about traffic and websites is that when used properly THERE IS NO OTHER LEVERAGING TOOL EQUALLY POWERFUL relative to the time you put in. They don’t call in sick or tell you they can’t “work” today because they have an ingrown toenail…they’re constantly on the front line…driving you visitors and generating leads. Every day like clock work.

In closing, start with one form of traffic…get REALLY good at it. Then expand your “octopus” and begin using other streams to bring additional visitors to your site. By “staging” this process it will also give you ample time to dial in other areas of your campaign (follow up emails, webinars/teleconferences, etc) to appropriately handle the “ramp up” process.

Never stop learning. Success truly does boil down to applied knowledge.

Committed to your success,

Terry Duff