Choosing Free Traffic vs Paid Traffic
When building traffic for your business, there are basically two types of traffic you can get: Paid Traffic and Free Traffic.
Paid Traffic
Two types of paid traffic include Banner ads and Pay-Per-Click advertising. With the first you have some graphic banners created and approach certain websites to have your banners displayed or have an ad network distribute them for you.
Pay-per-click traffic is where you join an ad network like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Network where your ads are displayed alongside organic search engine results based on the keywords entered by someone searching for information. In addition, you can have your ad displayed on various websites in the network. In each case, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Free Traffic
Traffic is never actually free considering the time and effort it takes to get the visibility for your website you need to attract the traffic you want. Even so, it doesn’t require you to pay when someone finds your website as with paid traffic and over time continues to pay dividends when your Seo is done right.
Free traffic primarily comes from search engines, Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Or, just about any other website where you have been able to get a link to your site. This includes business directories, article sites, blogs and social networking sites.
How to Decide: Free or Paid?
Initially, you definitely want to build free traffic since this builds the foundation for your business online that has long-term consequences. When done right, free traffic built as a result of Effective Search Engine Optimization techniques turns your online web property (website) into a long-term asset that continues to provide you customers over time.
The problems with paid traffic are many. For one, it’s expensive and time consuming. Even so, at the right time for the right reason it is an effective strategy for many. Successful companies that use paid traffic normally have large budgets and are able to stay the course for a period of time until they can make those efforts profitable. In addition, things change frequently and can throw havoc on your campaigns making them ineffective at the drop of a dime.
In addition, data from Google itself shows that websites ranked in search results the organic listings receive many times the number of visitors than do the paid ads at the top and right side of the search listings. It wasn’t always this way, but things are evolving much more in favor of organic results.
That being said, when you have been able to get good positioning in the natural search results, the addition of some PPC advertising alongside those results can help to increase visibility and credibility for your brand which helps to increase the number of visitors who click through to your website from either source, free or paid.
Automation
The result of getting free traffic over time creates a situation where your Online Marketing evolves into becoming virtually automated, and the traffic just keeps coming with minimal ongoing effort, sometimes for years. You will have built an asset for your business that has real value and ads to the overall value and equity of your company.
Author Steve Josephs is owner of Intellidon Marketing LLC, a Search Engine Marketing and SEO Services firm specializing in attracting new customers for local businesses through Online Marketing Strategies. See: Wikipedia on Search Engine Optimization.
