To Pay or Not To Pay for Website Traffic?
By Stu Leventhal Guru Marketing Tips Editor
What is the best kind of website traffic? Well, it is free web traffic...of course. But really that is a quick answer that is not too complete.
You are looking for traffic that is going to buy what you are selling or pitching. The best traffic buys or hires you. It really does not matter if you pay for attracting traffic if the cost is built into the price of whatever you are selling.
Everyone wants something for nothing and that is the attraction that cyberspace presents to us all in many formats. If you do all the work then it is considered free. Of course it is not totally free because your time is money too. But generally if we do it ourselves then we feel great if it works. Often though we do not value our own time like we would if we were paying someone else.
Online ads are relatively inexpensive. Done correctly one can send plenty of visitors to a website. It is about placing the ads in the correct places online, where they will be seen by potential customers. It also requires knowing how to create the ads.
Free traffic is usually considered, when you attract people to your website without paying for an ad or commercial. Lets say for instance, you write a blog post or social media post and you install a link from your post to your web page. If you designed and wrote the post yourself, plus published the post and did all techie things necessary to make the post attractive without having to pay anyone then whoever follows your link to your website is considered FREE Traffic.
If however, you have to pay a writer or a photographer or an SEO etc; then that was not really free; was it?
Although I will say most people and marketers consider PAID for Traffic being when you pay for actual advertising space online or offline, like an ad on a website or in a magazine or a radio commercial. Social media posting, blogging, article publishing; they say gets you FREE Traffic, even if you had to pay a few hundred dollars to have a video made or for an SEO expert to get your article optimized for Google Search.
I say paying is paying and if it cost money then it ain't FREE!
The goal for attracting web traffic should be assuring that whatever it costs you to buy; you must make more from using it than you paid out. So, if an ad in the classified section of a newspaper or on Facebook both cost $100 dollars for you to create and run; I say, you see whether the Facebook ad or the newspaper ad brought you in more money, orders or phone calls that actually turned into buyers purchasing something. The ad that had the best results wins and you should therefore do more of those type of ads.
Now of course you would not just give up on a marketing idea, the first time it fails. You have to try to figure out why and where your idea went wrong and if you can fix what's broke. On that note, you should also remember that a great performing marketing campaign can also be improved to perform even better. Yes, work on making your great ads even better too as well as struggling to fix your poor performing ads.
The point is; you keep working on your promotional ideas and tweaking them to improve them. Most great marketing campaigns are crafted over time, into great money makers.
Traffic, for your info, is just an internet marketing term coined to mean online audience. This is because marketers have to explain why lots of folks landed on a web page but no one bought anything. Traffic, you see, is kind of meaningless. You want real interested buyers landing on your website not just people clicking on and then clicking off.
Orders and new customers signing contracts with you is how you rate your web efforts...period.
Believe me, there are plenty of ways to send website visitors to a web page but are they interested in what you are pitching on that page?
Marketers will tell you that they can double your amount of social media followers in a month. Many can do just that too. The question is, are you going to get double the orders you were getting from that expanded audience? Where are those people coming from? Who are they?
It is the quality of the visitor that matters not the amount of website visitors. Are you qualifying your visitors before you tally them up. Why count them as having gained legit business leads, unless you are actually making some money from them?
Know that web traffic comes from somewhere. You do something on someone's site and people follow the links published to your site. There is an audience already somewhere and you want some of them to come visit you. You can buy an ad to entice the audience to click over to your site or perhaps you'll try leaving a comment with a link to your site.
With the purchased ad you generally can request good positioning, in a place where you feel your ad will be noticed most and paid attention to. With a blog comment you do not have much choice where your link is going. Therefore, the paid ad usually gets you more results. That does not mean do not leave blog comments on popular blogs! Remember those comments can stay up on line for a very long time, sometimes years. Ads on the other hand only run for as long as you've paid for them to run.
Getting folks to your site is only the start; now you have to entertain them and sell and pitch to them.
What are you selling? Yourself, products that you manufactured, advice or services or perhaps something you bought and are acting as the middleman to resell?
Do you understand the psychiatry of your desired customer or client? How much do you know about your market and industry? Have you determined what kind of traffic you are looking for? Do you usually sell to the budget buyer, the person looking for the best deal or the person that wants the brand names and bragging rights, so they can say, "I bought the very best, top of the line."
How does your website compare to other websites? If you get lots of traffic, can you handle it all? These are some of the question you need to answer before you make your web traffic strategy.
You are looking for traffic that is going to buy what you are selling or pitching. The best traffic buys or hires you. It really does not matter if you pay for attracting traffic if the cost is built into the price of whatever you are selling.
Everyone wants something for nothing and that is the attraction that cyberspace presents to us all in many formats. If you do all the work then it is considered free. Of course it is not totally free because your time is money too. But generally if we do it ourselves then we feel great if it works. Often though we do not value our own time like we would if we were paying someone else.
Online ads are relatively inexpensive. Done correctly one can send plenty of visitors to a website. It is about placing the ads in the correct places online, where they will be seen by potential customers. It also requires knowing how to create the ads.
Free traffic is usually considered, when you attract people to your website without paying for an ad or commercial. Lets say for instance, you write a blog post or social media post and you install a link from your post to your web page. If you designed and wrote the post yourself, plus published the post and did all techie things necessary to make the post attractive without having to pay anyone then whoever follows your link to your website is considered FREE Traffic.
If however, you have to pay a writer or a photographer or an SEO etc; then that was not really free; was it?
Although I will say most people and marketers consider PAID for Traffic being when you pay for actual advertising space online or offline, like an ad on a website or in a magazine or a radio commercial. Social media posting, blogging, article publishing; they say gets you FREE Traffic, even if you had to pay a few hundred dollars to have a video made or for an SEO expert to get your article optimized for Google Search.
I say paying is paying and if it cost money then it ain't FREE!
The goal for attracting web traffic should be assuring that whatever it costs you to buy; you must make more from using it than you paid out. So, if an ad in the classified section of a newspaper or on Facebook both cost $100 dollars for you to create and run; I say, you see whether the Facebook ad or the newspaper ad brought you in more money, orders or phone calls that actually turned into buyers purchasing something. The ad that had the best results wins and you should therefore do more of those type of ads.
Now of course you would not just give up on a marketing idea, the first time it fails. You have to try to figure out why and where your idea went wrong and if you can fix what's broke. On that note, you should also remember that a great performing marketing campaign can also be improved to perform even better. Yes, work on making your great ads even better too as well as struggling to fix your poor performing ads.
The point is; you keep working on your promotional ideas and tweaking them to improve them. Most great marketing campaigns are crafted over time, into great money makers.
Traffic, for your info, is just an internet marketing term coined to mean online audience. This is because marketers have to explain why lots of folks landed on a web page but no one bought anything. Traffic, you see, is kind of meaningless. You want real interested buyers landing on your website not just people clicking on and then clicking off.
Orders and new customers signing contracts with you is how you rate your web efforts...period.
Believe me, there are plenty of ways to send website visitors to a web page but are they interested in what you are pitching on that page?
Marketers will tell you that they can double your amount of social media followers in a month. Many can do just that too. The question is, are you going to get double the orders you were getting from that expanded audience? Where are those people coming from? Who are they?
It is the quality of the visitor that matters not the amount of website visitors. Are you qualifying your visitors before you tally them up. Why count them as having gained legit business leads, unless you are actually making some money from them?
Know that web traffic comes from somewhere. You do something on someone's site and people follow the links published to your site. There is an audience already somewhere and you want some of them to come visit you. You can buy an ad to entice the audience to click over to your site or perhaps you'll try leaving a comment with a link to your site.
With the purchased ad you generally can request good positioning, in a place where you feel your ad will be noticed most and paid attention to. With a blog comment you do not have much choice where your link is going. Therefore, the paid ad usually gets you more results. That does not mean do not leave blog comments on popular blogs! Remember those comments can stay up on line for a very long time, sometimes years. Ads on the other hand only run for as long as you've paid for them to run.
Getting folks to your site is only the start; now you have to entertain them and sell and pitch to them.
What are you selling? Yourself, products that you manufactured, advice or services or perhaps something you bought and are acting as the middleman to resell?
Do you understand the psychiatry of your desired customer or client? How much do you know about your market and industry? Have you determined what kind of traffic you are looking for? Do you usually sell to the budget buyer, the person looking for the best deal or the person that wants the brand names and bragging rights, so they can say, "I bought the very best, top of the line."
How does your website compare to other websites? If you get lots of traffic, can you handle it all? These are some of the question you need to answer before you make your web traffic strategy.