Active vs. Passive Website Traffic Generation

Many of my clients and list members ask the same questions when it comes to generating website traffic. From the questions, I can sometimes pick up a thread of misunderstanding about website promotion. One of those threads surfaced last week and turned into this article. There are actually two broad types of website promotion: Active and Passive. Things that fall into the category of Passive are: 1) Search engine optimization 2) Writing and Growing Website Content (The pages on your site whether they be articles, reports, your weblog, or a forum) Many more website promotion tactics fall into the Active Category: 1) Syndicating your content (like this article for example) 2) Paid advertising (Banner and test ads, pay-per-click advertising, ezine advertising, etc.) 3) Linking strategies (Reciprocal and non reciprocal linking) 4) Being active in your "community" (Posting to forums that your customers and associates frequent, for example.) 5) Doing teleseminars 6) Offline networking 7) Joint ventures with businesses who have the attention of your target market. 8) Free classified advertising (Some people still see benefits from this type of advertising to this day online.) 9) Offline media advertising (Radio, TV, Newspaper, Trade Magazines and other publications, etc.) 10) Reports, software and other viral free tools that point back to your paid services or products. The two types of promotion are also referred to as "push/pull" website promotion. Passive website promotion "pulls" traffic TO your site while active promotion goes out on the web and "pushes" traffic to your site. Looking at the two lists above, where do you think, if you HAD to choose between them, your time would be best spent? Now I will never knock search engine marketing. That is a great source of sometimes massive free traffic. Sometimes. Unless you are in a niche that is very competitive. You see, if you are in a competitive niche you will always be out-spent and out-worked by companies with endless budgets and staff for the top positions. Most mom and pop sites in competitive niches are not going to do well in the search engines if they don't spend exorbitant sums of time, training, and money on getting their sites perfected just for search engines. You should do what you can do with optimization. Do what you can afford in time and money. Realize that search engine marketing is an ongoing battle to get and keep good rankings. It is a long term, ongoing traffic solution. But also realize there is a lot of active promotion you can do today to get people to your site who are interested in your product/service whether your site is in the engines or not. Most people still think you have to wait a long time to make ANYTHING happen for your traffic stats to start improving. That's not true. You could get a boost in traffic in as little as a couple of hours using active website promotion strategies. The simplest way would be to go to Google and start an adwords campaign. Simple meaning it is easy to start with an account and create your first ad. But then more complicated in that you need to actively watch your stats and improve conversion rates to get the most return for the money you spend to get that traffic. It's a good strategy though, especially if you master the science of PPC advertising. I have a bonus in my Power Linking Course at