Thursday, November 7, 2013

Paid vs Free Traffic



























Due to the rapid usage of the Internet becoming a norm throughout the globe, various groups of people are now able to market their products and services by setting up a website. However, the best-designed web site will not produce income unless there is traffic directed to it. There are a couple of options to obtain website traffic. One is through free traffic and the other one is through paid traffic. Let’s examine the differences between the two. You can then decide whether the former or the latter is a suitable choice for your website.

Free traffic, as the name suggests, implies that you traffic to your website free of charge. The most common method of obtaining this involves using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. When you optimize your website, search engines view your site as being useful and relevant. This in turn, leads to increase in rankings for your keywords.SEO methods are great for obtaining free traffic in the long term but it might take as long as six months to a year to see full results. Alternatively, you can use strategically written articles and get them published at article directory sites that have high volumes of traffic. This works to bring in organic search engine traffic within a week. However, as your article moves out of the main pages of the article directories, your traffic is likely to taper off in two to three weeks. Writing and publishing articles once a week should keep free traffic to your site from dropping off. Free traffic can also be obtained through various traffic exchanges. Traffic exchanges can quickly bring in a lot of traffic but will most likely be untargeted.

The other option of getting visitors to your website involves paid traffic. If you need immediate traffic to your website and have some money to spend, paid traffic is a very good option. However, careful planning is required to ensure the greatest return on your investment. The most common and immediate method of obtaining paid traffic is through payper- click listings with all the major search engines like Yahoo, Google, Miva etc. Depending on the amount you are willing to spend as well as your target keywords, pay-per-click traffic can bring in some of the best results due to precise targeting of visitors to your site. The advantage of paid traffic is that you are not affected by search engine algorithm changes and as long as you have money to spend, you will gain traffic to your website.

The best thing to do would be to use a combination of both paid and free traffic. Optimize your website to bring you traffic over the long term and to position your website really well in the search engines. For the short term, get your traffic through a combination of paid searches and article marketing. In time, you will be able to obtain almost all of your traffic for free and you can slowly phase out of your paid traffic options if you so choose.





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