Free Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

Web traffic is the very first issue anyone involved in internet marketing should be concerned about.

If you have been struggling online for some time you probably know what I’m talking about. Yes, traffic (visitors) is the foundation of any business, online or offline.

As you probably know, there is free and paid traffic and today and I’m going to show you free and paid traffic sources, the difference between them and the advantages of free traffic over paid traffic and vice versa.

Free traffic

Not a secret that the best way to bring free traffic to a website, is create a lot of content, i.e. choose a niche that you have interest in and write a lot about it. The more pages you create on your website the more of them Google will probably index and get it listed in its search results thus resulting in sending free traffic to your website.

If you update your website on a daily or weekly basis at least, then your pages will be staying on search engines for months and even years, bringing you tons of free traffic and for which you don’t need to pay. Google, Bing and Yahoo are the main traffic source for any website and that’s why search engines should be the main concern for anyone struggling online.

Another free traffic source is social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. If you spend 30 minutes a day at least for all of your social media accounts and do it wisely you can find a lot of followers and drive free traffic to your website.

To be successful with social media you should interact with people and your fans on a daily basis as I mentioned above. If you do it one day and forget the next few days then you will not be able to benefit from social media to its full potential.

YouTube is another free traffic source for your website. If you are a blogger, writing on different topics and creating product reviews, you can create same reviews using specific software and put your videos on YouTube. If you do it consistently within a year, you can bring a good amount of free traffic to your website.

A repeat visitor is also known as a good traffic source to any website. To turn your first visitor into repeat visitor you will need to spend some time by improving your website performance.

If you have an interesting content on your website and update it on a daily/weekly basis then you will be able to achieve what I’ve mentioned above.

Additionally, you can install a free subscribe box (feedburner.com) on your website to allow your visitors subscribe to your website news. That is an additional free traffic source you must benefit from.

You can write an article and then contact any website owner in your niche and ask for his permission to publish it on his website which is called guest blogging. If your article is of interest to him, he will happily publish it and can even ask for more content because any website owner wants to have more content.

If you do it consistently and find the right website that has a lot of traffic, you can easily drive some of it to your website.

You can write an article and submit it to article directories to bring more traffic to your website. But after Google recent updates you shouldn’t overdo it trying to get many quality backlinks to your website, otherwise it can have a bad impact on your site.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic sources:

PPC (pay per click), i.e. you pay Google or Bing for the number of clicks you get from them. It is not cheap and you can easily waste your money if you do it wrong. If you want to master PPC art then read my review. Or you can go through PPC level at Wealthy Affiliate and also learn the basics of internet marketing.

You can buy an ad space and put your ad on big networks. Not cheap as well.

You can pay someone who has an email list and put your offer in front of his readers and thus drive traffic to your website.

Free or paid traffic?

Compared to free traffic, paid traffic is known to have some advantages over free traffic. The most important advantage is that you can pay and bring targeted traffic to your website any time you want.

The amount of traffic depends on the amount of your time and budget you are ready to allocate for your paid traffic campaign.

If you are confident in your product and your website content and think you can convert your visitors into your customers then you can try it.

But what I know exactly is that to be able to convert visitors into customers through PPC you need to learn this art from the experts of paid traffic (Trafficblackbook).

Even if you learn all ins and outs of paid traffic you still need to try, test and fail until you find what works best for you. But this requires time, efforts and some money. Are you ready for that? It is for you to decide.

I think the safest would be to start with free traffic first. Once you have Google analytics installed on your website you will be able to track your website visitors to know which pages of your website are the most visited and stayed on, which links are the most clicked, etc.

When you have more information about your website, your visitors’ behaviour and know which pages convert better you can start spending money on paid traffic thus benefiting from it and saving a lot of your hard earned money.

Driving free traffic to your website requires some time until your website pages appear on the first page of Google and other major search engines. This traffic will be completely free and it will not take long to have your pages appear on the first page.

On average, it takes about 6 months. The more content you create on a daily/weekly basis, the faster your website pages will be indexed by Google resulting in higher traffic.

If you have a great content on your website and a product in demand then you will easily convert your visitors into your customers and if you fail to provide any value on your site then you will lose all your visitors regardless of how much traffic you bring to your website, free or paid. Your main concern should be working on your sire consistently and bringing free traffic first.

If you can make success on your site with free traffic then you can add paid traffic campaign at a later stage to scale up your success and if you fail to make any success on your site with free traffic that means you have to work hard on improving your site content instead of wasting your money on paid traffic.

Finally, if you want to learn how to drive free traffic to your website I can recommend you the best program that I know. Read my review of the WA below.

WA has recently launched an excellent paid traffic course and if you join WA you will be able to take the advantage of great benefits WA has to offer you, i.e. the basics of internet marketing, free traffic course, paid traffic course, keyword research and many more, literally all you need to build a successful business online.

If you still have any questions feel free to contact me or leave your comments below.

About the Author: Adam

My name is Adam. I'm the founder of Your Income Advisor. My goal is to help others succeed online, by exposing scams and reviewing top rated products. I can help you start your own business online