Do you remember seeing those giant coin funnels in the mall where you put in a coin and you get to see it roll around and around the funnel slowly getting faster before it drops in the hole to be lost for good? Well getting website traffic is a lot like that funnel, only all the things that you put in the coin slot (search engines, blogs, press releases etc.) don't merely go straight to the bottom, they create a cumulative effect that multiplies your efforts. This is why its important to have a multiple armed marketing strategy so that your products and services can be found by as many people as possible.
This is how it works. Lets take search engines to begin with since they seem to drive the most traffic to our websites. Search engines LOVE links. What provides these links, and increases your search engine ranking? Blogs, Press Releases, Article Marketing, Advertising in online forums, dealers, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Friendfeed, Yahoo Meme, etc.) and much more. Now each of these can be optimized, and improve how much they affect your search engine rankings, but the cumulative effect is much greater than if you just went based on one or two of them alone.So its clear that Search Engines will drive more traffic if you have links in other types of media, but what about blogs? How can they benefit the volume of website traffic? Did you know Blogs can drive traffic to your website? Having a clear link structure designed in the same template as your website can make it easy for customers to get where they want to in your site! How can you drive traffic to your site more effectively with blogs? Make your content relevant! Search Engines drive traffic to blog that are relevant to people's needs and blogs drive traffic to your site. Mention your blog in your press releases, and advertising and if they find what they are reading interesting they will look for more information at your blog, and then click to visit your webpage. Dealers as well might like to visit the blog to find out what products your offering that might sell best to customers, or they may even find better ways to sell your products by looking at your blog. All this adds up and results in more traffic, and more sales for you.
The same thing is true for each area mentioned. They all feed into one another and the more each of these avenues are utilized the better the cumulative effect. The Lesson to learn from this? Make sure your marketing staff isn't forgetting any of these areas, or you'll be missing out on more than you think.
