5 Steps to Get The Best Kind of Web Traffic that You Always Needed

What goals do you want to accomplish online? Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Or, do you want to generate more sales? Or simply, do you just want to share your content online? No matter what is your main objective, if you don’t have the right audience you won’t be able to achieve your goals. Fortunately, there are multiple sources of traffic online (free and paid), which you can use, but what is important is to understand that no two kinds of traffic are same and they behave completely differently. In this article I’ll highlight the behavior of various sources of traffic so that you can easily decide which traffic source is good for you and your objectives.

Organic Search Traffic – Organic search results get 90% of the total clicks a search engine gets. People love organic search traffic because of the obvious reasons – it is free (You definitely have to hire SEO’s, link builders, content developers etc if you don’t have knowledge about SEO or don’t have time to do all these things) and converts well. But getting top rankings for your website in search engines for desired keywords can take few weeks to many months depending on your competition. Since getting organic traffic requires lot of time you can’t expect overnight results from it.

Pay-per-click Traffic – As the name says you have to pay for it. It is the most popular source of traffic amongst internet marketers because the traffic you will get is of high quality and converts well. Also, you don’t have to wait for months like organic search traffic as visitors will start coming within few hours. Although PPC campaigns are getting expensive every moment due to high competition but still with proper keyword research, proper targeting, effective sales copy and high quality landing pages you can easily achieve a positive ROI for your campaigns.

Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking could be great source of free traffic if you have high quality content to share and have few friends on such websites who can give an initial push to your content. The main thing which you need to understand while using social bookmarking is that people don’t visit websites like Digg or Delicious to buy anything. They go there to find some useful content. So if you are trying to use social bookmark website to sell your products then you are just wasting your time because the traffic you will get won’t convert most of the times.

Social Media Traffic – Social media websites like Twitter and Facebook grew at the staggering rate in 2009 and are still growing every day. Although social media traffic is not interested in buying anything but it converts at a good rate once you establish yourself amongst your communities on these websites (Obviously you need to share useful content with them and help them to establish yourself) and have a good following on these websites. Various studies here and here about the impact of social media on consumer behavior shows that the decisions of more than half of the US adults when it comes to buy online are influenced by the information they get from social media websites.

RSS Readers Traffic – The traffic you get from RSS are your loyal readers. This traffic won’t convert well with Adsense and other similar programs because they come to your website for content and are not interested in the ads. Although, since they are your loyal readers and trust you, this kind of traffic converts very well if you are trying to promote an affiliate program or trying to sell your own product.

As you have seen, the traffic originated from different sources behaves differently and needs different techniques to monetize. Instead of jumping from one source to another you need to focus on the traffic source which works well in your niche and can help you to accomplish your goals. What is your main source of traffic and how do you use it to accomplish your blogging goals?