Be Careful Of What Kind Of Traffic You Go After...

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I've often seen people ask "what are the best ways to generate traffic for my website?" -- A repeating question in this forum.

The most popular methods are: article marketing, video marketing, forum marketing, just to name a few.

However, I'd like to point out a fact that some people overlook: More traffic does not necessarily lead to more profits.

We're so often bombarded by marketing messages promoting the quantity of web traffic that we often neglect the quality.

But the truth is... All web traffic sources are not created equal.

Years ago, when I first started out on the internet, all I wanted was to generate as much web traffic as possible. And I wanted to do it the easy (read: lazy) way, so I bought a piece of "secret" software hoping to generate a great deal of traffic in no time, just as the software promised.

You see, I had no regard for traffic quality whatsoever, which is an attitude still typical among today's internet marketers.

Anyway, I was absolutely thrilled to see thousands of new visitors when I checked my traffic log the next day... but then I was bewildered to see no new sales at all.

I had no clue what was going on...

But as I found out later, the piece of software I bought was using a so-called"referrer spamming" scheme that submitted my website address to random websites' server logs as a means to get crawled by GoogleBot, so all the new visits were essentially made by other servers (and perhaps a couple of unsuspecting webmasters). As you can already tell, this kind of traffic is useless at its best, and it might even cause your website to be flagged as a "spam site".

So I "learned my lesson" and started pursuing traffic in a legitimate manner. I discovered that there were a lot of people searching for recipes online -- What a great niche! -- I could build a membership site and charge for downloads or monthly membership fee, right?

Wrong.

As it turned out, most people searching for recipes are searching for FREE recipes. That kind of traffic is hard to monetize except if I build an Adsense site (and there are like a million site free recipe sites already).

I'm sure I could still monetize the traffic somehow, but the moral of the story is: Be careful of what kind of traffic you go after. Traffic doesn't equal profits.

So what's the best FREE traffic? (That's another popular question.)

Be careful again: There's no such thing as "FREE traffic", because in order to generate more traffic, you'll have to spend either money or time.

Some internet marketers still view article marketing as a way to generate free traffic, having forgotten that during those 3 hours that they spent churning out and submitting a good article, they probably worked at less than McDonalds's hourly rate.

Instead of quoting "outsource it!" as a solution to that problem, it's better to prioritize your traffic generation strategies and choose the ones to suit your level of expertise and marketing stage.

The fact is, there are certain traffic generation methods that work more slowly than the others but have the potential to bring you tens of thousands or even millions of additional visitors over time, and there are also "instant" traffic generation techniques which work for only a few days. However, you can't really say which traffic generation method is "better", because it all depends on your objective in a particular situation.

It doesn't matter if you don't have the time, energy or money to generate web traffic from a myriad of sources; you just have to know the ones with exceptionally high Return-On-Investment (ROI) for you personally.

The question is... Out of the countless methods to generate web traffic, which are the most cost-effective ones for you specifically?

I will not attempt to list down the main traffic genereation methods here. A simple search on Warrior Forum will give you pages and pages of relevant information.

But you must track your traffic and figure out which sources are converting into cash. Ditch the bottom 20% of methods that cost you time but doesn't deliver. Then move on to the next methods.

Owen Lee
#careful #kind #traffic

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