There are different ways of bringing in traffic to websites. Depending on whether you are a serious site owner who wants to make a brand out of the site for the long term, or someone who wants to maintain a website and get some passive income out of it, the focus could be on different options to bringing in traffic.

Organic Traffic to websites are those that link to sites using search result pages. Referral traffic is that which is redirected to websites through links available elsewhere on the web. It is a good mix to have both organic as well as referral traffic on sites. Traffic sources to sites could be analysed using such tools as Google Analytics, which gives a split up of user behaviour and how your visitors have come to visit your page. A proper analysis of the results gives you key data the entry points of your site and the time spent on different pages by individual users.

Depending on how effective your site has been in fetching organic or referral traffic, you could adjust your site and contents. For instance, if your site has been predominantly getting organic traffic, it could mean two things – one, that you are not working much on getting referral traffic and two, that you could still increase the number of hits that you generate organically, depending on the exact number of organic hits and not just the relative percentages between organic and referral traffics. If you have a decent number of organic hits, it means that your keywords are doing fine and search engines are getting attracted to your site; you could, hence, work on the same lines that has been successful in getting you the traffic.

Affiliate programmes: If you have a product that makes sense and adds value to customers, I wouldn’t rule out setting up an affiliate marketing programme. Affiliate marketing is a good way to get your website publicised and to have your products sold – most companies get their referral traffic through affiliate programmes. Affiliate Marketers are virtual salesmen who sell your products for you and get people visit your website by promoting your site. Typically, affiliates are websites or blogs that host your programme and brand name to let people know of your web presence.

While you could opt to recruit affiliates on your own, set up the affiliate marketing system up and running, get the required technology, keep track of your affiliates and handle accounts and payments, I would suggest you take an easier and more practical approach, meant for people who may not have the technical knowledge and knowhow to get full fledged into running an affiliate marketing show, by joining an Affiliate Network. Affiliate networks are the technical middlemen who form the vital link between you and your affiliates. With an Affiliate network, you can sit back and wait for traffic to visit your site and for your products to be sold. You would have to apply to an affiliate network with your details and pay a deposit, while all the practicalities would be dealt with by your Affiliate Network. Clickbank.com would give you a fair idea of how things work while being with an Affiliate Network.

Sponsored Links: One way that companies promote their blogs and websites is to go for Advertising with Search engines. While websites fight it hard to get that prized slot at the top of web page rankings, search engines themselves provide the option of getting listed at the top with “Sponsored Links”. These Sponsored Links are pretty obvious and striking, based on the search terms. However, I doubt the effectiveness of the strategy – though the results are marked and are glaring, not many readers would actually click through the sponsored links as they would be more interested in going for the results generated by the search engines. Having said that, I would give the benefit of doubt to sponsored links when it comes to brand display – the sponsored links do count for website visibility, as like any other form of advertising, though sponsored links may not result in many clicks themselves. In other words, there is nothing line being at the top of search results through SEO strategies.

As a serious website owner or blogger, you should work both on organic as well as referral traffic. You may start off with Google Adwords for advertising your site on the web. You need to be an active social participant on the web to be placing your contact details and web URL’s at strategic locations that have a good deal of visitors. You may like to start off with Google Analytics or by installing Alexa Toolbar from Amazon.com to get freely accessible information about how your site has been faring. Quantcast.com and compete.com are other useful sites to analyse web pages, which require placing of codes in sites.