Traffic Technique

Pros

Cons

Search engines and directories

1. Steady flow. Generates traffic with little effort on your part.

2. Prime prospects find you rather than vice versa.

3. You can register multiple pages, each with their own title, meta tags, and keywords.

1. Traffic depends on a high ranking. Often hard  to get.

2. Requires periodic reregistering to keep from losing high ranking.

3. Competition for high ranking for many keywords is intense.

1. Sudden spurt if the announcement is important.

2. Visitors are introduced to your site who may not have otherwise heard of it.

1. Short-lived. Eventually traffic tapers back to pre-announcement levels.

2. You must keep generating new events to take advantage of this traffic technique.

1. Worthwhile postings generate immediate interest and spurt in traffic (list of important Web events).

2. Some will bookmark your site, ask questions, expressed an interest in your product.

3. Can develop a reputation as an expert.

4. Opportunities for developing one-to-one relationships.

5. You can tap knowledge and experience of experts.

1. Spend time becoming familiar with discussions before postings.

2. Several days after posting, traffic falls off.

3. Could generate negative responses from target audiences, such as self-promotional postings.

4. Eventually, unimportant postings to same discussion groups won’t increase traffic.

1. Free method for increasing traffic

2. Steady stream of traffic from numerous sources.

3. Reciprocal links provide valuable resources for visitors.

1. Difficult to get busy sites to link to you.

2. Reciprocal links give your visitors a ready exit.

3. Your link may get lost in long list of links.

4. Have to keep adding more links to make up for sites that drop your link or quit operating.

5. Reciprocal links may benefit competition more than you.

1. Target audiences you want to reach.

2. Inexpensive to prepare and send promotional materials.

3. Testing of offer, audiences, etc. is easy and inexpensive to do.

4. Actively attract attention by placing your message in inboxes.

1. Takes time to build your own mailing list.

2. Renting lists can be expensive.

3. Run risk of appearing to spam recipients.

4. Net users getting conditioned to block out ads.

1. Reach large targeted audience.

2. Considerably cheaper than offline advertising.

3. Easy to track results of ad campaigns.

4. Banner ads more conspicuous than most other traffic techniques.

5. Easy to test effectiveness of banner ads and host sites.

1. Usually more expensive than other online advertising options.

2. Net uses getting jaded to banner ads and content sponsorships. Equivalent of tuning out TV ads.

3. No guarantee of success.

4. Good graphics artists for banner ads may be hard to find.

1. Reach potentially huge market.

2. Free publicity can bring instant recognition.

3. Better than free advertising, publicity has more credibility.

4. More space to describe your site or product.

5. Bestows instant "expert" label on you.

6. Tremendously satisfying to receive.

1. Time consuming to prepare media list and contact media.

2. Intense competition for media attention.

3. News releases and press releases must be written competently.

4. No control over content. May have to deal with negative comments.