Search engine optimization is extremely important. It helps people find your website through Google, and it drives a great deal of Traffic to your website. There’s a problem, though.

The competition in the online world is so tough that most businesses don’t stand a chance to get their sites featured on the search engine’s first page of results.

You can make it there through tons of effort, endless blog updates and tons of content. When you achieve high rank in the results, you’ll keep trying even harder to maintain it.

Until Google makes a change in its algorithm and makes you ask yourself: “why did I do all of this, anyway?”

Can you name all changes in Google’s algorithm so far? If you can, then you’re a genius because the algorithm changes 500-600 times every single year. The major updates, on the other hand, are not that common, but they are very, very frustrating to SEO marketers.

Let’s make it clear: search engine optimization is inevitable. Should you focus your entire energy and resources in this one way to attract traffic? Absolutely not.

There are reliable alternative sources of traffic that will keep your site in the game even when Google fails you. When a new update is launched, you’ll upgrade your SEO strategy without being worried that you lost the entire traffic.

Alternative sources of traffic are just as important as SEO, so website owners and developers can check out these methods for attracting more visitors to their sites:

1.  Paid Promotion

A website’s visitor and conversion rates can be quickly boosted through well-organized paid ads. If you pay for the right ad on the right platform, you may easily attract thousands of visitors to your website.

I was recently looking up information about online meditation courses, and guess what Facebook keeps suggesting now? The platform knows I’m interested in this stuff and it keeps pushing these ads into my eyes, no matter whether I want them or not.

What’s the disadvantage of this method, you may ask?

Well, it can get expensive. Chances are, you don’t have an unlimited budget to spend on ads. The good news, however, is that the ROI is awesome.

Plus, it’s easy to track the expenses, especially if you focus on one or two platforms. You will limit the budget and you won’t spend a single dollar above budget, but you’ll still get tons of visits to your site.

These are only three of the available options for paid advertising:

• Facebook ads
  You’ve seen them, and you’ve probably clicked on them. The best thing about this method is that it’s very, very targeted. Your ads will reach the right target audience at the right time. Even political parties use this method to promote their campaigns, because they know that this is the platform where the action is.There are two important elements of Facebook ads: visual and textual. You will need a great image or graphic that will attract people’s attention.You can include a written message on that image, so you’ll make sure that the viewers will get the point.As for the text, it needs to involve a call to action and it has to be very attractive. If you are having troubles to come up with the perfect content, you can hire a professional writer or editor from services like Australian Writings.
• Solo ads
  Some Internet marketers have impressive mailing lists, and they will accept a one-time payment for sending your own email message to their contacts. You’re not buying the email list, so you won’t be able to keep sending messages to the same people. Rather, you are composing a message and a successful marketer sends it to their subscribers.Have you seen messages in your email’s Promotions category that simply didn’t belong there? Maybe you haven’t even noticed solo ads because they blended perfectly within the list of promotional messages.Whether you noticed something weird or not, the truth is that you didn’t subscribe for these messages and you’re getting them in the form of solo ads. You can do the same to reach a wider audience and bring more traffic to your site.You can easily find services you can buy solo ads from. Udimi, SoloAdsX, and HyperSoloAds are only few of them. It’s important to be very careful with this method. Don’t drop $1000 in advance without getting all information you need. Ask around about the reliability of the service and get clear explanations of the results you can expect from this investment.
• Ads on influential websites
  No one really likes banner ads. Great websites, however, can infuse visually-appealing ads through the pages without making their audience frustrated. Even sites like Forbes and CNN feature ads, and paying for some space on such popular online destination will certainly pay off.If you want to attract a great deal of traffic through this method, it’s important to think about your target audience and the websites they usually visit. Search for influential sites and pay to get your ad featured there.

2. Forum Activity

When people have questions and problems, they turn to forum communities for help. When a website is being properly marketed through forum comments, the links can attract a lot of traffic on the long term.

Let’s say you maintain a website that recommends or sells anti-aging products. You can easily find the relevant threads on Reddit and other online communities. Then, you’ll offer your advice. You have tons of knowledge on the topics related to your industry, so don’t hold back and share it.

When you become a valued member of the community, you can start inserting your links here and there. The members themselves post links, so yours will fit in completely naturally when you have high-quality comments to offer.

3. Activity on Viral Content Buzz

This is a community that enables users to earn points by sharing content submitted by other people. Then, they can use those points to get their own content promoted. In other words – the more you share content from other users, the more shares your own pages will get.

Some marketers assume they would get the same effect by sharing their own links through Social Media, but Viral Content Buzz is different, mainly because it’s a community of competent people from different niches.

They are the ones sharing the content, and they are after high quality. Your links will get promoted through real social media profiles with great activity. So, you’ll get tons of traffic through your membership in this community.

4. Using Various Platforms for Content Promotion

Chances are, your website is already being successfully promoted via Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Those are the classics, but there are many other platforms that can contribute towards greater traffic. Here are few of them:

• Quora
• Tumblr
• BizSugar
• Slideshare

Whenever you get a chance to write a comment or post at a website, do it and insert your link. If your comment offers great solutions, the readers will click the link.

5. Blog Commenting

When a website is promoted through constructive comments on influential blogs, most readers are ready to click the link.

The trick is to provide great value through the comments and help people solve their problems. They won’t click a dry link without context. Find several blog posts from your niche and comment on them.

It’s important to comment on fresh posts; people rarely check old publications. Write meaningful comments to join the discussion, and drop your link.

This is not something you do occasionally. Blog comments should be part of your strategy for getting more traffic.

6. Email Marketing

This old-school strategy still works. Every website can benefit from a list of subscribers who want to get news and updates. That’s why you need to provide an option for your website’s visitors to subscribe. Instead of waiting for them to Google your site when they think of it, this strategy will keep reminding them you have something interesting to offer.

Your first goal is to create a great email list. The most reliable way to do that is through permission-based email marketing, which means you’ll never add a new contact without their consent.

Your messages have to be visually-stunning, and you need to optimize them for mobile users, too. Here are some of the best email marketing tools you can use:

• GetResponse
• MailChimp
• ConvertKit
• ActiveCampaign

7. Giveaways

A creative campaign with an attractive prize will certainly get the attention of a website’s target audience. When you promote a contest through social media or any other platform, you get higher chances of people clicking the link.
If you sell products or services at your site, it will be easy to think of a theme for your contest: give some of it for free.

If your website is content-oriented, you can invite the participants to write essays or articles, and the most popular ones will get a monetary prize.

This is a great strategy, since the participants will promote the links and they will bring you more traffic.

8. Infographics

This type of content gets a huge number of shares all over social media. Infographics are very easy to create. People like getting a lot of information in compact format, so they will certainly click the link to see what you offer.

Hint: Pinterest is the perfect platform for promoting infographics. The platform will keep recommending the pins to the relevant audience, so it will bring you more and more traffic on a daily basis.

So don’t forget to pin your infographics there, and make sure to make them pinnable straight from your site. Don’t forget: this type of content will easily get attention on other social media sites as well, so promote it as much as possible.
Screenshot 8

SEO Is Important, but It’s Not Everything
When marketers invest their entire budget and energy in SEO, Google makes them sorry for that, sooner or later. It’s important to have other sources of traffic, such as paid ads, blog commenting, Viral Content Buzz and forum activity, email marketing, giveaways, and infographics. Include these methods in your strategy and you’ll definitely notice results.

Stephanie Norman – professional writer with wide experience in the field of education, writing and blogging. It gives her the opportunity to help people to find out some useful and necessary things and apply them correctly in different spheres of life. You can follow her on Facebook and Google+.

The post Dependable And Worry-Free Traffic From Alternative Sources appeared first on Ninja Outreach.