The 3 Bs of growing website traffic

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Dave Westfall

We are frequently asked by Clients and Prospects: “How can I increase my website traffic?” Well, the answer to that question is that there are really only 3 ways to grow your website traffic.  You can:

1. Buy It
2. Borrow It
3. Build It

So, let’s take a closer look at those three ways of growing your website traffic.

Buy It, for example, could mean that you have the financial resources to drive traffic to your website using traditional marketing methods like paying $3 million for a 30 second TV commercial during the Super Bowl as GoDaddy.com and other larger companies do. Or on a smaller scale you could be running ads with your domain name listed on local or cable TV, radio, or buying print ads in national or local magazines, newspapers or those online or offline yellow pages ads.

But it could also mean that you are incurring Pay Per Click (PPC) fees for each time a website visitor clicks on your website link on Google or Yahoo by running Search Engine Marketing (SEM) advertising campaigns. Be careful, because depending on the cost “per click” those PPC fees can really add up fast.

Finally, buying traffic could mean that you are buying “Paid Links” back to your website from professional or membership organizations and other Internet directories that charge you to list your website.

Borrow It could mean that you are tapping into another websites existing traffic and in many cases paying the owner for referrals or clicks or customers. Borrowing this type of website traffic is normally referred to as participating as an advertiser or content provider on larger websites like eBay or YouTube. Or you could simply trade website links with other synergistic and or complimentary websites in or out of your industry that target the same customer profile. Plus on some social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or Twitter you can list your domain name in your online profile and those viewers can link back to your website.

In addition to borrowing the website traffic that you may get from these large social networks there are other additional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits associated with getting incoming links from these high Google “page ranked” websites. But more on that in a future blog post. However, it is highly recommended that you not participate in link exchanges with “Link Farms” that exist primarily for the purpose of artificially boosting your website traffic. Participating in this “black hat” practice could actually get your website banned from the major search engines.

Build It primarily means following “ethical” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and creating good on-page content to attract visitors to your website. This is the “hard work” part, but much of the traffic generated this way can be “free” or “low cost” and is usually the best way to generate traffic to your website for the longer term. Most research studies indicate that the vast majority of Internet users still chose to click on links from the organic or “non-paid” search engine results over the paid or “sponsored” PPC advertisement links.

But don’t forget to drive traffic to your website by overlooking simply putting your website domain name on your business cards, brochures, flyers, direct mail letters, postcards or in your email signature. Plus, you’ll also want to take advantage of Viral Marketing techniques as discussed in this previous Full Partner blog post, word of mouth advertising and referrals from satisfied customers to drive traffic to your website.

Now, you’ll want to find a way to make all of that “Build It” work easy to do with no HTML knowledge required, right? Plus once you’ve done all of that work and paid all of that money to advertise your domain name you’ll want to know where all the traffic is coming from. So, having a fully integrated eCommerce Content Management System (CMS) website like those offered by Full Partner makes it easy for you to optimize these three ways of driving traffic to your website. Full Partner websites come with web analytics to track your website traffic plus an affiliate marketing program and a built-in blog so that all the traffic comes directly to your website rather than to Blogger or WordPress.

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