There is one common characteristic that exists in both buying traffic and borrowing traffic – you’re transferring someone else’s traffic over to your website under set conditions. What this means is once your agreement with the “seller” or the “lender” ends, (eg. when you stop paying for that advertising) traffic from these sources immediately ceases. Given the limitation of these two methods, there’s another option that needs to be considered when it comes to generating traffic – building organic traffic.
There are two key methods for building up organic traffic to your website:
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Social Media Markting
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO sends traffic to your website by making it easy for people to find your website when they search via major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo for keywords or key phrases relevant to your products/services. Due to the fact that search engines are a predominant tool that people use to find information, SEO is critical in building a website’s online presence.
The power of search engine traffic lies in the fact that it’s highly targeted, resulting from people who are actively entering specific keywords to find information relating to a certain need they have – this is the type of traffic that can be easily turned into leads and potentially sales.
Given that 80% of people reportedly do not look past the first page of the search results, SEO is all about pushing your website to appear within the top rankings listed for specific keywords.
In order to implement effective SEO, the following two factors need to be carefully considered:
- On-page factors (accounting for less than 20% of SEO result): This is the process to make a webpage “search-engine friendly” and keyword-relevant.
- Off-page factors (accounting for more than 80% of the SEO result): This is essentially about building links on other websites that point back to your website, making it appear more relevant for chosen keywords in the eyes of search engines.
Social Media Marketing
When we observer the way in which information is shared, transferred and discovered via web communities and virtual social platforms, it becomes evident that social media sites can be a great tool to get your website in front of a targeted audience.
Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and Digg receive millions of active users at any given time of the day. User-generated content rapidly spread across these platforms each second. Social media have become an integral aspect in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, literally transforming the way in which people communicate. The impact this phenomenon has on Internet Marketing simply cannot be ignored.
Perhaps the best part of social media marketing is that it can work just as well for small businesses as it can for major corporations. On one end of the scale, there are established brands such as Dell who reportedly generated more than $6.5 million using Twitter; on the other hand small businesses like Kogi BBQ are generating loyal customers with social media as their primary marketing avenue.
Although the subject matter of this article is website traffic, something else to keep in mind is that the benefits of social media are not limited to generating traffic. When used correctly, social media marketing can be a great way to communicate, interact and build long-term relationships with customers.
References
- Adam Ostrow, (2010), Available: http://mashable.com/2009/12/08/dell-twitter-sales/.
- Guy Kawasaki, (2010), Available: http://blogs.webex.com/webex_interactions/2010/05/guy-kawasaki-part-three-sell-like-delloutlet-and-kogi-bbq-use-twitter.html
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