Focused traffic is what makes a website successful. All webmasters know this. Without any traffic or poorly focused traffic a website is not a website at all. It’s just another piece of flotsam in the Internet sea!

Why Is Traffic Considered Paramount?

Website visitors ( i.e. traffic ) are people to come to the website in their search of products or services. This can result in positive leads, the type that converts to money in a bank. Focused traffic, i.e. people who are specifically looking for products and services that your website provides, is the kind of traffic that produces online revenues from advertising and/or from sales from the website.

There are websites that get 50 visitors a day, some may get around 500 visitors a day, yet other sites may get 5000 visitors a day, in this scenario it’s quite possible that the website getting 50 visitors a day earns as much as the website that get 5000 visitors a day, largely because the visitors are focused visitors all wanting to spend their money on products or services that are available on the website. Focused traffic is really high quality traffic. High quality traffic ( i.e. focused site visitors ) normally converts to sales.

The bottom line to earning an income from a website is – Obtaining Traffic – normally greater the traffic greater the income for any website. Hence, it’s pretty important to keep a meticulous record of where such traffic is coming from. All webmasters must know what produces quality traffic and how to get such traffic.

Here are five most important traffic sources mapped to marketing techniques that – Get such traffic – to come and visit the website. This information can help you with your traffic and how to grow it.

1. Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization

98% of all traffic to a website comes from Search Engines such as Google. High ranks in Google’s result page for targeted keywords / key phrases, usually brings in the very best quality traffic. Get – On Page – Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) right, build a decent amount of one-links from related sites and the website will start getting a fair amount of traffic.

Next, do your very best to create great page content, i.e. content that will add real value to your site visitors. Keep adding content pages to your website. Any website that has 1000+ pages will attract more traffic than a 5 to 20 page website. View you website content as a – Long term goal. Keep adding a page ( or three ) of great content each day. Over a period of time your website will have the 1000+ pages, of great content that attracts site visitors like pollen filled flowers attract bees, i.e. works for both the flowers and the bees.

This approach is really the perfect way of getting more and more site visitors, Plenty of great content usually equals plenty of site visitors.

2. Article Marketing

A really effective which brings in quality traffic is article marketing. This needs one to write short, interesting, ( i.e. 300 words approximately ) articles, which have the website’s keywords / key phrases intelligently and naturally sprinkled within their content if possible.

Next do add your Keyword / Key phrase based links in the article resource box. Submit these articles to great article directories such as Hubpages, Go Articles, Buzzle and a few others. This is a tried, tested and really great way to drive focused traffic to your website.

3. PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

Warning: This can be a very expensive way to drive traffic to your website, but PPC can be the quickest way to get quality traffic to a site. Be careful with this approach. Think through it carefully. You will find a PPC campaign which work for you. Once you do scale up the campaign quickly. Monitor the increase in focused site visitors very carefully. Google Analytics is just perfect for this type of such monitoring

Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Marketing have now joined forces. This combination does produce decent traffic flows. Google Adwords is excellent, but Google Adwords can be a real pain to work with and have maybe become a tad too expensive. Having said that, if you have the financial resources, please do not ignore Google Adwords.

4. Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other such social media sites provide a lot of traffic and word of mouth publicity for any website.

Getting the website’s pages bookmarked in some of these sites can bring in a flood of traffic. While such traffic can be temporary, such traffic often signs on for the website newsletter, which will provide you a way of contacting such site visitors again.

You tube videos are another really – Hot – way of driving traffic to a website. Do not ignore social media and video sites when looking for sustainable sources of focused visitors.

5. Email Marketing / Follow-up Lists

This is a great way to build – Repeat Visitors – to your website.

Constantly build up different contact lists for – follow ups. Follow up via an interesting, informative, Newsletter or special Discount offers. This can bring in more visitors that one expects.

Try and place – Viral Messages – within Email content. When your website’s newsletter provides valuable information, recipients often pass this on to their friends and co-workers encouraging them to sign up for your newsletter. This kind of word of mount publicity brings in a huge amount of focused traffic.

There are other traffic sources such as Press Releases, Banner Ads, RSS Feeds, Off-line Advertising. All can be great sources of focused traffic.

If the website sells products or service, do consider an affiliate plan via which you can craft joint ventures with other websites this can be a very valuable source of traffic.
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Thank you to my Guest Post Author: Ivan Bayross of OpenSourceVarsity.com

Ivan is a 59year old published technical author and mentor.
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