On the Internet, website traffic is king. In many ways, traffic is like currency on the Internet. If you are a website owner, the more traffic you receive, the more prominent your site will be. For some, this directly translates to making more money and growing their business online. Without traffic, your website is of very little value to anyone but you, and perhaps some of your closest friends.
Having a good or informative website is in no way an indication or guarantee that you will get traffic. Internet website traffic is extremely valuable and competition for traffic is fierce. Getting traffic to your website is not an easy task and usually requires a great deal of time and money.
If you have an online business, generating traffic to your website is possibly the most important thing you can do for your business. The golden rule is to spend 20% of your time growing your website and 80% increasing your traffic. When done correctly, generating traffic to your website is a long-term investment and one that will reap the rewards for years to come. Building traffic is not an overnight exercise, but something that requires time and patience.
Aesop, in his fable of The Goose And The Golden Egg, illustrates a very important approach to online traffic. In the fable, a very poor farmer discovers one day that one of his geese is laying golden eggs. At first he couldn’t believe his luck, but upon closer inspection he realizes that it really is gold. Overwhelmed with joy, every morning he went to look for his golden egg. For a time, the farmer was quite content to receive a golden egg every morning, but as time passed, he became more impatient and greedy: he wanted more. Puzzled and frustrated as to why the goose only lays one egg at a time, he guts it in an attempt to get more, only to discover nothing.
Your website is your goose that lays goose eggs and if you treat it right, it will continue to produce golden eggs for you. The way it feeds it is by funneling traffic to it and this is a gradual and consistent process. If you get impatient and ‘open’ it, you could kill it completely, and along with it, your golden eggs.
It is true that there are many quick ways to get traffic to your website, but many of them can kill your website. On the other hand, building good solid website traffic will continue to bring you traffic for years to come. It is vitally important to think long term. Quick-fix solutions rarely last very long. Investing the time in long-term solutions will eventually pay off, and when they do, they tend to keep delivering day after day.
Those who always jump on the bandwagon to follow the ‘latest’ black hat techniques to get traffic, tend to do a full time job, they have to. As soon as one source runs out, they have to move on to the next one just to get some traffic. Those who focus on solid, long-term sources of website traffic do the job once, and the results keep paying off time after time. This is what it really means to work smarter and not harder. Initially it may require more work and a steeper learning curve, but in the long run you always get more for less.
Internet website traffic is something you need to build and you need to do it consistently. In the end, you can determine how much traffic you get. Traffic is the lifeblood of any website and there is no free food on the internet: you have to go and get the traffic and above all give your website visitors a reason to come back.