One can not really rely on specific traffic sources. If you’re a website owner, then you must definitely experiment with all possible traffic sources. Most of us end up relying on Search Engines to rank our websites or web pages, but we tend to ignore the regular updates made to the search algorithms. Most of us even manage to get a large number of likes or followers on our social media profiles, staying active on Forums, commenting on blogs and doing all sorts of things to get traffic. But, do we ever ask ourselves that is it worth it? The major traffic sources for most us include:
- Search Engines
- Social Media
- Forums
- Blog Commenting
- E-Mail Marketing
- Advertisements
Most of us get traffic to our websites or blogs from the above mentioned sources, but the question that we need to ask ourselves is:
“Are they totally reliable? Do they promise us a FIXED number of visits every day? Are they really static?”
I hope the following blocks of statements would help you answer these questions and make you realize what you really need to do to ensure a good number of visitors every day:
Search Engines:
Search Engine optimization is one of the best source of traffic. If your website is search engine optimized and you succeed in getting it to the top results of Google, Yaaho or Bing, then you would definitely get a MASSIVE amount of traffic. Agreed. Now catch this: Do the results remain static? One of my web pages was at the top most position of Google search results for a keyword which was highly searched. I used to get a good amount of traffic everyday from that keyword, but after the Google search algorithm updates, the numbers started diminishing. Search Engines like Google keep updating their search algorithms. Updates like the Panda, Penguin, Phantom and the Humming Bird have affected SEO’s to a great extent. The last couple of updates have been really fatal for some websites too. So, in my opinion, relying solely on Search Engines for traffic is NOT a very good idea. SEO is one of the most important aspects of online marketing, to read more about it, check: Link
Social Media:
For some websites, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn get a lot of traffic. The reason I highlighted the word ‘some’ is, in order to get some good traffic from social media websites, one must have a good target audience. I am the admin of over 4 Facebook pages, that have a total of over 1,00,000 followers. I tried sharing my updates on those pages expecting to get a large number of visitors, but to my surprise, I didn’t. All the traffic that I got from Facebook was from HowToRuleOnline’s official Facebook Page. The reason is pretty clear, this happened because the users who were following the website’s page had interest in it and the content that it contained. Other pages had a different niche, so sharing my posts on them didn’t really get me fruitful results.
Even if I succeed in getting a large target audience, does that ensure me some minimum number of visitors? It doesn’t. To ensure that we get some good traffic from social media we’ll have to keep a number of things in mind like the time of posting, tagging, using hash tags, getting more shares, likes, comments and much more. Social Media marketing is another important aspects of online marketing, we can not deny that, but it isn’t totally reliable.
Forums:
Some Forums like BlackHatWorld and WarriorForum are very good for niches like Online Marketing, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Search Engines optimization. Forums can get you traffic only if you’re one of the most credible, well connected and trusted members. Moreover, most of the top forums don’t allow posting links to other websites. If you overdo it, you migh be black listed from them as well. Yahoo Answers is like a pseudo forum, a user starts a pseudo thread by posting a question and other users answer them or respond to the thread. Again, you’re not allowed to include links to other websites. Yes, you can include them in the reference section, but it doesn’t get good traffic either. I was a level 3 member in Yahoo Answers in my initial days of blogging. I would have entered the top 10 users in the category: Search Engine optimization if I would have given one more best answer. Even after being one of the best users in this category, I hardly got any traffic to my blog. Yes, I did included the answers from my website only and gave my website link in the reference section, but it hardly made any difference. Moreover, even after giving the best answers, a number of my answers were removed because I included a website name in them.
So, forums don’t really work all the time. In some cases, they might. Some forums do help in creating do-follow back links which help in SEO and thus online marketing.
Blog Commenting:
I believe that blog commenting is more of spamming. There’s no point posting comments with no links in them and most of the readers don’t know that the website owner can mark their comments as spam and the link in the comment can get permanently blocked on search engines or social media sites. If you’re thinking that comments get you back-links, please don’t. Comments give no-follow back-links, so they hardly make any difference.
If I think like a reader, why would I even bother to read all the comments? I might do that if I would think of posting a comment too. The numbers say that only one out of 50 users post a comment on your post. Blog commenting is another important part of online marketing, but not always.
So, we discussed all the bad points of these traffic sources. I’m not denying the fact that they don’t get traffic, YES! They do. But, one can’t just rely on them for it. In my next post we’ll speak of a way-out which promises you to get targeted traffic.
Feel free to share your views below and add anything that you want to.
