There are many things you can do to drive traffic to your site. Before you start those efforts, you should understand the three types of traffic to your website. This article is a primer to a series of articles I’m going to present to you that will tell you how to drive the exact type of traffic you want to your site. Let’s begin.

First, we are going to start with a few definitions. It’s pretty basic, but it’s essential that you understand exactly the types of traffic available to you.

Direct Traffic -
These are the people that directly type your name into their browser’s address bar like this http://www.pureblogic.com.

Organic Traffic -
Organic traffic results from people who reach your site through search engines. This means that you have some term on your site relevant to what these people were searching for AND they clicked on your site when it came back in search results.

Referral Traffic -
This type of traffic comes from link that people click on other sites to get to your site. For instance, when an article is Stumbled and all of those Stumblers rush to your site, that is called referral traffic. When someone posts a link to your site, that is referral traffic as well.

Understanding what drives each type of traffic and then being able to get the type of traffic you want is critical to understanding how to make money online and be successful online. Let’s break down each of these types of web traffic.

People who come to your blog directly may be coming for a variety of reasons. Word of mouth, promotion that you are conducting for your site offline or a request or invitation from you to come visit the site are all reasons that someone may come to your site directly. People who come to your site this way are often curious about what is on your site. They tend to click around to check things out.

Organic traffic, which comes from search engines, can really drive your site’s monetary success through the roof.  If your inclusion in the search results was intentional and correct, you have the potential to successfully make money off of your organic traffic or the potential to be successful in your interaction with this type of traffic if you define success in some other way. The key in that statement is ‘if your inclusion in the search results was intentional and correct’. PureBlogic ranks #1 on Google when you search for ‘movie reviews google traffic estimator’ (without the quotes). This stems from an article that was indexed about the Google Traffic Estimator. So what has happened when people have found http://www.PureBlogic.com from this search? They have left right away! PureBlogic’s inclusion in the results was not intentional or correct. Getting results from organic traffic means that you have to really optimize your site for the search engines so that you pop up in the proper place.

Referral traffic is last but not least. Referral traffic comes from all of that link building and online promotion you have been doing on places like Digg, Stumble Upon, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, Blog Engage, Blogging Zoom or any of the other 122 bookmarking sites on my list (yes that’s a link for you to go see it J !). When you first start joining communities and submitting your articles to places, referral traffic will typically account for a large percentage of your overall traffic. Referral traffic can be a tremendous source of  traffic for a number of reasons. If  you don’t have PageRank, getting your article on a site like Digg or Technorati can help your article place high in search results. So the referral traffic can help you turn visitors into organic traffic.  I have had articles that I have placed on Digg that have ranked higher in the search results that the actual article on my site. Digg is, according to Google & every other search engine, more important to more people than PureBlogic.

Now that we understand the types of traffic, in the next article we are going to focus on figuring out approximately how much traffic we are getting and where that traffic is coming from.



Posted By Kila Morton

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