Traffic To a Website – What Is That?

No online business can be successful without traffic.

Yet the concept of traffic is quite confusing to many people, and to some extent still is to me as well.

So let’s take it from the beginning:

Traffic to a website is nothing more and nothing less than people coming to your website from somewhere on the internet.

Unless they type in the url (=website address) of your site directly into the browser address field, they have to have come from a source of some kind.

So what is a source? A source is a platform (think social media or forums) or website where people can find the link to your website, click on it and land somewhere on your site. Maybe on your optin page.

So how do the links to your site get out there?

Well, they don’t magically appear, I’m sorry to say. You have to do the work to get them out there.

As I see it there are three main ways you can see to it that people can find links to your site:

• SEO
• Forums, social media; some place on the internet where you create content other than your website
• Advertising

If you have been implementing relevant SEO when creating content on your site, the source can be a search engine showing your site in the search results for certain keywords. This is a great way to generate traffic to your site, but one that takes a lot of learning and staying updated with the algorithm changes. It also takes time to rank well in the search results. Many creators swear by it though, for example Neil Patel.

There are tons of forums for various topics on the internet. Most of them allow you to post your own website link at least in your profile, and possibly in your posts as well. Most do not allow affiliate links though, so make very sure it’s allowed before posting one, or you’ll risk losing your account.

Likewise, most social media platforms allow links in some way. Instagram allows only one single link in your bio, so let that be the link to your site, or to a LinkTree page. (I’ll cover what this is in another post.)

Quora is a platform where people can post questions, and other’s can answer them. I have an account on Quora where I answer questions about affiliate marketing, and I have a link to this site in my bio, as well as to my YouTube channel.

All of the above are so called free traffic methods, also called organic. They will cost you time and effort, and possible be quite slow in generating traffic to your site, but they will not cost you money.

Advertising on the other hand will cost you money. The most well known place to advertise is probably Facebook, but you can also place ads on eg YouTube and Tik-Tok. For me, Facebook is not an option because I got banned from advertising a couple of years ago, and haven’t succeeded in getting the ban lifted.

To succeed with advertising you need to spend time learning how to do it right.

If you do it right, it can be a faster way to getting traffic to your site than the free methods. But a word of warning: if you skip the learning phase, you risk losing money while seeing little to no results.

So which method should you choose?

Well, it depends. (I love that phrase, it’s very useful, simply because right way to do things very often depends on a number of factors.)

It depends on whether you have the budget for advertising, and whether you have the time and perseverance needed for free/organic traffic methods.

Me, I don’t have the budget for ads, so I have to choose the path of free traffic. Right now I’m on Quora answering questions, and I’m also posting videos on YouTube.

Let me know in a comment which traffic method you think is the right one for you at this point!

To our success, Katrin