Without search engine traffic, you have no traffic at all; none worth mentioning and certainly not enough to sustain your affiliate business.
Ninety percent or more of the traffic to your website(s) will be from search engines, primarily the big-names like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These search engines are what will deliver hundreds or thousands of people to your virtual doorstep searching for products and information such as that you’ve provided.
Outside of search engines, websites generate traffic in only a few ways. These include:
- Links from other websites or articles
- Links and addresses from traditional marketing
- The occasional word of mouth exposure
All of these combined, however, only equate to about 10% of visitor traffic. And while ten percent is certainly something worth grabbing, the absolute best expenditure of your resources is optimizing for search engine traffic. (Incidentally, your efforts to optimize will put more links and exposure out there for your site to be found through the above-mentioned means, making search engine-centered development even more important.)
More importantly, the traffic that you get from a search engine is organic. That simply means that the traffic that search engines generate for you is traffic from real, live human beings out searching for a site like yours. They search for information and products to serve a need. That need may be buying, it may be learning, business promotion, problem-solving or what have you, but it all comes down to one thing—these are the people that are going online with the express purpose of finding someone like you.
Whereas those who click on links or enter your web address from a business card or some such means may just be curiosity seekers, the people coming from search engines started with a purpose, a goal in mind. And if you’re good, even if that primary goal wasn’t buying, you just might convince them that that’s really what they were after all along, and you just might get that sale!
