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Blog Traffic

Paying for traffic can be a powerful tool for marketers. 2017 emarketer survey found that 42% of small and medium businesses consider Facebook and other social ads to be the most effective marketing method available to them — better than their own websites or email lists!
Paid traffic can come from more than just Facebook, though. Technically, any service you pay for that drives leads or eyeballs to you is a paid traffic source.

Organic sources of traffic:

Online: searches and sign ups; Social Media followers; Friends and family; Word of mouth; Quora.com; Snip.ly 

Cheap sources of paid traffic:

Social Media Post “boosts”. Designed to create awareness and website visits

Other: Paid traffic-

• Display ads, aka those things on the side of the page your ad blocker erases

• Paid search like Google AdWords or Bing Ads

• Social media ads, the sponsored content that appears in your Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook feeds or before the YouTube video you clicked on

• Paid discovery, or the content promoted by networks like Outbrain Amplify

• Sponsored content — a type of content marketing that looks like an article on a website or even in a print mag but is actually a piece of content marketing for a brand

• Influencer marketing, where a social media influencer promotes your product or brand for their audience

Depending on the kind of marketing you’re buying, you could pay per click (PPC), pay per view (PPV), pay per acquisition/action (PPA), or just pay a flat rate for each instance, for example with an influencer you generally purchase a certain number of posts.

With some old-fashioned display advertising, you might just pay to keep your ad displayed for a certain amount of time.

That’s a lot of options, and figuring out what works for you can take some tinkering. A mix of organic and paid traffic is usually the most effective way to grow a business.

The exact magic mixture will depend on your specific audience, but when you’re testing paid traffic sources, here are the five you should consider first.

AdWords

An old-school paid traffic source that still offers huge potential rewards, though the cost per click is often high. The basic concept is that you choose keywords that you think your potential customers will search, and you bid on putting your ad as one of the sponsored search results at the top of the page. Of course, AdWords has gotten way more sophisticated as the online advertising world has evolved. Now you can use dynamic search ads, a feature that customizes your ads based on what’s on your website and what people are searching without having to fiddle with your list of keywords all the time. AdWords also offers the ability to make bid adjustments by device, target users by geographic area or demographic group, and re-target people who have engaged with your website before. The more specifically you can target your AdWords, the higher chance you have of success. Figuring out exactly which little slices of humanity work best for your brand takes experimentation, so keep detailed records of which changes produced good results.

Google also offers display ads on their Google Display Network. Display ads get a bad rap these days, and for good reason. Here’s a heat-map study from the Nielsen Norman Group showing how even people without ad blockers ignore display advertising:

Facebook

95.8% of social media managers surveyed said Facebook ads gave them the best ROI of any social platform. Facebook advertising is a must for anyone paying for traffic. But Facebook has LOTS of options, and they’re changing constantly. Do you want to put your ad in newsfeeds, on Instagram, messenger, or in the audience network? Do you want to target by place, age, interest, or find prospects similar to a group you know already works using lookalike audiences? Do you want to use text, images, video, slideshows, or collections? The upside of Facebook is that it’s possible to reach exactly who you want in exactly the way you want to reach them (sometimes, hilarity ensues). You can create static or dynamic campaigns, small or big campaigns, re-targeting campaigns, campaigns with a huge spend or campaigns with a tiny spend. There are Facebook lead ads, which makes it super easy for people to give you their information. Link ads, that send people to your website. Or ads that contain in-Facebook product catalogs that do automatic re-targeting. It’s a lot to learn, but it’s also easy to get started. Experts like Jon Loomer are a great way to stay on top of best practices, and there are tons of tools that can help you optimize your campaign without having to become a total expert.

Amplify

Amplify works differently than AdWords or Facebook ads, in that they don’t do ads. Instead, they provide the platform where you put a link to your awesome content. This is where you start the relationship with your potential customer, bringing them down the funnel by providing nothing but valuable, useful, funny, and endearing content. Similar to Facebook and AdWords, Amplify offers a cost-per-click bidding system, the ability to test multiple headlines directed to the same content, device targeting, geographic targeting, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences, or re-targeting tool. Their premium network of publishers ensures that you’re always getting traffic from high-quality sources. More importantly, though, the algorithms behind the content discovery platform are constantly working to find the most engaged audience for your content. The people who click your content recommendations are far more engaged than people who come from search or social, according to this analysis from 2016:

LinkedIn

For those of you in the B2B market, LinkedIn’s native ads could be a great paid traffic source. You can target people who have visited your website; target by contact or account; or by title, industry, demographics, or geography. Their options are a display ad, a sponsored post in people’s feeds, or In Mail ads. They offer a pre-filled contact form similar to Facebook’s lead ads, but really the most exciting thing about LinkedIn is the ability to pinpoint-target people by their business information and to reach them in the “walled garden” of LinkedIn. Similar to the way that discovery has lower bounce rates than social because people are in “content consumption” mode, when users are inside of LinkedIn they’re in “professional” mode and will view ads and read content with a different mindset. That could be very powerful for the right advertiser: according to marketing land, the best candidates for LinkedIn ads are high-value B2B products and services, recruiters, and higher ed.

However, LinkedIn’s network is priced on a cost-per-click and it’s pretty expensive. You won’t find any targeting for less than $2 per click, and a lot of the targeting will start at $4.50.

Twitter

Twitter is interesting because if you’re good at it, you should be able to generate tons of organic (read: free) interactions, but at the same time, people can be very wary of brands co-opting what they see as part of Twitter’s culture. Offensive or ill-timed tweets can also blow up in a careless social media manager’s face. “Good at” twitter means more than just able to make conversions or generate retweets, it means an understanding of and sensitivity to the medium. If you are good at Twitter, though, the payoff is huge: 94% of customers plan to purchase something from a small or medium-sized business they follow, and 69% bought something because of something they saw on Twitter. So is it worth it to pay to advertise on Twitter? With those numbers, it’s definitely worth a try.

You can pay to promote a single tweet, an account, or a trend, and either pay per click, follow video view, impression, engagement, app install, or lead. You design a campaign around the objective and type of promotion, then you can cut up the audience by geography, income, gender, phone carrier, or interest. For “interests,” you can get as granular as keywords like specific TV shows or movies. Twitter has a fairly high CPC, so make sure anything you promote has a strong CTA and think hard about your goals before you create a campaign.

If you’re generating leads and conversions, great, if you’re just paying for followers, you might be able to do that with better free content.

How do you use Organic sources of traffic?

Social media followers speaks for itself. You have a Facebook page, Twitter Account, Instagram, Pinterest, etc, etc and you generate content which you then post into your “Streams” for your followers to enjoy.  This is the most receptive audience you have as they “opted” to follow you.  In order to just produce one post and have it go to all Social Media sources I use Hootsuite.  It’s simply a platform that groups your media channels in one place, allowing you to schedule posts to different channels at different times.

Quora.com – an online Question and answer service where people can pose a question such as, “How do I start a blog?” and others answer it, as well as they can, with a suggestion that the reader visit the website for more excellent insight into….(insert your own niche here).  If people like you answer they may just head on over and sign up for more of your words of wisdom!

Sniply –  Sniply is a simple tool that allows you to overlay your own custom message onto any piece of content, creating an opportunity for you to include a call-to-action with every link you share.  I’m just learning this but so far, it’s pretty cool!

We only Scratched the surface here today so let’s put a pin in it here and circle back!

XO

Anna