For your online business to succeed, you will need people to visit your website. The more visitors or traffic you attract, the higher your chance of making a sale. As they say, traffic generation is the most important part of Internet marketing. It is the lifeblood of any online business.
There are basically 2 broad strategies under which traffic and lead generation fall under: They are either free or paid traffic. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. In this article, I’ll outline the various pros and cons of each method of generating traffic.
- Examples of Free Traffic:
- Article marketing
- Social networking
- Blogs
- Press releases
- Video marketing
- Podcasting
- Search Engine Optimization
- Joint ventures
- Forums
- Social networking
- Examples of Paid Traffic:
- Pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords
- Pay-per-view advertising
- Banner advertising
- Pros of Free Traffic:
- * You don’t need to keep spending and spending money to get traffic.
- * Traffic will be sent to you forever.
- * Your traffic will increase over time.
- * You just need to work hard once to set up the content.
- * You are establishing a good relationship with your customers first and gaining their loyalty.
- * You are setting yourself up as an authority in your niche and building trust in your expertise.
- Cons of Free Traffic:
- * You will need to put in a lot of your energy upfront.
- * You will need to dedicate a lot of time and effort to build the traffic components.
- * You need to keep doing it in order to have any effect.
- * Your effort will take a longer time to bear fruit.
- Pros of Paid Traffic:
- * Traffic is instant.
- * You will get a huge surge of traffic to your website.
- * You can test offers quickly to see if they will convert before spending too much time on them
- * Your traffic is mostly targeted.
- Cons of Paid Traffic:
- * The costs of getting traffic continually can add up to a lot.
- * Advertising in the wrong medium can cost you a lot of money.
- * You need to work out your profit after subtracting the costs of advertising.
As you can see, there are many pros and cons in using either free or paid traffic. Which method of traffic generation you use will ultimately depend on your current circumstances, your goals, your lifestyle and your resources.
You can even mix both methods if it suits your requirements better. In fact, lots of Internet marketers have used both as part of their traffic generation strategies to great effect. Choose wisely and your online business can grow and be a huge success
