Knowing Where Your Visitors Come From

How do you drive traffic to your website?  If you are anything like the majority of people you will probably use a variety of methods to generate traffic, such as classified ads, pay per click marketing, search engine optimisation and so on.But do you actually know how many visitors you are getting from each source?  If you don’t you may well be wasting time on methods that just aren’t working for you – and that means you aren’t using your time in the best possible way.One of the most important things you can do to build up a good stream of traffic to your website is to continually look for new ways to promote it.  This is particularly applicable if you have a new site and you want to get it out there and start making some sales.Let’s look at an example of how this works.  In week one you decide to optimise your site for the search engines, and you also place two classified ads that link back to your site.  That makes a good start.  Then in week two you decide to write three articles to submit to various article directories that will also drive traffic back to your site.In fact it’s fair to say that you are spending so much time focusing on writing new articles and promoting your new site wherever you can that you aren’t paying any attention at all to what might actually be working.  Supposing two out of the three article directories you have submitted articles to aren’t actually bringing you any traffic at all?  Your efforts would have been wasted – and if you continue to submit articles to those sources you will be wasting more valuable time.  You would do better to ditch those ones and find two more to replace them.As you can see, it isn’t just a question of putting the effort in; you also need to keep tabs on your internet marketing efforts to make sure that you are bringing in the results you really want.  This points to the need to keep good records of what you are doing and when, and also keeping a firm eye on your website stats to see where your traffic is coming from.  If you have been promoting your website heavily in one place and you aren’t seeing the results reflected in those stats, then you need to rethink your strategy.There is also the fact that the internet is constantly changing and some methods which used to work quite well may eventually fall out of favour.  There will always be a lot of competition from other websites that you will have to withstand, so it does pay to make sure you are getting the best possible results that your marketing budget allows for.  That doesn’t mean throwing your money away though – it simply means making sure you are spending it in the right way and ensuring that you get plenty of visitors as a result.