Have you wondered what the basic cause of marketing failure is? Well it is when you cannot derive desired traffic or enough conversion or when you aren’t properly tracking your return on investment (ROI). Traffic, conversion and tracking can be considered as the three pillars, and all 3 are needed for long term success. Sounds savvy!!

Website traffic can only be effectively optimized, if there exists any accepted process for traffic generation and management. Most B2B companies have the following sources. 


So here we are to discuss 4 major traffic sources that every business should make their part of: 

1.   Search Engine Optimization

In simple terms, SEO is the process of getting web pages to rank at the top of search engines like Google. Great number of people consider SEO to be the holy grail of online marketing and its quite logical to justify why? It strives to make your website by rank high thinking of new traffic and customers. 

2.   Online Advertising

This can be considered as the big category of online advertising. Two main types are:
Search Advertising – Googl eAdWords, MSN AdCenter, etc
Display Advertising – Google Display Network, Facebook, retargeting etc 

3.   Social Media Marketing

It doesn’t matter which business you’re in, all your potential customers are spending time on Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest or on blog, or on revive pages like Yelp. 

4.   Referral Marketing

Another major source of big traffic category is referral marketing, under which there are two main categories of referral traffic.
  • Referral partnerships: Where partners are sending you traffic (usually in exchange of reciprocation or commission.
  • Customer Referral Programs: Where incentives are created for your customers so that they can refer more customers to your business.  

The biggest advantage of referral marketing is that it creates the most highly qualified leads and typically is the highest converting traffic. 

Don’t Limit Yourself to a Single Source of Traffic
Now if you commit of doing the mistake above, you leave your business unstable and vulnerable. For example, if you’re relying on Google ranking (SEO) for all your customers, you could go out of business overnight if Google changes their algorithm. 

What To Do NEXT?
The next plan of action should be analyze if you are using all four sources of traffic or are you missing some? If you’re missing any don’t forget to include it into your marketing plan in the next 30-90 days. New sources of traffic shall always bring more traffic and customers in the short term and business stability in the longer term.