There comes a time in almost every web marketer’s life when they are sorely tempted to throw their hat in the ring and go for some paid web traffic, even sticking a fork in their organic marketing efforts. This never fails to amaze us, because while there is a place for both on your marketing menue, the thinking behind it is usually something more along the lines of desperation than any real coherent strategy. Let’s look at why you need both (sometimes) and why paid traffic may be a method you should avoid.

If you plan to be in your business for any appreciable length of time, you will need a long term organic search strategy.  Depending on the various paid methods is a bit of a risky basket, in my view, to be putting all your eggs in!  There is also the fact that for almost any paid traffic campaign, you need a lot of working capital to keep the wheels greased, whereas organic search requires no such investment. You will have to create the content that will be ranked, and sometimes the supporting content to make it rank well, but once that’s done, it can and often does produce for years. With paid traffic, you’ll be  be buying those same clicks tomorrow.

There are some terrific uses for paid traffic that are viable and should be considered. Paid traffic, especially pay per click (PPC), can be very useful in testing a market or a product. You can get a good idea what will work before investing a lot of time and effort into an organic campaign. You can also use it to help get a site off the ground, and noticed.

Some of the more popular methods of paid traffic include:

• Pay Per Click
• Pay Per View
• Banner Advertising
• Contextual Links
• Video Advertising
• Paid Social Media

with a multitude of other ways that you can pour a lot of money into what can be a dubious enterprise. This is the main concern: that inexperienced marketers can and very often do lose their shirts using paid traffic. With Google calling the shots, paid traffic is really a crapshoot. They can decide your landing pages aren’t worthy and you’re stuck either paying higher prices per click, or being pushed out of the game altogether. Not my idea of a good business model.

Utilize paid traffic when it makes sense to do so, and don’t hang your hat entirely on it, or you may very well find it missing one day!