Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your website. Only some people who visit your site will make a purchase, but the more traffic you have, the higher the odds are of converting a customer.

Traffic serves more purposes than just making sales, though. When you can analyze your site’s traffic, you can learn a wealth of information about your audience:

• Where is the traffic coming from?
• How long are they spending on the sites?
• Which products or web pages do they spend the most time visiting?

It’s essential to track where your traffic comes from. That way, you can see which of your ads, posts, or email marketing strategies are performing best and which will need tweaking to improve their numbers.

Traffic is the foundation of your entire marketing strategy. It’s where your sales come from, but it’s also your touchstone for gauging the success of each of your sales funnels.

No matter the specific method you use to drive traffic to your site, you’ll be doing it in one of two ways: you’ll either be paying for traffic or earning it organically. Obviously, these types of traffic differ in terms of the money you spend but also in their sources and conversion timelines.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is all traffic that comes to you through paid sources. These include things like promoted posts and ads, sponsored results on search engines, and paid join venture collaborations (“JVs”). Focusing on paid traffic is an excellent option if you have more money than time to invest.

When you put out your paid content, the resulting traffic is usually more immediate than organic traffic. It doesn’t take as much time or effort to build paid traffic, either. You control paid traffic in the sense that you can control where it comes from and where it goes (i.e., your sponsored content will link to a specific landing page in your sales funnel). But you can only control it as long as you pay for it.

Organic Traffic

Leaning into organic traffic is perfect for business owners who have more time than money. Sources like blogs, YouTube channels, and SEO-focused content marketing can drive organic traffic.

Because it’s unpaid, organic traffic is much more cost-effective than paid traffic. However, businesses focusing on driving organic traffic must be willing to play the long game because organic traffic is slower to tap into than paid traffic.

Organic traffic fits in the category of traffic you earn—you work to drive it, but you only have it as long as you keep working for it.

No matter the type of traffic you want to focus on driving, it’s undeniable that both are good for your business. But how exactly do you get to work building that traffic?

Before you start on promotions or unpaid content, you should utilize the Dream 100 strategy. To do this, you’ll first need to visualize your dream customer. You should be able to answer these questions and any others you can think of:

• What are their likes and dislikes?
• How much money do they make?
• How do they spend a typical day?
• Where do they hang out online?
• What are their biggest frustrations, fears, and desires?

You can even find a stock picture of someone you think fits the description of your dream customer, print it out, and put it on your wall for inspiration in the next phase.

Once you’ve identified your dream customer, it’s time to figure out their pain points and desires. Then, you can see how your product or service helps them out.

Let’s say you run a family law firm specializing in helping single parents achieve their ideal custody, child support, and spousal maintenance situation. Your ideal client is a quality person and parent who deserves your help in a difficult circumstance. Therefore, your expertise in law may help relieve difficulties and mental stress, allowing your clients to spend more quality time with their kids in a happier state of mind.

Next, you should identify places your dream customer hang out online. These will be places where other like-minded people congregate, and might look something like this:

• blogs
• podcasts
• Facebook groups
• websites and forums
• influencers and other social media accounts

Now that you’ve found your Dream 100, it’s time to engage them to drive traffic to your business.

Creating and increasing paid traffic clearer once you’ve found your Dream 100. You’ll head to these forums and blogs to run paid advertisements and promotions.

Doing this through your Dream 100 list is much more effective than just running paid ads blindly on social media. Through your Dream 100, you’ve found your ideal customers. You can promote yourself to them directly instead of simply trusting algorithms and hoping for the best.

To utilize paid promotions, you’ll reach out to influencers, podcast hosts, and other large-scale resources to see if you can collaborate with them for a price. For example, you’ll pay influencers to discuss and promote your product or service. You’ll see if you can run podcast advertisements or join the host to talk about ways your business can lead listeners away from pain and towards their desires.

All this paid traffic will cost you, though. If you don’t have the resources to spend on paid advertising, then generating organic traffic will be your best bet.

Your Dream 100 will come in handy in a big way when you want to drive organic traffic to your site, too.

One option is to create optimized content. An excellent place to start is by creating a blog on your website. Before you begin blogging, you should identify the top keywords and phrases that your target audience is typing in search engines. That way you can write with intent to speak to existing search demand instead of writing just for the sake of writing.

At the end of your blog posts, you can encourage readers to subscribe to your email list so they never miss an update or new blog post from your business. This is an excellent method for any business wondering how to generate leads with digital marketing.

Once you have a blog, you can spread your content even further across the web by turning your blog posts into YouTube videos or social media content. YouTube is an especially useful source to leverage because, unlike social media, where your older posts will get lost in your timeline, YouTube videos often increase as your channel’s credibility grows over time.

A third option is to go the way of earning your traffic: you’ll need to work your way into the minds of your dream customers.

Look at your Dream 100 sources and share your expertise on these platforms. The goal is to become a well-known, trusted, and valuable resource. Leave comments. Start discussions. Subscribe to bloggers, Youtubers, business coaches, and podcasters. Share the most exciting content you come across, and add your own thoughts as well.

The goal is to strike a balance between sharing your knowledge without being spammy. Ensure that you’re authentic and true to yourself, while delivering value. If you can communicate to people that you’re a likable, trustworthy, and authoritative source, they’ll want to check out your business without you needing to push them.

Before you can start selling them anything, you must build a sturdy relationship first. Remember, increasing organic traffic requires patience and playing the long game.

Consistency in Organic Traffic

The tricky part about building organic traffic is that it requires that doesn’t often come immediately. Consistency is key—when you keep at it, the possibility of increased traffic improves.

When you get to the point where it feels like your organic traffic isn’t increasing, you can implement The Law of 100. This means that you commit to doing something 100 times. That can be publishing 100 blog posts, posting 100 times on social media, or adding 100 YouTube videos to your channel.

When following The Law of 100, you should remember to prioritize quality over quantity. Churning out mediocre content isn’t the goal—it’s to provide your audience with meaningful, valuable content that will leave them wanting to know more about your business.

Even though increasing organic traffic is a lot of work and can take time, the results can be amazing. Organic traffic can convert at a rate of 10 to 19 times higher than paid traffic. Be patient when focusing on organic content because you’ll start to see that your efforts are a great way to get more web traffic.

Whether you go for paid traffic, organic traffic, or some of both, you’ll need a consistent way to ramp up the traffic to your site. Because you’ve spent significant time or money (or both) to get your name out there as a trusted source, you’ll want to continue building trust in your audience with a lead magnet.

Lead magnets are a product or service you give away for free or cheap in exchange for someone’s contact information—usually their email address. No matter what you choose to offer, your lead magnet should:

• Solve a problem
• Be easy to create
• Be highly valuable and genuinely helpful to your audience

You want your audience to find it attractive and helpful, but you don’t want to spend all your time creating it.

Above all, remember your dream customer. Would they like what you’re offering? Would they be interested enough to give you their email address? Once they’ve gotten your free offer, will it be valuable enough to keep them coming to your site for more?

Using Lead Magnets for Lead Generation

You might wonder, “How will offering something for free benefit me and drive traffic to my site?” There are two answers:

1. Your free product or service should create excitement and desire for what you can offer your audience. When your leads gain access to your guide on solving their needs, they will be interested in finding out what else you can offer them.
2. Lead magnets are the answer if you’re wondering how to get leads for your business. You can add all those email addresses you collected to your list of subscribers, where you can continue to build a relationship with your audience.

Best of all, traffic from your subscribers is traffic you own. The goal of getting organically earned or paid controlled traffic is to convert it into traffic you own. You don’t need to rely on algorithms or hope that someone will let you advertise your product or service on their platform. Instead, you can contact these subscribers whenever you want with whatever offers you’d like.

Always remember your dream customer in everything you do to drive traffic to your site. Ask yourself:

• Would they respond to your paid ad? (If not, tweak it.)
• Would they listen to a particular podcast, follow a certain YouTube channel, or subscribe to a specific blog? (If yes, leverage those platforms to spread awareness of your brand.)
• Would they find your site’s content valuable? (If not, focus on creating content that they would want to follow.)
• Would they be drawn to your lead magnet? (If not, increase the perceived value of your offer.)

When you focus on your dream customer’s preferences, you’ll see consistency in your efforts.