Choose the Right Kind of Traffic for Your Site

Probably the chief complaint heard among people attempting to run a business online is that they simply don’t have enough traffic.

While this is no doubt true, the methodology they use to try and remedy this situation is entirely faulty. The reality is, there are literally hundreds of ways to generate traffic to your pages, some quite easy. However whether or not this traffic does you any good is another question entirely.

What is really needed is traffic from your specific audience. If you are simply trying to get the most visitors you can, you’re missing the boat here. You have to be advertising and otherwise visible where your particular audience hangs out, so you can interest them. Let’s consider several steps to take toward this goal.

Pre-Thinking your traffic campaign

Before you begin to spend money or time, get great answers to these questions.

  • Just who is your audience? – Understanding your ideal customer demographic is a important key to advertising effectively. What are the ages, sex and interests of your customer avatar? You need to know this to do the best job you possibly can.
  • Where do they hang out? – Knowing where your audience congregates is great intelligence you need to have. This may be on a particular social network, industry forum, or other popular site.
  • What tools will you use? – Tools like Alexa for demographic information about a particular site is useful. One of the fastest and best ways to gather info about your audience is through Facebook’s Audience Insights. It’s free if you have an ad account, which is also free. This tool provides you with so much actionable info it’s ridiculous.

Okay, next step?

So now that you’ve gathered your data, you need to decide what traffic method will work best for your given audience. That may be Facebook ads, or ads on LinkedIn, Pinterest or Twitter. Perhaps a content marketing campaign aimed at securing search rankings for your keywords. Or maybe a video marketing initiative.

Whichever method it ends up being, the point is to make sure you have targeted your audience as best you can BEFORE you begin to market. It’s all about finding the best return on your investment you can!