Online marketing is an industry where the old “ups and downs” cliche really does make sense. Traffic is everything to online marketers — the lifeblood of all online success — and when it shifts and changes with the roller coaster intensity that it often does, things can get very difficult. Online businesses, particularly advertising supported websites, frequently fail because of only one factor: a distinct lack of traffic.
Unfortunately, for many marketers this traffic volatility is quite constant. Pay-per-click marketers, otherwise millionaire online successes, can become dead broke due to lack of traffic. Businesses seize up and becomes near impossible to scale, and what was once a profitable empire simply withers and dies. Much like the dying strip mall became an endemic when foot traffic stopped, once profitable online companies frequently close up shop when the traffic dries and moves elsewhere.
However, there are ways to generate traffic consistently. From long tail SEO to advanced word of mouth marketing strategy, a number of long-term online businesses have been generating traffic consistently for almost a decade, and earning healthily for every second that the traffic has been coming in. These four tips can help you do exactly the same, whether for your online service business, discussion forum, or affiliate-powered sales website.
1) Do not rely on PPC for all your traffic.
Pay-per-click advertising is great for generating rapid traffic, but it is not a long-term traffic resource. The biggest PPC advertising networks – Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Bing Adcenter – are notoriously fickle and difficult to work with, even for small business advertisers. The best marketers use PPC networks for traffic, but they do not build a business on it entirely. Structure your traffic across multiple platforms, and allow yourself to be insulated from potential crises.
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2) Invest in long tail SEO.
When it comes to traffic generation, nothing is more valuable than long tail search engine rankings. Whether you are ranking for terms that draw 50 searches per day or 5,000, your business is safe and your traffic secure when you are ranked highly in search results. While a focus on PPC is very worthwhile for short-term business development, it is worth spending time on long tail SEO for long-term stability and scalable traffic.
3) Avoid shady tactics.
Shady traffic generation tactics, linkspamming, and search engine tricks can bring you massive amounts of traffic in little time, but it is rare that they provide any real long-term traffic. Search engines and social websites actively patrol for shady traffic generators, and are not hesitant to remove offending links. Focus on real traffic generation, not short-term deception and shady tricks.
4) Build word of mouth.
Controversial internet writer Maddox has been generating huge amounts of traffic for over a decade, all without the use of PPC, SEO, or any other traffic generation tricks. His secret: good content. If you can create a website or online business that is so good people want to talk about, you will be able to capitalize on the discussion for long-term, stable, and valuable traffic.