It’s a hot topic, it has been and it will be for some time.
Which traffic is better for your business – paid or free?
Well, let’s examine the facts first, then get to some conclusions later.
Paid Traffic Pro’s and Cons:
Pro’s:
– It’s scalable – you can get as much traffic as you want as long as your pockets are deep enough. Works great if you have a product/service which converts well and you can scale up fast. Simply love that fact – you can grow fast, and I mean really fast
– You can get it on demand – plug in and play, get traffic when you want it, from where you want it, whenever you want it. This way you can be it total control of your budget.
– You can ethically ‘steal’ traffic from your competitors – it’s no secret you can find out fast where your competitors buy traffic, then you can buy the same traffic and send it back to your website. It’s a great strategy which in most cases brings almost immediate results because your competitors have done the heavy lifting for you. Works even better if your competitors are billion dollar heavyweights meaning it’s easier to get to their data and then piggyback on it.
– It gathers data fast – even if you’d spend $50,000 on an ad campaign and not made a single sale you should celebrate! The data is far more important than making a buck. Even in this case, not making a single sale, you’d have valuable data which would allow you to be ahead of your competition.
– It eliminates the guesswork – so many people have no idea about their target market psychographics (interest, behaviours, etc.), that, unfortunately, they simply guess who their target audience is and what they want. With paid traffic, all these theories can be put to the test and bring real data.
– You can start small – if you’d put $5 per day in paid advertising, you’d be ahead of 90% of your competition. Even with small budgets you can start to bring in traffic, sales, bookings, and valuable data.
– It allows you to screw up fast – remember data? Once one of the top internet marketing heavyweights told me “become at screwing up fast… so you know what doesn’t work” meaning, you can find what works even faster…
– You can have laser specific targeting – you can target people based on the keywords they use, age, location, interest, behaviours, employment, marriage status, income, credit card use, mobile they use, products they use, services they use, language they speak, things they love, thing they hate, music they listen…I mean the list is endless…as long as you know who your ideal client
– You can run multiple campaigns simultaneously – serious time saves and data gathering machine. You can find out what works fast, then scale up fast. You can test new ideas, products, services…You can do, pretty much, anything you like.
– Conversions – you can track to the last penny where did your money go. In short, you can know how much you can spend on each, click, sale, lead, etc. This way you can track your conversions – how much money went in and how much money you got out. Mega important if you want to grow your business and stay profitable.
– Google loves it – little birdie told me that Google wants your money so if you pay for ads; they will love you and your website. You’ll rank higher, and they give more value to your website – that’s providing everything is kosher.
– Retargeting – you can show ads to people who have visited your website, everywhere on Google and Facebook, and bring them back to your website and turn them into clients with special ‘incentive’ offers.
– It gives you SEO value – one BIG secret SEO people DON’T want you know is that when you pay for traffic; you get SEO value to. You get more traffic, more engagement, comments, people stay on your website longer – because you laser targeted them.. All of these are factors for which Google will rank your site. So when you pay for the traffic you get more traffic because you bought it, then you get rankings to which, so it turns out, gives you even more free traffic and you get SEO value too. Awesome balls or what?
Cons:
– You need cashola aka dinero to get started – yep, it’s a money game, you need to invest to get. If you don’t have much in it might present a problem.
– There is a learning curve – you can do it, you can learn how to manage your traffic, but it will take money – for the courses, then time to implement and learn. And it’ not that’s simple, there is a lot to learn and most people just hate it. Plus, you do need to know the difference between good courses and bad courses.
– It might be hard to find someone to run your campaigns – there are way too many charlatans out there and they can’t give you a proper explanation of how or what they are doing. It‘s a problem, especially if you give them the power to manage your money and a chance to grow your business.
Ok, let’ move on to the
Free Traffic Pro’s and Cons:
Pro’s:
– It’s Free – well, it’s hard to beat this one. If you’re lucky enough be having your website high in the rankings on Google page num #1, you’re going to enjoy a healthy consistent number of clicks.
– You can get a lot of traffic – providing you’re in demanding niche, you can have lots of free traffic.
– It doesn’t cost you anything – again, if your page ranks high enough, you don’t have to pay for anything, you’ll get traffic because of the rankings.
– You can get traffic fast – for example. If you have a local business, you can optimize your site and rank up high and fast which will turn into traffic. You do have to know what are you doing.
Cons:
– Time to get results – if you depend just on SEO to get rankings, you will be waiting for some time. It takes time to rank properly and if you need traffic fast this might be a problem.
– Conversions – it’s very hard to track conversions from free traffic, which is a problem, because you don’t know what’s working or not.
– You might get slapped – I’m sure you’ve heard of Google slap- Google throws out some native animal like Panda or Penguin and they screw up your ranking over night. Meaning, if your business depends on free traffic you’re deep s***.
– It’s actually NOT free – you need time to rank your site and time is money. So you have to do SEO, which is time consuming, or your employee needs to do it or you need to hire someone else to do it. Your time is money, your employees cost you money and an outsourcer actually costs you money.
– You may never get as much as traffic you’d like to – if you’re in a niche fighting against companies who actually spend $$$ on SEO, paid traffic and other forms of marketing – it just might be impossible to be on Num #1 position of Google page #1 – where your competitors are.
So, in my humble opinion based on experience, I vote for – paid traffic!
Here is why:
The biggest deal breaker for me is that “Free traffic” still costs you your time, and time you can’t get back when you spend it – money you can.
And since you never know what new rule Google just might bring to the market, you really don’t have control of anything.
With paid traffic, chances are much higher.
So instead of worrying about rankings, I’d rather spend my time sending out emails to potential clients, that would be a much better use of time and ROI would be great.
Then make some money and get someone, or yourself, to start managing my paid traffic sources.
If you have zero money to start – that would be my strategy – try it, it works…
Word of warning, sending out an email, it’s not just sending yet another email – you do need to know what to write to get a response.
If you want to know more about it, or you need a formula, get in touch and I’ll give you one.
Thank you for reading 🙂
Damir
