A GUIDE TO DIGITAL LITERACY.

5.1. Difference between Paid and Organic Traffic.

Free traffic is always the goal, right? Which is why most businesses aim for
organic traffic first. After all, if you can get a steady flow of free traffic, you’ll
pocket the savings.
But as with everything else in life, you get what you pay for.
The easiest way to explain that is with a simple comparison: the water hose
versus the rain.
Paid traffic is like a water hose. You have complete control over the direction
it’s pointed, the amount of water pouring from it, and how long you let the
water flow. You can turn it on and off whenever you want.
If you’re getting more traffic than you need, with paid traffic, you can slow the
flow. You have control of where it’s going, how fast, and when.

Organic traffic, on the other hand, is more like rain. You aren’t sure when or
if it will come, how consistent it will be, nor how long it will last. Listen to the
weather channel all you want. You have no control.
With organic traffic, you can lose traffic if Google changes their algorithm. If a
competitor has a huge launch, you could lose traffic to them. You also have no
control over where the traffic goes. Even simple things like changing the URL
of your landing page can mess things up.
You can enjoy all the control of paid traffic without it actually costing you
anything. You do that by building funnels that reimburse your ad spend.
So in essence, you can acquire customers for free, and then once your
advertising costs have been reimbursed, use simple tactics to build loyalty and
optimize your customers’ lifetime value.
Better still, it’s not an either/or proposition.
The better your paid traffic is, the better your organic traffic will be as well,
because good advertising drives traffic—and the pages that get lots of traffic
tend to rank higher in search engines.
That creates an upward spiral of traffic acquisition. A win-win, if you will.
But it’s important to be realistic. You just can’t run one traffic campaign and
expect it to magically deposit a million dollars in your bank account.
If you want a constant flow of leads and customers for your business, you must
look at this as a system.