Ways to Increase Website Traffic: Paid vs. Free

For your website or online business to be profitable, you need to get as much traffic as you can to it. That's because, no matter how good a website or service or product you have, if people can't find it, they can't buy it.

But not just any web traffic. What you need is targeted traffic, i.e. traffic interested in your product.

There are many things you can do to achieve this. You can increase website traffic by paying for it, or you can work for it and grow free web traffic organically.

Increase Website Traffic through Paid Traffic

Paid methods to get visitors include:

• Publicising your URL or website address in newspaper or magazine or TV ads. Usually not very effective unless your URL is short or memorable, as people can rarely remember long URLs.
• Buying leads in email or online newsletters, called 'paid inclusion'. You pay for your website to be promoted in such newsletters, that go out to large numbers of subscribers. Choose only the relevant ones with subscribers who are interested in your product. It can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars each time.
• Buying banner ads. These ads appear on other websites and are inexpensive, but are typically not effective as they are not targeted.
• Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) campaigns. Here you buy online ads, but only pay when a searcher clicks on one. Each click costs from $0.10 to over $10, depending on competition. This is one of the most popular methods to increase website traffic, as you get targeted traffic instantly. To know more on this, see Pay Per Click Advertising.
• Running an Affiliate Program. An affiliate program is a system that enables people to sign up and channel traffic to your sales letter or website. The incentive for these people, called affiliates, is that they get paid for each sale they make. The beauty of the method is that you only pay when a sale is made - revenue without risk. Especially useful for selling digital products, like e-Books, where a sale doesn't entail any extra production or shipping cost.

Paid web traffic has the merit of bringing visitors to your site almost instantly. You can use it for launching a site, or to do a sales promotion. You can also use it to jumpstart free traffic.

Increase Website Traffic through Organic Traffic

This is traffic you don't have to pay for, free traffic. You should try to get this, on top of any paid traffic. For one thing, free is good; for another, your visitors come because your site had something they wanted. That makes them more receptive to buying.

But free traffic does not shoot up overnight. It takes time to grow and nurture; hence we have paid traffic.

Sources of organic traffic include:

• Your website address in business cards, letterheads, email signature, etc.
• Mailing lists. These are people who have signed up to receive emails on subjects of interest to them. You grow a list by getting visitors to subscribe to it. Your emails to this list would include links to your site or sales letter. But you need traffic first to do this. Maybe by jumpstarting it with paid web traffic. Another popular approach is to joint-venture(JV) with others who have mailing lists in a complementary or similar area. Established internet marketeers often use this method to increase website traffic - some very successfully indeed. But do NOT buy mailing lists of people who did not opt to hear from you, as they won't be interested in your product, and it's spam anyway.
• Links or referrals to your website from other sites (called backlinks or incoming or inbound links). You can get these when other websites link to you, perhaps because they like your content, or by listing your website with web directories, or by contributing comments at blogs or forums which allow a link to your site from the comment bio line.
• Links to your site from your blog. Works especially well if your blog has lots of visitors.
• Links to your site from ebooks or articles or other writings that you distribute free or sell. Also called viral marketing, as the links get propagated when the article or ebook is distributed to as wide an audience as possible.
• Referrals or links from search engines like MSN or Google or Yahoo. Getting such links involves SEO or Search Engine Optimization, and is a whole field in itself. Done correctly, it is able to generate huge amounts of free web traffic eventually. If you are interested in the details of it, see Web Traffic.

Both paid and free traffic have their role to increase website traffic, but leveraging on the long-term benefits of free traffic can mean the difference between failure and success.