I was reading my twitter stream earlier today and came across an important article that you absolutely must read concerning important internet traffic sources for your website -article: internet traffic sources. I’m not going to reproduce all the fancy graphs for you in this post, so check out the original article if you want further evidence. I’m just going to summarize and give you the ‘skinny’ here today.
Search Engines
Google is still King of the Jungle. What’s surprising is just how dominant they are. They account for 92% of internet search based queries. That’s far more than I previously realized. Yahoo and Bing are just not bringing in significant volumes of traffic.
Social Networks
Facebook controls 68% of the social networking category, Twitter 25%, and LinkedIn 4%. This blows me away because you hardly hear of Facebook being a dominant source of internet traffic.
Social Bookmarking
StumbleUpon drives 51% of all social bookmarking traffic, followed by Digg at 30%, and surprisingly YCombinator (which I’ve never even heard of until today) at 12%, and Reddit at 5%.
MultiMedia
YouTube is massive. If you are not using video to promote your business then you are missing opportunities for traffic and for search engine optimization opportunities. Another multimedia site capable of driving significant traffic is Flickr. YouTube accounts for 84% of multimedia traffic, with Flickr comprising 9%.
Conclusion
Your biggest opportunities for driving traffic to your small business website come from these sources:
- Search Engine – Google
- Social Networking – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Social Bookmarking – StumbleUpon, Digg, YCombinator, Reddit
- Multimedia – YouTube, Flickr
Related posts:
- Common Sources of Internet Traffic for Local Business Marketing
- Are You Using Facebook to Build Your Business?
- Use LinkedIn to Drive Internet Traffic to Your Local Business
- How to Use Social Media for Small Business Success
- Social Media Traffic Optimization – Becoming as Important as Search Engine Optimization
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“Google 92% of internet search based queries”….thats very much true due to google caffeine, its too fast to return the results and google search share has increase as compared to bing and yahoo….We have to wait for actual merging of Bing and Yahoo to see some changes!
Next is social media, no surprise as most of the teens use facebook
in bookmarking web sites, i never heard about YCombinator sending that amount of traffic
Hey Mike,
Thanks for the comment. Yes YCombinator was a complete surprise to me… never heard of it but you can be sure I will be putting more time into using them to bookmark things from here on out.
Thanks for giving me a much clearer view of the social networking scene. The related posts helped to sharpen my focus too – so needed to weave in traffic.
Hi Mary,
I feel like I am forever learning too, which is one of the functions of my blog – to keep me up to date with what is happening in internet marketing and with local businesses. Thanks for your comment.
This is very interesting. I believe it about Facebook – everyone is there (even my grandparents!). I don't know anything about social bookmarking. Now I'm going to have to learn about that as well.
Hey AJ – yeah I am still finding my feet with Facebook too. It's a whole new world for me, coming from an internet marketing / affiliate marketing background. It's a different approach for sure, and as you've mentioned even the good-ol-folks are getting heavily involved now too. In other words it's not just teenagers who are messing with Facebook.
Wynne,
This is a real eye opener. So far I only use facebook for family and friends but I'll need to reconsider that stance. Thanks for sharing.
Chris
http://christianpaulsen62.wordpress.com
Hey Chris,
Yeah these stats are pretty surprising… and I too am working hard to incorporate the other traffic driving methods mentioned here. Thanks for your comment.
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