The main purpose of a website is to gain as much traffic as possible to the blogger. This, in turn, means the blogger will gain more awareness, more traffic for adverts and will generally make more money online. However, before a website can truly start making money, the website owner must realise that there are three main sources of traffic on the internet that he or she should take advantage of to successful create a website that gets consistent amounts of high traffic. These three main sources of traffic for websites are listed below.
 
 

Organic Traffic

This is, by far, the number one source of traffic for at least 95% of all the websites currently up and running. Organic traffic comes from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on. The web user searches on these search engines, your website pops up and they click onto it.
The great thing about organic traffic is that it is mostly consistent. I say ‘mostly’ because if you create an article that gets 1,000 views a day, it won’t get 1,000 a day for the rest of your life. However, it will get 1,000 views a day for a long time such as a year or two and then start to dwindle down.
What you will also find is that organic traffic is healthy too because the majority of organic traffic are new visitors to your website. This means that if you have adverts on your website, they are not going to ignore them like returning visitors might do.
The sky is really the limit when it comes to organic traffic. If you search engine optimise all of your articles online, there is a chance each article will get you consistent amounts of traffic every day for months or even years. For a website to be truly successful, you will find that the majority of its traffic is from organic results.
 
 

Social Media Traffic

Although it is not as consistent as organic, a website can gain just as much, if not more, traffic from social media than it could organically. This is because social media allows your articles to go viral. This is when everyone starts tweeting, liking and sharing your article so the amount of people that are seeing your article through social media increases resulting in spikes of traffic for your article.
This is why most websites have social media accounts associated with them and social media plugins above, below or near the article on the website: so that they can increase the chances of becoming viral.
 
 

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is the term used for web users that have come directly to your website. The ways this can be done is through:

• Manually typing in the website’s address into the address bar.
• Bookmarking the website.

Direct traffic comes from web users who have already visited your website and found it interesting in some way to visit it again direct. Direct traffic is usually considered the audience to which you write your articles to since they are repetitively going back onto your website. The only about this type of traffic is that they know where your adverts are (if you have adverts) and are less likely to click on them.