Before I get things rolling, this article is not criticizing pay per click advertising in anyway whatsoever. PPC is the best source of traffic online which is why millions of advertisers use it around the globe. However, there will be times, out of curiosity of simple change, that you will want to try out a different way of gaining traffic to your landing page. I usually look to try out other sources of traffic to see if they gain as successful results as PPC does. Either way, here the three other sources of traffic you can use instead of PPC on the internet.
 
 

Social Media

I rank social media as one of the highest sources of traffic because the possibilities are endless: you could create a viral video, tweet or post that is shared by the thousands gaining you huge amounts of publicity. Another great thing about social media is that, at its core, it is free. Yes, you can buy tweets and Facebook exposure etc. However, you can gain endless amounts of traffic from social media, in theory, for free. For this reason, I would always try to use social media when trying to gain traffic. This is why social media is often used alongside PPC: social media buttons on the landing page.
 
 

Banner Advertising

With PPC being #1, it is safe to say banner advertising (inparticularly BuySellAds) comes in at #2. Although over the months on PPC.org I have always said that PPC is just that bit better than banner advertising, that should not stop you from experimenting with them. The reason I say BuySellAds is not as good as PPC is because:

• You have to do the ‘contextual’ part of your campaign manually.
• You could pay for an advertising spot and get minimal traffic.

But, you could also buy an advertising spot and get much more traffic than you could have ever predicted. Again, like social media, the possibilities are endless. You have paid for that advertising space for a fixed time period: what happens in that time period is yours to keep at no extra cost. If you gain much more traffic than expected during your banner advertising campaign, that is your traffic to keep at no extra cost.
 
 

Commenting

I know exactly what you are thinking – commenting? Is that really a source of traffic to be compared to the above examples? Yes: if you know how to use it right. The reason why not many people comment any more is because there are no definite results to gain from doing it. But, surely, that applies to social media, banner advertising and even PPC too? Commenting is a great source of traffic because:

• You gain a link back – Even if it is not a dofollow link, your comment will still give you the possibility to gain traffic as most websites ask for your name and website URL when commenting.
  
• Web users will click on your link if they think your comment is good. You can express a complete understanding of a topic through a few sentences as a comment. From doing this, web users will gain the impression you know exactly what you are talking about and will become intrigued into your depth of knowledge. Therefore, this will encourage them to click on your linked URL in your comment.
• Comments stay there forever – banner advertising and PPC will come and go. Social media will lose interest. As long as the article you commented on keeps getting high amounts of traffic, your comment will keep getting viewed. For example, in theory, if you commented  on 1,000 articles, in ten years time, if each article gains 20 views a day, that is 20,000 views your comment could still potential be getting. This makes clear commenting is definitely for the long term source of traffic.