Written by When starting an online business, there are really only two ways that you can get your site visitors. There are Paid Visitors and then there are Free Visitors. Now each and every business is unique and they start out in different situations. It’s up to you, the business owner, to decide what kind of marketing you want to do to get your site visitors (or traffic as it is called in the online industry).
It’s through the marketing that you do that determines if the visitor that you get is a paid visitor or a free visitor. If you put together a piece of marketing that brings in one or many visitors and cost you money, this would be a paid traffic. But if you put up a marketing piece that brings in someone and there was not monetary cost to you, this would be free traffic.
Now like I already said, it’s up to you, the business owner, to decide what kind of marketing you would like to do. Paid, Free, or maybe a bit of Both. Making the decision is really as simple as asking yourself a couple of questions.
- How much time do you have to put into your business?
- Do you have a bit of a marketing budget (no matter how small)?
Let’s talk about some of the pluses and the minuses of each of these method of getting your site visitors.
PAID MARKETING
Paid marketing is by far the fastest way to get your site visitors. In essence, you’re trading money for traffic. The more money that you have, the more traffic that you can get. But it’s not just straight out this much money for this many visitors. Every type of marketing costs a different amount of money plus it also depends of what your target market is.
Knowing your market, the people that are going to buy from you, can save you a lot of money. I know that for myself, I spent thousands of dollars on marketing before I really even got who my market even was. So believe me when I say, figuring out your market first can save you a lot.
Like I was saying, there are many different types of paid marketing. Some of the big ones are:
- PPC (Pay Per Click)
- Banner Ad’s
- Media Buys
- PPI (Pay Per Impression)
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition or Action)
I will be talking about all of these in future posts so please Subscribe to my blog to stay updated and get the most recent trainings.
FREE MARKETING
Free marketing is very cool as I’m sure you would guess. This is getting people to come back to your site without you having to pay any money at all. But there is still a cost to this. It’s going to take some of your time. Some will take a bit of time and some will take a bit more of your time. It really depends upon what you’re doing.
Also, some things will bring in just a bit of traffic while others can bring in a lot of traffic. It’s really up to you and how well you do your marketing. The one big thing that I have found with doing any sort of free marketing is that you really need to keep thing consistent and keep taking action with them. It is highly unlikely that you will do one piece of free marketing and that you will start to be making thousands of dollars a month.
It actually takes you creating and doing a lot of different marketing pieces to really start to get the amount of visitors for you to really start making big money. But let’s get into some of the different ways you can be getting your site visitors.
- Article Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Facebook Marketing
- Twitter Marketing
- Blogging
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Forum Marketing
Again, I will be getting into these more in the future so I encourage you to Subscribe to my blog so that you can get the newest training and learn these valuable marketing methods.
Now which ever method that you pick to focus on, master it. This was one of the big lessons that I had to go through. Through mastering a way of getting your site visitors, you will end up having more visitors and more sales than you would think would be possible. So really MASTER A METHOD.
Talk to you in the next post
Steven Downward
PS: If you have started marketing your business, I would love to hear about any of the ways that you have used and what kind of results that you got from them. Did they work out the way that you wanted them too or did they crash and burn? Just leave me a comment in the comment section below. I always enjoy hearing other peoples experiences on how things have worked out for them.
Thats a great review of the free vs paid traffic approaches. However, in your free category, each of those items still has a varying expense – and a varying value you the person. The expense may not be $$ but it still costs us our time which is precious.
While someone is initially learning, they need to focus on one tactic, but beyond that there comes this need to balance our time to energy ratios! LOL
I get a LOT of Google traffic off of a couple key posts that I SEOd well. Those posts took me a several hours apiece, but as long as the topic remains relevent they could generate me traffic for a long time.
Things like Twitter require regular attention just to even begin to get traction. Sure they have a nice semi-residual effect but they require more babysitting than a few SEOd posts do. So I’ve found that what works best for me is actually a “healthy” blend of (mostly) free traffic sources.
Free traffic can carry you a long ways but its going to be throttled by your own number of hours in the day. If you outsource it then its no longer Free LOL! There reaches a point where, once we have a nice organic free jump start and some initial income coming in where it can be nice to supplement the growth potential with some paid traffic.
Great stuff!
Kimberly
Kimberly Castleberry´s last [type] ..31DBBB – Day 4 – Analyze a Top Blog In Your Niche
[Reply]
Steven Downward Reply:
August 14th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
@Kimberly Castleberry, I totally agree with you. “Free” in money just means that you need to put your time into it. Without your time, you will not be getting anywhere.
I also like how you mentioned that it is a very good idea to focus in on one tactic. Through doing just that one tactic you should be able to generate a lot of traffic and a lot of activity for your business.
Thanks for the valuable comment Kim.
[Reply]
Hi, Steve:
Just wanted to add something to your paid traffic overview.
It’s fast, yes, but only if you don’t take into consideration the learning curve it takes to be successful at it.
Paid traffic has definitely been declining and continues to do so, so I am all for search engine optimization and leveraging your marketing efforts through that.
Best,
Ana Hoffman
PS Thanks for stopping by my blog!
Ana @ Blog Traffic Generation´s last [type] ..Bloggers Get on Board – Or Else…
[Reply]
Steven Downward Reply:
August 14th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
@Ana @ Blog Traffic Generation, Hey Ana
I know what you mean with the learning curve. I know many people (myself included) that has spent a bunch in paid advertising to not really get anything back in return. But once you pass that curve, traffic can flow nicely and a good income you can have.
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