3 Types Of Traffic – Why It Matters To You

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It’s safe to say that one of the most challenging aspects of an online business is getting their presence known online by generating enough traffic to their websites and sales funnels.

As a refresher, if you are not familiar with that term or unsure of what it is.

Traffic is a fancy word for getting eyeballs on your product or service. If you have a brick and mortar store, traffic means people walking into your store. When it comes to people shopping online it means people visiting your website.

Traffic is the lifeblood of any successful online business.  As an affiliate marketer, business owner, it’s important that you have a steady, consistent and growing stream of traffic to your website.

This traffic will be the foundation for growing your business. This is the first step before your traffic gets you leads and sales.

The more people who visit your website, the more people who opt-in to your lead magnet, and purchase your product or service.

One of the main aspects of getting traffic is using it to grow your e-mail list. The bigger your email list gets, the more of your own products you can sell and the more you can earn by promoting other people’s products to your list as an affiliate.

Finally, with the right process in place, the more free coaching sessions you do, the more clients you’ll close and the more money you’ll make.

Let’s get to the meat and potatoes of Traffic, shall we?

There are 3 types of traffic

If you are going to experience explosive online growth for your business, then you need to understand that there are only three types of traffic to help increase lead generation and sales:

1. Traffic you control
2. Traffic you don’t control
3. Traffic you own

Once you understand how each type of traffic works and how it all ties together you’ll be able to control your traffic or more specifically direct the right traffic to the right offer. Once you nail down traffic that is converting for you, then you’ll be able to double down and scale your efforts.

Your number one goal should be to own all your traffic.

You may have heard the saying “the money is in the list”.

Understanding your traffic and putting a relevant, helpful offer in front of them is how you build and grow your list and also increase your sales and conversions. 

Let’s take a look at the three types of traffic and how you can use them to increase your leads and sales.

Traffic you own

We’ll begin with the traffic you own because it is the most important traffic source. The traffic you own is the best kind of traffic because it is the traffic you get from customers, subscribers, fans, and followers.

We are calling this traffic we own because we can send out an email message to our list, publish a new blog post or post a message your followers and fans will see.

You do not have to buy any of this traffic from another platform because you can send out an e-mail anytime you want without any additional costs.

Traffic you control

The next type of traffic is the traffic you control. You can control traffic when you have the ability to decide where you want it to go.

For example, if you are advertising on Facebook, when a user from that platform clicks on your ad you can direct them to wherever you want them to go.

This could be an optimized landing page or your latest blog post or event page. More examples of ways you can control traffic may include:

• Email ads (solo ads)
• Pay-per-click ads
• Banner ads
• Native ads
• Joint ventures

The downside of this traffic is that every time you want more of this traffic, you have to spend more money.

To get around this, always send traffic to an opt-in page to collect your visitors’ information such as their name and e-mail address.

A certain percentage of traffic will leave but the cool part is that some of the people will give you their personal email address which now becomes part of the traffic that you own.

Traffic you don’t control

Internet marketing is like real estate. You want to own as much land as possible. Whereas in the digital real estate world, you’ll want to put out as much content as possible. You get paid on the work that you do once. This is where traffic will start to show up.

It will show up and you won’t have any control over where they land on your website or where they go from there. A good example of a channel of traffic that you don’t control is organic traffic.

Imagine having potential customers that are trying to find you when they search for your product, service, business name, or anything related to your web content. Perhaps they typed in “bike repair” in Google (or their search engine of choice) and your web address showed up at the top of the search results. Let’s suppose had a compelling hook (fancy word for description), for them to click on you, which sent them to your website.

While organic traffic may occasionally happen without any effort on your part, most often, it’s necessary for you to do some SEO work to set you above your competitors in the search engine results.

Which traffic should you aim for?

Your goal should be to turn this traffic into traffic you own. The same approach you take with the traffic you control, structure your website and blog in a way where it serves as a lead generation machine.

Have your blog posts take the form of a ‘mini’ opt-in page where the top of your page the “top of the fold” entices your visitor to opt into your bait offer with their personal email address. Now they become a part of the traffic you own.