For almost 30 years, the internet has helped users connect with one another, find information, locate products and even enjoy entertainment. The nature of how people find these solutions has morphed over the years, with revamped variations of age-old services like search engines and new incarnations such as social media.

As 2020 begins, knowing how to best utilize the internet to drive traffic to your blog or website is crucial. Given that the best methods for driving traffic today aren’t necessarily the same as they were 10 or 15 years ago, making sure your understanding of today’s terrain is up-to-date should be a prime goal.

In the spirit of this, let’s examine which methods are best for driving traffic to your website in 2020.

Social Media (Organic & Paid)

Whereas reaching people via search engines can take a lot of time and dedication, social media is leveling the playing field in a variety of ways. Through both paid and organic social media marketing efforts, brands can reach as many people as they desire.

Thanks to paid social media campaigns, brands are only limited by how much money they wish to spend. With organic social media, pinging your website to a dedicated audience requires persistence and dedication – but it’s generally considered easier to build a following on social media than influence via standard search engines.

Email Marketing

Especially for brands that have spent months or years building influence with audiences, email marketing remains just as effective as it was many years ago. While more people than ever use email – and more brands than ever are also using email marketing – it is considered a very cost-effective and high-converting strategy in terms of driving traffic. Given that the people who have signed up for your mailing list are people who have been to your website and voluntarily engaged, the click through rates are bound to be substantially higher than through other forms of marketing.

Guest Appearances

These days, finding ways to collaborate with other brands is essential to maximizing visibility. A variety of guest appearance opportunities exist. The most common example is guest blogging, which has been used for several years. However, other options also exist: for instance, joining a brand on a podcast for an interview, or lending your expertise to a news report in exchange for a link on their article.

This form of marketing demonstrates authority on your part, motivating a greater share of people to click on your link and trust the content of your website.

SEO

Long a mainstay of content marketing, search engine optimization remains just as relevant in 2020 as it has ever been. While there may be new methods to reach large numbers of people, the fact that search engines are still widely used and provide an organic source of traffic means said traffic pinging your website is a highly efficient form of marketing overall.

Through the mastery of keywords and phrases, high quality content, backlinks, on-page optimization and consistent themes, brands can ascend the ranks of various results pages and drive recurring flows of traffic to their websites for years to come.

As 2020 is upon us, embracing the most effective forms of traffic generation is key. Email marketing, SEO, social media and guest appearances/collaboration are among the best performers as of now, but the future could present us with new methods. Ultimately, staying abreast of how the traffic game changes will ensure your website always has a consistent flow of people finding and returning to it.