If you have a website, then you will understand the need for consistent and growing website traffic. However, it is easy to be active in traffic building strategies that are ineffective. Not all traffic is created equal. Therefore, you need to be constantly monitoring the effectiveness of your traffic building strategies.

There are many different types of online businesses and their websites will have distinctly different focuses and flavors. For example, the purpose of many websites is to make direct sales while the aim of others is to create brand awareness. However, one of the most effective uses of a website is to capture leads onto a subscriber list which can be used for future marketing purposes. Irrespective of the purpose of your website, it is important that your conversion rate from visits meets your reasonable expectations.

Some traffic building strategies can be clearly differentiated. For example, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements for a content network tend to be much cheaper than those for a search network. Pay per click ads for a content network appear on websites as opposed to search results pages.

The reason for the different pricing is that the search network PPC ads are targeted. They show up when people search for particular terms. The content network ads, on the other hand, appear on websites which have related content, however they are often viewed by browsers seeking free information and are therefore less effective. Obviously, the higher conversion rates resulting from search network PPC ads increase demand and therefore prices.

Unfortunately, paid advertising campaigns can be expensive. Even successful campaigns resulting in substantial sales can ultimately be unprofitable due to high advertising costs. However, it is possible to use free, targeted marketing strategies such as search engine optimization which aims for free search engine listings. It is difficult to attract high volumes of traffic by using SEO. You need to be listed on the first few pages of major search engines for popular keyword searches. It can take a lot of time and effort to implement search engine strategies to achieve this.

A way to minimize the cost of pay per click advertising while still gaining the benefit of targeted marketing is to bid on less competitive keywords. These tend to generate less traffic, but overall you can build traffic substantially by using a combination of lower cost keywords. Misspelled popular keywords can also be purchased with great effect.

Other free targeted traffic building strategies that tend to be very effective are article marketing, creating partnerships and email marketing to subscriber lists. Most importantly, you must avoid high cost traffic building strategies that do not convert to sales.