Two effective but less often used traffic sources

Wed 17 March 2010 10:44, Stijn De Meyere

As an online marketer, it is essential to be able to think on your feet to avoid falling behind. In this incredibly competitive industry, uncreative solutions quickly end up growing saturated, and saturated markets become havens for spam, inflated pricing, and low quality traffic. There is a reason for the ever-frequent failure of PPC campaigns and SEO efforts: they are too popular and competitive for most online marketers.

However, there are still some traffic assets out there that are both inexpensive (sometimes even free) and unsaturated.

These search-based traffic sources appear in all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) and can be used as a traffic canvas for anything from affiliate sales to direct service-based businesses.

1) Google Image Search

Google's standard search results are one of the toughest fields on the internet in terms of competition. Competing for a top-ten search position can be tough, but Google's other search platforms can be used as an effective and less competitive field for traffic generation.

Google Image Search is one of those less competitive fields. With the right combination of page authority, image tagging, and on-page content, your image results can end up becoming major traffic resources.

2) Well-ranked Youtube videos

Google occasionally embeds videos within the search results, and following their buyout of Youtube in 2008, Youtube videos tend to rank more quickly and effectively than other video platforms.

If you need an ultra-quick and completely free ranking strategy, consider using Google's very own Youtube to move into their search results.

Later this week I’ll add some more alternative traffic sources. In the mean time, please add yours!

<UK SEM agency Greenlight on SEM,...

Growing use of smartphones benef...>

Comments (7)

- Sander Tamaëla
- [website]
Those two are the ones frequently used after optimizing for regular traffic sources (organic and ppc), can't help but think these are becoming saturated as well. More and more website optimize their images and use video (YouTube) to enrich their user experience.

For blogs and news site, social is becoming an important source for traffic. So tweet your news and interact with your followers. Although most (news) website are already using social, it's still unused by smaller niche sites (and those often have some nice scoops).

Wed 17 Mar 2010, 11:03
- Roy
- [website]
It's cheap traffic, but cheap traffics gets you cheap customers, if any...

Have you looked at their conversions based on last cookies?

Wed 17 Mar 2010, 11:12
- Derek Visser
- [website]
I do not fully agree with Sander; I do think getting a good postion in images is possible with relatively little effort.

However, customers stemming from images or video are often not coming in on conversion-related terms. Income from images and video traffic sources is usually very low.

Wed 17 Mar 2010, 11:31
- Stijn De Meyere
I agree with Sander that social media are becoming key in traffic. I'll talk more about social media optimization later. Roy, I agree a bit. Google Images has proven to be a good source of traffic for me, of course if the images are relevant for the message. And YouTube, well I can tell you that relevant videos related to your message, well made, teasing and engaging, can increase traffic beyond saturation. On top of that, YouTube, just like social bookmarking, is about engagement and community. So if you do it cheap, your traffic will be cheap. It does require committment and involvement but most of all imagination. But the channels: they are free. Cheap traffic does not get you cheap customers. PPC ads in social bookmarking sites are very cheap but they bring me extremely good customers because they put content in the spotlight, not ads as with Google AdWord.

Wed 17 Mar 2010, 11:52
- Roy
- [website]
It really depends on what you are selling... Maybe that should be included. We can get cheap traffic, but if you're looking for leads, you rather get Quality traffic and also a pretty huge amount of that.

Wed 17 Mar 2010, 11:59
- Sander Tamaëla
- [website]
@Derek Visser: I think you misunderstood my comment. What I'm saying is that more websites tend to optimize for images/video, making those traffic sources more saturated.

@Roy: agree, in most cases traffic from images/video pull down your conversion rate.

Wed 17 Mar 2010, 12:02
- Remko Zuiderwijk
- [website]
The quality of the traffic will depend on the type of content that you publish. For example, my girlfriend have a small business with birthdaycakes and cupcakes (www.cakecompany.nl). If I look at the GA data last month I had 243 visits via Google Images. Just beceause people are looking for cakes. And in this case an image is can be more powerful than an organic result.

Mon 22 Mar 2010, 11:57

Comment

Vkontakte loses copyright battle

Tue 7 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

0 comments

Vkontakte, the most important social network in Russia, has recently lost a copyright case to Gala Music Group who claimed their rights for the content posted by Vk...... read more

Futubra... “Twitter for housewives”

Fri 3 Feb 2012, Tamara Yadvichuk

1 comment

On January 16th Russian internet giant Mail.ru Group launched Futubra, a Russian-language microblogging service. Two weeks into the launch it had almost 50000 users an...... read more

‘Have Florida - Will Travel’

Wed 1 Feb 2012, Ramcy Simoons

0 comments

As Gallant Grand Old Party nominee Romney one upped or better put smacked the Gator daylights out of ole Gingrich or ‘G-rich’ for insiders (Comedy Central)...... read more

Inside buildings will be seen in...

Mon 30 Jan 2012, Qin Hu

0 comments

Inside buildings will be seen in Google Maps soon

Recently, Google announced the news about the coming feature of Google Maps. According to its vice president of consumer products, Marissa Mayer, Business photos for G...... read more