Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

There is no question about whether traffic is a vital piece to your businesses success online. However, whether you should use paid traffic or organic traffic brings up an interesting topic. Both sides have their pros and cons which makes it almost impossible to say which the perfect solution is.

If you have just started a website and are looking for quick traffic, paid traffic is the way to go. This allows you to buy advertisements and get your website higher on the search engines, thus increasing your traffic. Another reason you may consider paid traffic is for a special promotion of some sort. This allows you to advertise the promotion and get your point across to a wide variety of people.

Whether you don’t have the funding or just don’t want to pay for traffic, organic traffic can be equally effective in other circumstances. Obviously organic traffic is not going to come instantaneously as it will take time for you to get your website known.  However, the way you build the traffic can be much more personal and effective. 

For instance, you may post in forums or on a blog that you have created. From there, you can personally talk about your website to people that respond and build a relationship. Having relationships with customers is often a great way to build up credibility and reliability.

Another advantage to organic traffic is that you may get a better base of interested customers. The reason for this is because the traffic you are receiving is coming from visitors that had to find your website. This is in conjunction with your efforts of going out and trying to find the customers as well. But often times when you use organic traffic, the visitors to your site came because you offer what they think they want.

So which method is the best way to generate traffic you may ask?

If you have even the slightest budget when starting a business, you may want to use a little paid traffic to begin generating traffic immediately. However, it is wise to conjoin your paid traffic efforts with organic efforts that way you can begin building those relationships and other alternatives to traffic. The more paths you have traffic coming from, the better chance you have of actually reeling in customers.

With that said, there really is no right or wrong way to generate traffic to your website. Sometimes trial and error works best because different methods work better for different people. Once you find what works best for you, stick with it.  All in all, a mixture of paid traffic and organic traffic will be most beneficial to your website as oppose to just one.