Why Organic Traffic Triumphs Viral Traffic

Which of these two options sound better to you? One, you could have a blog post go viral, bringing thousands of visitors to your website in one day. Or two, you could have one well optimized post that brings you a small amount of organic traffic (that is, traffic from search engines) each day. A lot of people would choose option one – how cool would it be to see hundreds of shares on one of your post, hundreds of visitors browsing your website at one time, right? Well guess what – a lot of people are wrong. The steady organic traffic would by far be the best option, and here’s why. 

Let’s take a look at the reasoning behind why things go viral. It’s not always because the content was amazing, no, you could have the world’s best content go completely unnoticed. It’s almost like a snowball effect – the psychology behind this is that, if people see someone sharing a post, so they read it, and they think they should share it too. So what happens?

More and more people start sharing the content, and it gets a lot of views for a day, a week, if you’re lucky, maybe even a month. But then it dies down, and people forget all about it. Now this would be fine, except for one thing. Most of the people that were exposed to the article didn’t care about the topic, they weren’t actively looking for it.

Organic traffic is completely different. Not only will it probably bring you more traffic in the long run (due to its consistency) it’ll also make you significantly more money. Why? Organic traffic is targeted traffic. Let’s think about it for a moment.

When you type something into Google, you’re looking for something specific. You’re looking for a piece of information that you need. That piece of information is important to you. You click on one of the results, and it tells you what you’re looking for.

What does this mean?

When you attract organic traffic, you can be sure that the person is actually interested in the topic at hand. This provides extremely more potential for sales than if someone clicked on your article through Facebook, for example. The clickthrough rate for your advertisements will be higher, because people will actually be interested in the ads that will serve. The conversion rate for affiliate sales will be much higher.

Let’s take an example of this, and show how it works. Let’s say for example, you were a visitor, and were looking to buy a Studiopress/Genesis theme for your blog. You type in “Genesis Framework Review” on Google, and are presented with a full review covering everything you’ve wanted to know about the framework. You are convinced it’s the one for you, so you buy it through that person’s affiliate link. The webmaster has made a sale due to the organic traffic he got to his review page.

Now let’s say someone shared his review on Twitter. It would get clicks, but those people that do click on it aren’t actively looking for new themes, and so they’re less likely to spend the money to buy one. See what I mean?

We all want traffic. We all want our posts to be shared, and go viral. However, if your goal of your website is to make money, you should instead focus on building natural, organic traffic. Not only will it make you more money in the long run, you’ll get more traffic from it as well. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.