All businesses that have marketing websites are looking to improve traffic. Sure it is a numbers game - more traffic, more potential customers, a certain percentage will buy something, etc. But the underlying factor is that the quality of the traffic matters more than the count of the traffic.
Does it really pay to have 1,000 visitors come to your website if they are not interested in your content? It does make more sense to attract 50 or 100 are interested, will read your content, sign up for your newsletter and perhaps buy something on your website.
Organic traffic is the best but is the hardest to achieve. This comes to those lucky enough to be a the top of the search engines for the search terms that are meaningful to their business. When a visitor is actually searching for your content and finds your site - they ARE interested and will be eager to see what you have to offer.
Referral links are also very good especially if they originate on another high quality [high Page rank] website and link back to your website. These links are enhanced and become the most meaningful to your website when they contain the keywords that you have built into your website. This is the type of link that The Limo Project 50 Cities offers to advertising limousine websites in the 50 most populated US Cities. A poor example of this type of link back text is "Great Limo Company", a much better example of a proper link back text is "Great Orlando Limo Service" such as Great Orlando Limo Service This link contains the most popular search terms for finding a Limousine company in the Orlando, Fl area.
Email Marketing Referral Links are very good, but take a considerable amount of work to get in front of the potential client. To do this properly, you need a service to send the email and measure the results. You can choose from a free service such as Mail Chimp, or a business solution such as Constant Contact. Next you need to design an email template and the content of the email to send out. Here is a sample of the email we sent out to request Limo Companies to donate 2 hours of Limousine Service for a Valentine's Day Contest we are marketing:
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Once you have the service and the email in place, you need a list of valid emails. You can achieve this through a sign-up on your website, purchasing a list or mining emails on the Internet. It is best to have people opt into your list [they gave you permission to send them email]. Always include a way for the end user to "unsubscribe" or "opt out" from future emails. You do not want to leave the impression that you are a spammer. If you see this referral in your Analytics report, it is an indication of success! Here is the measured results of the email sent to about 543 Limo companies: 
Of the 543 emails sent:
- 167 [30%] were opened
- 33 [6%] bounced
- 21 [3.8%] clicked to the offering
- 5 [2.9% Of opened, 23.8% of clicked to offering] companies signed up!
Blogging Writing you own content that links back to your website is a great way to get traffic. The general public is hungry for good content. This is "free" when done on your own. It does take time and a personality that enjoys writing. You can also gain traffic by responding to other blog content by commenting.
Twitter / Facebook / Linked In It is a great idea to become engaged in social media marketing through these 3 websites. Twitter is more fun - quick tweets, consisting of 160 letters or less. This is fast moving content that should engage curiosity rather than pure spam. Interested parties will follow you and click through to read full stories.
Facebook is based on linking friends together, but is slowly becoming more commercial with "Fan" pages and advertising opportunities. Linked in is a professional networking environment and very business oriented.
YouTube Video is one of the hottest media contents on the Internet today. A serious company should open a video channel, create content and share this with the world
Shopping Opportunities The Internet is offering many opportunities for businesses to promote their goods and services. Many of these have done the work for you and now need your content. FourSquare, Groupon, Craigslist, and various online malls are waiting for you now.
Paid Advertising
- Pay Per Click [PPC] / Cost Per Click [CPC]
- Banner Advertising
- Sponsorship
There are several ways to pay other sites to send traffic. One of the most effective methods is pay per click advertising on the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The gist of this advertising allows you to set your own daily budget and bid on keywords or sets of keywords that become clickable links to your website when the end user enters those keywords into the search engine. This is very effective in finding targeted traffic, but can become expensive especially when your competition is bidding up the price of the same keywords you have selected.
A good mix of traffic depends on how you have elected to market your website and the results of the options described above.
Here is a great mix of traffic coming into The Limo Project.
Much of the interest came from Twitter and blogging:
Here is a good mix of traffic for LimoCar Orlando.
Much of this traffic is now organic, 2nd is CPC Google Ads:
Companies should plan to use a mix of all the above in their marketing strategy. Budget and time available will dictate which to use, to do the work internally or to hire any outside services to perform the above tasks. When hiring, ask not only for references, but to see past results.