It all comes to how much time and money you have to invest. For those with money but not time, getting paid ‘traffic’ is a good alternative, whereas those with time and limited funds could look at learning and implementing tactics that would be unpaid but would yield results – albeit a lot slower. We give you a rundown of techniques for both paid and unpaid ‘target traffic’.
Paid targeted traffic:
- Paid searches through search engines
This is about advertising on the popular search engines, helping to ‘pull’ in a good number of visitors for your site. Obviously, Google scores high, not just for its prowess at getting traffic but also because it offers a number of tools to understand the target audience, and most of them are free. There is the Google Adwords tool, for example, that allows an in-depth research through keywords for more successful ad campaigns.
- Paid searches through social media
Another great way to get traffic is by buying ad space on social networking sites. Facebook has now become a great medium to find target audience since it is easy to find people, understand their interests, and then ‘target’ them with relevant messages. You would need to pay for the ads and only your target audience would be able to view them. The added advantage of placing ads on Facebook is that there are a number of options through which you can ‘filter’ the target audience, send them information and advertisements, which would be immediately useful and relevant to them. The other benefit of advertising on Facebook is that it is highly compatible with the Google Analytics tools.
It is known that people put all kinds of information about themselves on Facebook – age, gender, preferences, connections, likes and dislikes of a large number of things, and other such details. Using Google Analytics, it is simple to understand which set of prospects would be interested in which kinds of products, services, and or messages. Once you are able to gain the attention of a target base, you would save a lot of time, money, and effort since whatever catches the interest of people, is quickly shared and passed around – thereby increasing the reach of your messages, and potentially gaining a larger audience for your efforts.
- Buying Leads from Sites
A number of sites now offer paid leads – these sites can be found by putting in the relevant keywords such as buy leads and others. Thorough research and careful consideration is required for this method since not all leads are useful or effective, and leads must only be bought if they fit perfectly with your requirements.
There are of course, several other methods (not as prominent) such as advertisements on online magazines and trade journals.
Unpaid targeted traffic:
- Become a guest writer
Writing posts as a guest for someone, with details of your company and its website, helps to gain traffic and enhances the chance of gaining buyers.
- Post comments on articles or blogs
Comments help to build backlinks. In case you are unable to post an article on a particular site, writing comments on these sites for published articles, would gain attention towards you, your company, and your website. Commenting of blogs especially the ones that belong to your niche and industry serves also to build connections and establish relations with the traffic for such blogs.
- Offering freebies in exchange for subscription
This is self-explanatory – by offering things of interest related to your company’s products / services, in exchange for subscriptions is a great way to garner interest and traffic for your website.
The list above is not exhaustive. The online world has helped people to transcend boundaries, thereby offering limitless options. It all depends on how one uses them and remains aware of the latest developments, and this applies to both paid and unpaid means of getting website traffic.