It could be said that the primary focus of your online marketing efforts must be to acquire good qualified traffic and lots of it! But where Does good traffic come from and what kind of traffic is best for your web presence? Also and probably the one thing many online marketers fail to completely understand is, when you actually achieve good traffic, how do you know if your investment in your traffic campaigns are actually working?
So what is the difference between good and bad traffic? We quickly learn that not all web traffic is valuable and unless you are running a website that is 100% contingent upon ad revenues, you will need to quickly attract the right kind traffic to your site. It is generally agreed amongst really successful online marketers that there are only six primary forms of traffic, which we highlight below, and delve into in greater detail throughout this page.
Direct Traffic.
Direct traffic is most often the result of a user entering a URL into their browser or using a bookmark to directly access your site. Essentially, Direct sessions occur any time Google Analytics cannot determine another referring source or channel. This is generally the result of a visitor having been to your website previously.
Paid Traffic.
Paid traffic comes in many forms, such as with pay per click advertising platforms like Google's Adsense, text links, etc; as well as by the purchasing of banner Ads on other sites, automated traffic sources run by bots, paid ads on social networks like twitter or facebook, just to name a few.
Email Marketing Traffic.
Email marketing Traffic is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. This source of Traffic is generally built up over time but can also be purchased or in some cases leased.
Social Media Traffic.
Social Media Traffic is probably one of the simplest forms of generating traffic and happens dynamically when you engage and build relationships on each of your social media platforms.
Referred Traffic, also known as Referral Traffic.
Referred Traffic is traffic that comes from a third party source such as another website. These “other websites” could be: partner sites, blogs, emails, posts on social media sites and more.
Organic Traffic.
Organic traffic is what most marketers strive to increase. This traffic is defined as visitors coming from a search engine, such as Google or Bing. ... In HubSpot and Google Analytics, paid search traffic or PPC is marked in a separate category.
Another initiative is to simply promote your brand to mass audiences with cheap route to market portals such as Twitter, Yahoo Gemini, Amazon Advertising, BuySellAds, AdCash, Clicksor & AdMedia to name but a few.
These sources are more commonly known as Display Advertising portals (or networks) and in most cases, $50 goes a very long way if you are strategically minded in picking your target audience.
Content Distribution platforms are another great source for generating traffic. These sites show a combination of image + text ads as a recommendation on their publisher websites. Such as showing ads at the end of a blog post as “Sponsored” content.
These kinds of platforms uses behavioral targeting to increase the quality of the traffic and most of them follow a cost per click pricing model.
Here are a few examples of valued Content Distributors that can add huge amounts of traffic to your campaigns for very little investment!
