A website with no traffic does not exist. One of the hardest tasks for online marketers is generating a steady flow of site traffic and this is one of the reasons we initially decided to bring the Buy Traffic Guide to life.

Site traffic can originate from many sources including search engines, social networks, paid campaigns (PPC, media buy) Email marketing and more. It can be targeted and less targeted and so does the performance and sales of your website at the end of the day.

Let’s analyze the most popular sources of traffic and mention the pros and cons of each one:

1. Search Engines – While Google is still the dominant search engine, we must not overlook Bing and Yahoo who combined forces. YouTube is the second largest search engine even though it’s a video search engine. Traffic from search engine is keyword driven which means the traffic will be highly targeted. Visitor will search for a specific term and if your website is optimized and ranks well for the term you are likely to get that visitor on your website.
Pros:
• Search Engine traffic is highly targeted and the conversion to sales will be good (if your website is optimized).
• Cheap traffic – If you did manage to rank high – clicks are free so you actually don’t pay for the site traffic (you do, but in a different way – see cons below).
Cons:
• SEO takes time and cost money – to rank high is very difficult, it’s even more difficult if the competition is high – Time is money and there are other factors that cost money that you need to consider – you can read more on our SEO section.
• You can get the same results by investing some money into a pay per click campaign and have your advertisement featured on the search engine – sometimes it cost less than optimizing your site.

2. Social media traffic – Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Pinterest are all social network from which you can generate traffic to your website. When you come to think of it, it’s more or less like the search engines as you can either buy traffic or get it from free by inviting your friends and creating a viral or social campaign that will generate the traffic to your website.
Pros:
• Cost is more likely to be less than search engine traffic both in time and money.
Cons:
• Unless you are paying for it, most likely that the site traffic will be untargeted or less targeted than search engine traffic.

3. Media Buy – If you have a budget, media buy can be a great way to generate traffic to your website. You simply find a website that has the same interest as your website and buy an advertising space on that website. Obviously media buy has more than just paying for an ad space, there are many factors you need to consider as the statistics of the site you are buying traffic from, conversion, landing page and so on.
Pros:
• Targeted traffic
Cons:
• Cost

4. Email Marketing – If you are not capturing leads on your website you are missing out on recurring sales. Everyone will tell you that, but until you actually start to do it you will not actually understand what that means. Sending out an email campaign can bring great results to your business. You can read more about Email Marketing at the relevant section on the Buy Traffic Guide.
Pros:
• Cheap and Effective
Cons:
• Deliverability issues and Spam issues will make it harder to reach your customers.

5. Guerilla Marketing – By guerilla marketing I mean any action you take to get visitors from the internet by pin pointing them from various sources – this can include: Blog comments, Forums, Chats and so on.
Pros:
• Will only cost you the time you spend.
Cons:
• Hard and there are many protections against spam that will prevent you from doing so.

These are the most popular methods of generating site traffic. Now it’s up to you to choose which way is cost effective for your business.