SEO Step By Step Guide– 46. Paid Traffic

The ultimate aim of all our SEO efforts is to drive traffic to our website. Some webmasters think that it is too much of a trouble to go through tedious SEO strategies to get traffic trickle into our website. They feel that they can get the required traffic to their website by paying for that traffic. There are number of ways of getting paid traffic to our websites. Though there are number of methods some of them are more effective than the others. You should know what works for your website and what does not so that you will not have to spend your money on traffic generation approaches that do not work.

Here are some of the ways of getting paid traffic:
1.    Pay per click programs such as Adwords
2.    Placing banner ads in websites
3.    Paid links
4.    Launching affiliate programs
5.    Becoming a member of paid to click programs

1. Pay per click programs is one of the most popular forms of getting paid traffic to your website. There are number of companies offering pay per click programs such as Google Adwords, Adbrite, etc. This is one of the most cost effective ways of getting paid traffic to your website.

2. Placing banner Ads in websites is one of the oldest ways of driving traffic to your website. The cost of ad space varies drastically from one site to the other depending on your business vertical, pagerank and visitor traffic rates of the hosting site. You must pick the right website to place your banners. Banners in the wrong websites will only waste your money.

3. Getting paid links in directories and in other relevant sites. This is one of the ways of getting back links to your website.

4. Launching affiliate programs is yet another effective approach to getting paid traffic and business to your website. Often affiliate programs are performance based and you will be paying your affiliates only for the successful sales made.

5. Taking part in paid to click programs though used by a number of webmasters, it does not produce desired conversion rates. Moreover, it does not work well with all business verticals.

Most often more than one method is used to get paid traffic to ensure a steady flow of traffic. You must look for the best approach that will suit your website, your product and services. Pay per click program works for almost all business verticals. The paid traffic strategy that you use will also depend on your budget for your website promotion.

One of the disadvantages of relying completely on the paid traffic is that you will cease to get visitors as soon as you stop your ad spending or as soon as you remove your banners. On the other hand when you invest in optimizing your website for organic traffic, the initial investment might be little high but on the long run you will need to spend very little to retain the results.

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