Passive vs. Active Methods For Driving Web Traffic

If you have an online business, you must have web traffic. It doesn’t matter if you own a blog, an affiliate marketing site, or an information product, you need web traffic in order to have any amount of success.

As I detailed in my last trip update, I only have a limited amount of time to work on my online businesses each week. For this site, most of my time will be spent on creating content and long-term income sources. This leaves me with very little time to focus on creating web traffic.

What I’ve come to realize is that I’ll only have enough time to focus on what I’m calling “passive web traffic.” Allow me to explain…

The Difference of Passive vs. Active Web Traffic

Before I get into my traffic plan for this site, let me give you a quick definition of the two major types of web traffic:

Active web traffic– It’s called ‘active web traffic’ for a reason. This is any type of web traffic where you have to continuously expend effort to get people to visit your website. It includes activities like blog (or forum) commenting, networking, many social media activities, and guest posting.

Primarily, the active method can create a lot of short term traffic. Even a brand new site owner can skyrocket their stats by regularly using this technique. The problem is once you stop doing it, you’ll lose a lot of the momentum you’ve built.

Passive web traffic– The passive method is where you create a “mini-system” that drives traffic to your site without requiring you to work at it on a daily basis. This method includes activities like search engine optimization, article marketing, video marketing, leveraging sites like Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com, and creating satellite web properties/blogs.

In truth, the passive method requires more work upfront than the active method. Plus it doesn’t create a massive amount of short term traffic. The benefit is you can create a series of passive sources that all accumulate to a huge amount of long-term traffic. Plus, these don’t require the hassle of doing time-consuming day-to-day activities.

Case in point… This article is posted on the April 29^th, 2010 as I’m traveling through Toledo, Spain. I’m able to do this because of the passive web traffic methods I created years ago (as far back as October 2006). All of these mini-traffic resources are pointed to my affiliate marketing system which is paying for this trip.

Focusing on Passive Traffic

Now I know that there is a lot of cross-over between passive and active traffic. In order to make the passive method successful, you have to be willing to do a lot of short-term work. And with the active method you can gain a number of “fans” and dedicated visitors which produce long-term results.

The problem I’m facing now is time. Right now, I only have a few hours each week to focus on driving web traffic to this site. Sure I can focus on the active method, but I know that if I don’t have Internet access for a week, then all of this work will go to waste.

So my plan for the next few months is to focus on creating a number of passive traffic methods. Then once I’m back home, I’ll dedicate most of my time to networking and interaction. To give you an idea of what I’m doing, here are…

…A Few Passive Traffic Methods

While I was in the airport waiting for my flight to Spain I used my “what if I” method of brainstorming and came up with a few different ways to create passive traffic to this site. Here are a few ideas I’m going to experiment with during the next few months:

Passive Twitter- At this moment, I have three incredible outsourcers who help me with a number of different tasks. One of them is Soniya who helps automate tasks that I’m simply unable to do on a daily basis.

Specifically, Soniya handles most of my Twitter activities. Each day, she manages the time consuming task of “following/unfollowing” people and posting links to specific articles on this site. For a very low cost, Soniya has helped me generate up to two hundred additional visitors each day. The best part is I spend about thirty minutes each week on this task, managing the process and responding to personal comments and messages.

Creating Satellite Web Properties- To be honest, this traffic method is in the concept phase. I understand the basics, but it’s going to take some heavy duty tweaking to make it really work.

The idea is simple. Google loves certain web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger, WordPress, etc. What I plan on doing is creating a number of “satellite sites” which target a specific cluster of keywords. All of which point back to various sections of this site.

Furthermore, I’ve been doing some research into keyword phrases and domain names. My plan is to target certain long-tail keywords and create a mini-site which also points back at this blog.

For instance, there are many variations of the keyword “life plan” which gets lots of traffic, but doesn’t have a registered domain name. All I have to do is register the domain name and I’ll be able to easily create more web traffic.

Ezine Articles– Yes, I know you’ve probably heard about the benefits of article marketing. And if you’ve tried it, then you know that the results don’t often match up to the hype.

To be honest, I’ve had both incredible and awful results with article marketing. Some of my articles have received over 100,000 views and many have had less than 10. Furthermore, you can never predict which articles will succeed and which ones won’t.

So for the next few months, I’m going to do a little experimenting with ezine articles.

First off, I’m tinkering with the perfect formula to increase the CTR (click-thru ratio). My logic is once I maximize my CTR, it’ll be easy to replicate and systematize the articles. As of today, I’m getting an average of 25% CTR, with some articles receiving over a 32% CTR. Ultimately, I’m hoping to increase the average to over 30% with some articles hitting a 40% CTR.

Once I’ve perfected the CTR ratio, I’m going to work on the problem of increasing the number of page views. The way I figure things is the more eyeballs that see my articles, the more web traffic this site will receive.

Again, this is another mini-experiment I’m currently doing. I know article marketing works, but I want to maximize the results I’ll get while decreasing the amount of time I spend on the process.

My Question to YOU…

To be honest, there a number of additional traffic methods that I plan on using. But most of them are just one-line vague thought on a piece of paper. Probably during the next few months, I’ll flesh out these ideas and see if they’ll work.

So as I wrap up this post, I have a quick question(s) for YOU…

What type of traffic methods are you implementing on your site(s)? Does it require an active or a passive approach? How much time do you spend each week working on it? Do you have any recommendations for what’s working for you?

Please comment below…

Take Action. Get Results.