I am a big believer as an internet marketer that getting traffic is key obviously. While search engine traffic is important, I think many can benefit from getting traffic from other sources such as: stumbleupon and social bookmarking (del.icio.us, etc.). I know there have been a lot of chatter about this lately so I though I would share the impact of using these tools on some of my newer sites. I have posted about it here: social bookmarking traffic - I included some screenshots too. Anyone else care to share their results too?
I agree, I've been getting a lot of my traffic lately from stumble and it's been quite nice. while 70% of my traffic still comes from the big G, these other sources are helpful. with social networking sites, it also helps create loyalty to your site to bring visitors back (instead of just one-time visits)
i was only into SEO for quite sometime with no good results. it takes a lot of time, effort and good luck to get search engine traffic. but now i have had the taste of marketing on social networking sites and other means things are looking good. Its a lot of work on social networking sites and digg and other places aswell but sure the traffic is as nice. its good to have some traffic from these sites initially till search engine traffic starts coming in. TARGETTED TRAFFIC IS THE KEY. SEO or other means it does not matter. a lot of traffic to my sites is now myspace traffic and i am happy with it. just my 2 cents
my biggest site gets fewer than 1% of its visitors from search engines, and it recieves well over half a million pageviews a day. if you build an amazing site or service, you won't even need to work on marketing-- it'll market itself.
dont tell me you have not marketed at all. i agree with u on the fact that the content needs to be really gr8 and exceptional but still if you dont get those initial visitors that they start marketing your site (word of mouth traffic) it will not be really well. will surely like you to eleborate on this for rest of us.
that was a slight simplification of course, but I spend virtually 0 time promoting the site. I got the word out initially and it grew expotentially until it saturated and now it's solidly at that level of traffic and I do absolutely nothing to maintain it in terms of promotion.
That is a good point. Get the right targeted traffic rather than just mass traffic can mean more profits.
With social networking sites, stumbeupon, digg, etc..., you have to keep working hard in order to keep receiving traffic from those sources. The minute you stop, you will not get anymore traffic from those sources. With search engines, you are guaranteed a steady stream of traffic and you do not have to work every day on it to keep it up.
Depending on the sector, you may have to work very hard to keep up the steady stream of traffic. Given the number of times of algo changes I would suggest working everyday to ensure that you keep your traffic increasing from whereever your referrals are. There were a lot of webmasters who lost businesses due to google's algo changes b/c they thought just like you. But I do agree that having traffic from the search engines is great overall.
search enigine traffic sure is a really good source by far the best. but now with so much competition and search engines changing logs ever now and then it is not a steady source of traffic anymore. and SEO is not at all a lazy game. I have read SEOs working there heart out to crack the search engine puzzle only to end up with OK results nothing gr8. but yes if one can rank on the first page of a good key word nothing like it. easier said then done.
"manually" manipulating social bookmarking sites stops getting you traffic when you stop manipulating them, yes. but integrating social bookmarking aspects into your site correctly can provide a continuous flow of new traffic assuming you have content that people want to pass on.
I read ur blog everyday, its very interesting! And to get traffic you should have good content, that's it... With 1k unique pages you can get 1k unique visitors easily. My website have 20 pages and i get more than 50 uniques a day from search engines.
I think that is the way the search engines would like it. But I think right now you have to help get the content noticed - think internet marketing not search engine optimization. Social bookmarking can help get your site noticed while the search engines catch up.