Businesses are set up with an intention to earn profits, isn’t it?
You build great products or services and then want to sell them to make money, right?
But who is going to buy your product or service?
Any guesses?
Your Target Audience.
An online business can only be considered successful when it gets large amounts of targeted traffic.
That’s why driving traffic is so important. Traffic to your:
✅ Landing pages…
✅ Blog posts…
✅ Social media posts…
✅ Lead capture pages…
✅ Webinar pages…
✅ Product pages, etc…
… All with a goal to make money by selling your products and services.
But do you know how to reach them and take them to one or all of the above?
Well there are plenty of ways to do so and this post will talk about all the ways, both Paid Traffic Vs Free Traffic, plus the one where you can OWN your audience (more on that later…), in order to get more engagement and sales for your business.
Online businesses thrive on traffic.
So, it is critical for every business owner to have a strategy of generating targeted Paid Traffic Vs Free Traffic to their site or business if they want to be successful online.
Primarily, there are two sources of traffic:
- FREE
- PAID
Let’s learn about Paid Traffic Vs Free Traffic one by one:
FREE Traffic
Well, nothing in this world is FREE.
In terms of traffic, FREE means that you don’t have to spend money to get people to your digital assets. But with FREE traffic sources, you are compensating your money with TIME.
As per the word FREE, you save money for sure, but it can take quite a lot of time to build targeted traffic for your business by utilizing sources that get you traffic for Free.
Before talking about the Pros and Cons of using FREE Traffic for your business, let’s understand the different sources from where you can get traffic to your digital assets and engage with them as well.
As you might be knowing that the internet runs on hyperlinks.
If you want someone to land on your landing page or blog post or any other page, there will be a link to that page that needs to be clicked upon by a person to land on your page and discover what your business has to offer.
In today’s internet-driven world, you know it for SURE that your target audience is hanging out some place online.
It is your job as a business owner to find where they’re at and offer them an opportunity to click your links and discover what your business does.
You need to understand that your target audience is a group of people who have a burning problem that you solve in your business through your products and services.
There are various places online where a group of people hang out and talk about their pains, problems, wishes, desires, wants, etc.
If they are looking for answers to their questions, they would use search engines like Google and Bing to solve their problems, or…
…they would be part of communities like Forums, Groups & Pages on Social Media where all your target customers might be connecting together and sharing their problems with each other.
So basically, the two main sources of FREE Traffic are:
- Search Engines
- Social Media Platforms
Search Engines
What makes Search Engines a Traffic Source?
Well, when anybody types in a query, search engines take those keywords to find all the relevant web pages stored in their database and then list their search results on a page called Search Engine Results Page.
It is through the SERP that a person will click on a link and visit a page on someone’s site.
Imagine that site being yours, and hundreds of thousands of people finding your business website or landing pages or blog articles via search engines like Google and Bing.
What would that mean for your business?
Being found by your target audience directly because you had optimized your website for SEO. Optimizing for SEO allows generating organic traffic by optimizing your blog content, pages, and technical aspects of the website for search engines.
This way, your content can have a good standing on search engine results pages, and hence can have traffic from the search engines directed to your site.
Other than the Search Engines, you can also get traffic from…
Social Media
A wide variety of Social Media Platforms are available for businesses to explore and leverage today. The most popular ones include:
✅ Facebook…
✅ Instagram…
✅ Twitter…
✅ LinkedIn…
✅ Pinterest, etc.
Each social media platform has its own specialty in some way or the other. For example,
- Instagram focuses on Visual Content like Images and Videos,
- Twitter is primarily a Micro-Blogging Platform where you can share short texts along with some visual content as well.
- Pinterest is more focused on Graphical content like Infographics,
- Facebook is an all in one platform where you can share any kind of content, as well as create your business pages and create your own groups that act as communities you nurture,
- LinkedIn is almost similar to Facebook but has a more professional audience as it mostly is used by people working in corporate, and many other social media platforms exist as well.
Free traffic can be generated through social media by linking your site to social media platforms and building great profiles.
The people visiting and interacting with you through these profiles can then visit your site for more details or make actual purchases.
Other ways to get traffic to your site from social media is to become part of groups and pages on these platforms and engage with others in the community and…
🚀 provide value to them…
🚀 answer their queries…
🚀 build relationships with influencers and then…
🚀 occasionally share your website links with people, only if you think it is valuable for the community.
Just like this, there are a lot of other strategies that you can employ to get traffic to your website from these platforms.
The key difference between SEO and Social Media in terms of getting traffic is that…
Social Media can give you an instant surge of traffic for the short term. It is more of an active process to share your posts, engage with people, build relationships throughout, etc, whereas…
…SEO, if done correctly, is a passive approach where you can get traffic in the long term for a longer period of time if your website and content are properly optimized as per the Search Engine Guidelines.
Pros and Cons of Free Traffic
Pros:
- It is Free.
- It is less demanding.
- Works for businesses with small budgets.
- Those who click on your link already trust that what they will find is what they need.
- Traffic flow can continue long after you have stopped the campaign.
Cons:
- It takes a lot of time to create content.
- It takes a lot of skill to regularly and continuously optimize the website for SEO.
- It can take months to even start to see the results of your daily or weekly blogging.
Paid Traffic
As you now know that with FREE traffic we are trading money for time. In the case of paid traffic, we are doing the opposite, i.e., Trading Time for Money.
So, if you are someone who doesn’t want to wait to get traffic to your website and want to get immediate traffic to your offers, products, and services, then PAID traffic is what you need to employ for your business.
Paid traffic involves making payments to have traffic diverted to your site.
This includes strategies such as Pay per Click (PPC) where an ad platform is paid to host your ad and you generally pay for each click on the ads that eventually generates traffic to your site by redirecting the visitors.
Just like the FREE traffic, the major sources of PAID traffic are the same:
- Search Engines
- Social Media Platforms
Search Engines
When we optimize our website content for getting FREE traffic, that process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). That can take a lot of time.
Alternatively, you can pay Search Engines like Google, Bing, etc to place ads on their SERPs for searchers to visit your website.
Google Ads is a tool by Google that allows you to create ad campaigns targeting specific keywords that you desire to be ranked for. You can create different kinds of ads like text ads, responsive ads, site links, etc, that when clicked by a searcher will take them to your own website pages.
Just like Google Ads, Bing also provides a similar platform called Bing Ads that lets you do almost the same things as Google with a few feature variations.
Google has a wider user base whereas Bing is relatively less popular all around the world. But both tools can be used to get targeted traffic to your website based on the keywords you wish to rank for.
This is how Search Engines allow you to pay them for placing your ads on their SERPs for your desired keywords. Now, let’s understand how you can get paid traffic from…
Social Media
Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc, also allow placement of paid ads on their site at a fee.
In fact, some of the platforms allow users to sponsor a post that will only be shown to those users that match the ad criteria. One such platform is Facebook.
With billions of people using Facebook, it provides advertisers with the maximum number of options to target their customers by selecting them based on their behavior, demographics, and interests.
Facebook allows you to create different kinds of campaigns with different objectives that you can choose to achieve for your business, including:
- Awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Catalog Sales, and
- Store Visits
You can create different kinds of ads that can be shown to people on their:
- News Feed
- Stories
- Facebook Audience Network
- Messenger
- Sidebars, etc.
These ad placements can be used to create different kinds of ads like:
- Image Ads
- Carousel Ads
- Video Ads
- Instant Experience Ads, etc.
Just like Facebook, every other social media platform provides some targeting options that you can choose from to spread your message out directly to the users of the network who are your potential customers.
This is how paying Social Media Platforms to spread your message for different objectives can help you get awareness, traffic, leads, and sales for your business instantly.
After that you can even scale your business by optimizing your campaigns to find out the winning ads, winning audiences, and winning placements.
When found, you can then spend your marketing budget only on your winning assets and increase your budgets and hence your audience size to get even more leads for your business.
This is one of the major benefits of using Paid Traffic for your business. You are always in total control of your marketing budget and hence your results. You can take decisions based on various factors of your business and then ask Social Media Platforms to work based on that.
The key thing to note is that each Paid Traffic platform has its own policies and terms of conditions that you need to abide by. Also, each social media platform has a different kind of audience. So it is up to you to decide which platform to invest in that will serve as the most beneficial for your business in terms of the quality of leads and customers.
Pros and Cons of Paid Traffic
Pros:
- Better control over targeting – keywords, interests, likes.
- It’s instantaneous and offers faster turnarounds and results.
- Adjustments to campaigns and budgets can be done on the fly.
- Even if the budget is small, you can start with as low as $5 a day.
- It’s scalable.
- You don’t have to depend on a single traffic source for your business.
Cons:
- You’ll need to spend money, but this is a con only when you don’t know how to convert that traffic into profits.
Which is Better Paid Traffic Vs Free Traffic?
As explained above, each type of traffic has its own pros and cons depending on the strategies you wish to execute to drive your business revenue.
But if you still have to choose between Paid Traffic Vs Free Traffic, your choice can be guided by one major factor, and that is your budget.
If your budget cannot allow you to spend on advertising, then you will do well to stick to free traffic. Even then, ensure that you employ good strategies for better results in content creation, SEO, Forums, YouTube, Q&A Sites, etc.
On the other hand, if you have some money to spend and need instant traffic, then go ahead and get paid traffic.
I hope you are clear with this Paid Traffic Vs Free Traffic debate.
But what if I told you that there is a third type of traffic that will help you benefit from both the types of traffic above, and will cost you even less in future to reach the same customers that you once spent a lot of time and money to reach.
This third type of traffic is called the TRAFFIC THAT YOU OWN.
Here’s what I suggest:
You need to combine both the types of traffic that you get on your website to OWN it. Owning it means acquiring the information of the visitors using Email Marketing and then using that information to reach out to your visitors again and again.
This acquisition of visitor information is called Lead Generation.
When someone fills up a form on your website and provides his contact information, the visitor becomes your lead.
Now, with your email list containing qualified prospects for your business, you can send emails to get your leads back:
🚀 to your blog posts and generate more engagement… 👨🏻💻
🚀 to promote launches and make more money out of the same customers again and again… 💵
🚀 to engage abandoned cart customers and make a profit, which was otherwise a lost opportunity… 💲
When you use both FREE and PAID traffic and OWN them with email marketing, you don’t have to worry about your business making money, even if:
- Google updates its search algorithms and traffic on your website tanks… ⏬
- Facebook and other ad platforms change their policies and increase their ad costs… ⏫
With Email Marketing, your business will always remain safe, making you money, building more trust, creating raving fans for your brand, while always being in your control because now…
You OWN Your Traffic.
🚀 lets you engage with your audience at a much deeper level compared to social media… 🧘🏻
🚀 provides you the medium to nurture your audience through your business’s consumer journey… 🗒
🚀 allows you to deliver customized value-packed communications to the right audience at the right time depending on where they are in your customer journey… 🙋🏻♂️
🚀 allows you to run your business on automation, from welcoming leads -> generating sales -> following up with them 💼
So whatever traffic source you choose to use for getting traffic to your business websites, blogs, social media content, videos, etc, make sure to always incorporate forms on different areas of your websites that lets you capture lead information that you could use to communicate back with your leads, again and again.
If you are still confused about how to get traffic for your business, let me know in the comments below.
