Understanding the ways to get people to your site

One of the most important things about of having a web site is having visitors stop by. WIthout traffic your site is essentially worthless.So what’s the best way to get traffic to your website?  There are only a couple different types of web traffic. Paid & Free. So what does that mean? You can either just buy traffic or there are still ways to get free traffic.  

If you decide to buy traffic to get visitors to your web site,you can use services like  Yahoo Search Marketing and models known as PPC (aka Pay Per Click).  Now,what happens here is that you tell Yahoo,for example, how much you can pay for each visitor.  Depending on how much competition you might end up payng quite a bit or a not much per visitor. From a few cents to several dollars. So obviously it can get expensive fast. However it’s quick, reliable and usually precidtable traffic.   Using PPC does get people to your site.  

Another paid model is the banner model. With this you don’t spend per click,you buy a certain number of impressions usually measured in CPM – Cost Per Thousand.  And there are many banner networks which you can join and upload your ad and pay regardless of how many clicks for the agreed upon number of impressions.  In this particular technqiue you might get a ton of visitors or none at all.

The thing about buying traffic is that you really want to test the results and keep an eye on the process,otherwise you might just be  wasting your money.

Now, another option when it comes to getting traffic is getting FREE traffic.  Free web traffic can come from the search engines which unless you are lucky, will require some knowledge of SEO. It can also come from other websites.  Using linking strategies is a helpful way of getting visitors. Additional ways  to get free traffic might be things like writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Also, leaving meaningful comments on social sites like blogs, forums, video sites with a link back to your site can also help you get additional free traffic.

So there really are several ways to drive traffic to your site.  And really both ways free and paid, should be implemented and tested to see which one works best for your particular website.