The original creator of this article failed to mention one thing, "Have something that your viewers are actually interested in".
The success of your advertising revenue relies on number of clicks generated, which needs a lot of traffic to your site. More the traffic more the possibility of generating revenue from advertising or direct product sales. Without traffic it does not make sense for the advertisers to display ads on your site. This article discuss on understanding and managing your website traffic.
Site traffic is classified into four main categories as below:
- Organic Traffic
- Paid Traffic through Ad Campaigns
- Referral Traffic
- Social Traffic
1. Organic Traffic from Search Engines
Organic traffic from the search engines is considered as a quality traffic to your site, since it is not generated intentionally by the site owner. It is highly recommended to target the traffic from various leading search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu. This drives free traffic from across the world to your site from the interested users.
Use Search Engine Optimization techniques to improve your site ranking in search results page to get a good amount of quality traffic to your site from search engines. Submit your site to search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex and start monitoring your site performance using Webmaster Tools to optimize your website structure and search engine friendliness. This is a simple and completely free way of bringing traffic to your site, you can also submit your site to best free web directories.
Every part of your page like Page Titles, Meta description, URL Structure, etc, and every pages in your site are to be optimized for appearing top in the search engine results page. Learn more about SEO basics here.
In general direct traffic is also considered as an organic traffic since most of the users may bookmark or remember your site name and open it directly in the browser without searching for it. For example, mostly users will open Google or Microsoft sites directly in the browser by typing the address rather than searching it through search engines.
2. Paid Advertising
Paid Advertising like Google AdWords, Bing Ads and Facebook helps you to get geo-targeted ads on Cost Per Click basis. You can also use click to call option to pay only when a customer calls you through the ad you displayed. Paid advertising is essentially the same as getting traffic from search engines as discussed above with the additional option to display your ads in their partner content network sites.
The important part is to monitor your traffic and find out the least performing page in your site and optimize it for better performance. Learn more about Paid Advertising here.
3. Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is the intentional traffic created by the site owners using free traffic exchange programs or reciprocal links. It is not recommended to use any of the free traffic exchange programs since the traffic through these exchanges are not from the quality sources. If you are using AdSense then any means of traffic through free traffic exchange programs will lead to banning of your AdSense account for life time.
The other kind of referral traffic is creating reciprocal link with another site owner and generating traffic through other site. Search engines considers one way links for calculating the top position and the reciprocal links are considered as a spam. If you use this option unlimitedly then search engines will penalize your site by marking it for manual spam and remove it from the search engine results page.
4. Social Traffic
Nowadays bringing traffic to your site is no more a difficult task with the help of social networking sites. The simple option is to choose a few social networking sites where you have many friends and link your website to your profile. You can authorize those sites to link with each other to share the content on all the sites on single click. For example, you can select Pinterest and connect your Pinterest account to Twitter and Facebook. This makes your task simple by pinning a single image in Pinterest will auto tweet in your Twitter account and then auto post in your Facebook Page’s timeline.
Site promotion also becomes easy with creating a free Facebook fan Page, Yahoo! group or Company Page in LinkedIn. Another simple way is to start a blog with Tumblr or any popular blogging service in that country (for example Sina Weibo is a famous microblogging platform in China) and start sharing your interested topics from your main site.
Ensuring Proper Traffic Ratio
It is always a good idea to combine organic, paid and social traffic methods to boost traffic to your site. But webmasters should use tools like Google Analytics to monitor various sources of traffic to their site. In order to maintain a good publisher account status with advertisers, it is highly recommended to ensure that search engines are the major source of traffic to your site.
If you are not using any paid ad campaigns or social traffic then search engine / direct traffic should be 90% and the referral traffic shall be of 10%.
