For many webmasters traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live and other search engines comprises a big chunk of their daily traffic. I have seen people having more then 70% of daily traffic from Google only! Imagine your major traffic generating search engine bans your site tomorrow, which is happening very often these days with Google. What would you do? Make Backups It's never a good idea relying on a single source for traffic. Rather best approach would be split the source amongst many. So if your site gets banned or does not receive any traffic from a source for any reason you have your doors open for others. How to get traffic from different sources? There are quite a few proven old ways of getting traffic. Working on those along with getting traffic from search engines will give your site a life insurance when its needed most. Link Exchange: Exchanging links with relevant sites may bring you good amount of traffic. Remember though exchanging links with just any website is a bad idea. There are some misconception that link exchange is a bad thing all together, which is not the case. As long as you exchange links with relevant sites you would be ok. Direct Traffic: Direct traffic comes to your site typing in the url on their browser. The more direct traffic you have the better are the chances your site will survive the disaster period. Working on increasing direct traffic should be part of your marketing plan. Build a email subscriber list, email the subscribers periodically. Newsletters remind your old visitors your site, who have forgotten. Social Networking Traffic: Traffic in social networking sites has been increased tremendously in recent days. Digg, FaceBook and other sites can generate you big chunk of traffic if you do it right. Classified Advertising: Online classified ads sites also gets millions of visitors daily. Advertising on classified ads sites may also bring you some good amount of traffic. Article Marketing: A good well written article can bring you traffic for days. Write articles on the subject matter you are expert on. If you are not good in writing hire somebody. Make sure to push your keywords in the article. Publish them to different article directories. Summary This article has emphasized on some techniques for the worst case scenario. That does not mean you should forget about search engines. A well optimized site may bring you thousands of daily visitors. Thats a great way of having free traffic day after day. Still you need some backup for the time when you need that most. SOURCE: http://www.cosmocentral.com/post/2008/01/Do-Not-Rely-Much-on-Search-Engine-Traffic.aspx
See if I have high traffic then I will get the chance to exchange links with high trafficking sites BUT if my site has less traffic then their are all the chances that it would be impossible to get the link although a generous email asking to link to some of your "good" traffic could work out.. Direct trafffic is cool IF the name the logo etc gets stuck in your readers brain..one needs to work for that... BUT I DO NOT agree with advertising. Why should I waist money in advertising when I can get traffic for free... I recently compiled number of ways to get traffic here at DP itself...your comments/suggestions would do great.. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=6027723 cheers..
I think both of your threads are interesting to norm each one's criteria marketing our sites. Thanks for sharing. ·
I agreed with you that a webmaster shouldn't be too depending on traffic from search engines since the keyword rankings is always moving, sometimes unexpected.
\ Then you don't want to make that much money. On average they don't get that many quality hits from engines, so just exactly how many daily visitors do they get anyway if 70% of their traffic comes from the engines? They better not quit their day job.
Your article is excellent. By advertising I meant paid and non-paid advertising. Sometimes you wanna do spend little money building a brand. I will give you an example. I started a site last year, February 2007. I spend about $4000 or more on that site. I took the paid and non-paid both routes for that site. Did not earn a penny. So what did I get out of it? I was able to establish the site as a brand. Its getting about 45000 uniques monthly as of now and growing by 30% per month. From next month I will start monetizing the site. Anyways the whole point of the article was not to rely much on SE traffic. If you would look at the Google section at DP, you will find lot of posts saying "My site is vanished from serp" etc etc. I intend to make a point that before situation like that happens we could take some precaution, as much as we can.
I know the feeling..this month alone (1-22 January 2008), my personal blog's visitors: # Search Engines 2,127 (75.43%) # Referring Sites 576 (20.43%) # Direct Traffic 116 (4.11%) 75% from search engines (Google mostly) lol
This post is right. We shouldn't rely too much on search engine traffic but still, traffic from search engine is the best because it gives much, much better conversion rate rather than people from social media sites. Even if you monetize your site through your own product (not adsense or affiliates), traffic from social sites are still much worse if we compare it with search engine traffic. About advertisement, if you advertise your site, advertising in search engines are still better than advertisement in other websites or social sites. So my point is, traffic from search engine is still the best, much better than traffic from other sources but you're right, we shouldn't rely too much on search engine.
Last night I was reading a post on another forum. A guy used to get 30000 uniques a day. About six month ago he got an email from Google suggesting he should change some pages. So he did, and now his traffic is about 3000 per day. This is just an example true story. Your traffic can drop for many reasons. Lets say your top ranking keywords drop to #3 or #5 for some reason. Your traffic will dramatically drop. In situations like this we could at least survive taking measures to get visitors from sources other then search engines.
I agree 100%. Diverisfying your traffic is very important. You have controll over other sources of traffic, while with search engine traffic you are at the mercy of the SE gods.