In today's world, everything is searched for online before a final decision or opinion is made. While the ability to search for something online is extremely convenient, where your website ranks in the search results can be the make or break point of your business. Internet marketing is the process one follows when trying to move a specific website higher within the search engine rankings. The placement of the rankings are based on the keyword phrases being searched for within the search engine. In order to get the most out of the internet marketing process, having an understanding of different traffic sources is an extremely important factor to consider when creating an internet marketing strategy. Let's go over the different traffic sources that can play a major role in internet marketing, as well as how to use each one to your overall advantage.

Organically Targeted Traffic

What Is It? - Organic traffic is simply referring to the people that are naturally searching for things online. This type of traffic is the cream of the crop demographic for any marketer as these people know exactly what they are searching for. The goal of internet marketing is to get your website to rank for the search terms that these people are typing in, thus increasing the chance of converting them to a lead or sale once they have visited your site. One of the other reasons why this traffic source is so coveted is because this traffic source is essentially free. Every day millions of people are searching for things online, and being able to help a small percentage of these people find your site can allow for the needed exposure to potentially increase sales and revenue.

How To Use It - While organic traffic is the most sought after traffic source for any internet marketer, it is also the hardest traffic to secure. The reason being is that the search engines have created a very fair playing field for every niche and every industry. For example, let's imagine that you have a brand new website in the banking industry that you want to start marketing online. The banking industry is very competitive and other large banks have been on the internet marketing bandwagon ever since the internet was created. If you started marketing a new site, it would be unfair and downright wrong if it quickly beat out a competitor's site who had been marketing their site online for years.

Too many internet marketers think that they will be able to get a new site to rank above a well-established site in a short amount of time. Since this belief system never works, the better way to capture organic traffic is through targeting and marketing unique keywords. While you may not be able to beat out a banking website for general search terms, you may be able to beat them on search terms relating to specialized banking products or services. The key thing to understand is that internet marketing revolves around keywords, and people type in a countless number of new keywords every day. The best way to capture organic traffic and to compete with well-established sites is by finding the unique and long-tailed keyword phrases that people are typing in that your competitor has not actively done internet marketing for. This method is the only effective way to tap into the organic traffic source in any internet marketing campaign.

Paid Traffic

What Is It? - Paid traffic is referring to the people that visit a site due to the clicking of an advertisement. Whenever you search for something online, there are always ads displayed relating to the search term you typed in on the page.

Paid traffic can be very expensive as it runs on a pay per click basis. Paid traffic campaigns can also be setup to operate on a daily budget. The downside to this is that once your daily budget has been used up, your ad will stop showing to the internet masses. The price per click is directly affected by how competitive the niche is, as well as how much competitors are paying for clicks. This type of traffic source is commonly used for branding, specific product placement, and direct exposure to people searching online with relevant keyword phrases. You can also buy website traffic from reputable services that will send thousands of targeted visitors to your site for a much smaller cost than traditional pay-per-click methods. The service we recommend is Revisitors (www.revisitors.com), the leading provider of targeted website traffic.

How To Use It - Since organic traffic can take months and even years to capture, depending on the competitiveness of your niche, the next best way to get people to your site is to buy traffic. Creating an ad based on specific search terms will allow you to pay your way to the front page in order to give your site much needed exposure. Buying traffic is perfect for new websites, or websites that are in a very competitive niche. While you won't come up naturally in the search engines to be clicked on, your paid advertisement will, which can get your website in front of someone searching related keywords online.

Paid traffic really is the next best alternative to ranking naturally as it instantly makes you a contender. While you will have to pay for each ad that is clicked, paid traffic is a great way to connect your site to the people naturally searching for what you offer.

Use Both Sources, organic traffic or paid traffic is not the question. organic traffic and paid traffic is the answer.

It's no secret that internet marketers who see great success actually use both organic and paid traffic sources in their campaigns. By effectively using paid traffic on words that you don't naturally rank for, you will be able to combine the power of natural and paid search to send the maximum amount of traffic possible to your website. Setting up a realistic paid search budget is extremely important when actively using both traffic sources. It is important to make sure that you are spending money on both traffic sources in order to maximize your exposure for long term results.

As you can see, these different traffic sources play a huge role in the internet marketing process, and knowing how to tap into both of them is the key to be able to dial in the results and increase traffic numbers that you are looking for.