How to Get More Traffic to Your Website

9 Proven Strategies to Get More Traffic to Your Website

Who wants more traffic coming to their website? Of course, we all do. Traffic is the lifeline of every single business. More traffic means more sales. And there are a lot of strategies you can pursue to get more traffic. Some are free, others will cost money. Let’s start with the free methods you can use to get more traffic to your website.

Free Strategies

1. Blogging

Blogging is one way to generate traffic. Remember you’re not writing to sell. You’re writing to educate, entertain and inform potential customers.

Instead of writing about your product, you would educate the reader on why they want your product or service.

And you don’t have to limit your blogging to your own site. You could find an industry site or a publication like Forbes or the Huffington Post and submit an article to them. Many sites use contributors to fill out their content, which is another way of saying they use guest bloggers.

Guest blogging is a fantastic way to get your content in front of people who have never heard of you. One of the great things about this strategy is that once you’ve produced content articles for your own website. You can republish them on other platforms such as LinkedIn Publishing. You can also try Medium or other third-party websites.

But first, publish the article on your own website, so your site gets credited with the brand new, fresh, original content as opposed to LinkedIn or Medium getting credited. They are already massive and authoritative websites and don’t need the extra SEO boost fresh content will give them.

Using this strategy will bring you traffic consisting of people searching for more information on the topic you wrote about. And if you produce more content regularly, say every week or even every day, you’ll have many opportunities to find that traffic. Each of your articles will act like a fishing line to reel in the traffic.

2. Build a Brand on Social Media

Building an active brand on social media is more of a long-term strategy. Think twelve months and beyond. This strategy will require you to be very consistent in producing content daily if you’re going to gain any traction.

This is because there is such a massive volume of content out there. You’ll have to post quality content every day for twelve months and beyond to build up a following.

The great thing about this is finding the social media platform that works best for your audience. For some, YouTube would be best. For others, Facebook or Instagram would be more effective in reaching potential customers.

Like blogging, you want to create content that educates, entertains, and informs the customer of the issues related to your product.
You’re just using a different platform.

3. Answer Questions on Quora

Quora is a fantastic website where people post questions, and the community can reply. It’s like a crowdsourcing method of getting answers. Once answers are posted for a question, the community decides who gave the best response by either upvoting or downvoting.

It could be any type of question, organized by categories and industries. Questions could be about nearly anything you could think of. Ranging from how to fix your air conditioning, how to start a company, how to incorporate a business, or how to do your taxes.

It’s a huge traffic opportunity. If you’re a lawyer, you can go on Quora and answer people’s questions, giving information on how to start a business, for example. That will lead traffic to you because if one person had that question, it’s safe to assume thousands of others wonder about the same issue. You can also see how viable questions are because it shows you the number of people who have viewed a question and a response. And some Quora responses receive tens of thousands of views that generate traffic to that individual who actually answered the question.

4. YouTube

Posting educational, informative, or entertaining videos geared towards your prospects is a great way to get more traffic. The great thing is you’re not trying to make a career as a YouTube sensation. You don’t need a huge audience.

If you’re a locally-based business, you only need the people in your geographical area to care enough about your content to see your videos. A couple thousand views are significant enough to bring more customers and more awareness, and more traffic to your business.

Let’s say you are a dog daycare center. That’s the kind of business that doesn’t go national because it’s based on geography. So what you need to do is put out content that would be useful to dog owners in your area.

For example, I live in Miami. A local dog daycare center could produce videos about the 10 best places to take your dog in Miami or 10 pet-friendly locations to visit with your dogs in Miami. In this way, you’re creating content geared toward local pet owners, which is your ideal client base. And you’re doing it in a way that it’s not just talking about your service.

You’re giving value to the pet owners. They find out about your business because of the content. You post it, and they end up visiting your website and ultimately potentially becoming your customer.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts are great ways to educate customers. You could discuss your industry or issues that are facing it. You could interview thought leaders in that sector. This would provide valuable content that draws customers in, and they will eventually find your products or services.

This strategy, however, is only if you really want to seriously pursue content marketing. You’ll have to be very consistent if you’re going to build an audience. You can’t just put out a podcast when you feel like it. You’re going to have to think of it as programming, similar to a radio show, so to speak. Where you’re constantly thinking of how to make it engaging, how to make it entertaining so that you can actually bring and build an audience that would care enough to listen to that podcast.

And the great thing about podcasts, though, is that they are very versatile. People can listen to it at their own leisure, and you can actually reach a broad audience.

6. Infographics

and

7. SlideShare Presentations

These next two I really like. These two methods are straightforward for any business or brand to produce.

What you’re doing is distilling a complex or technical topic into a very visual medium. You’d just need to work with a graphic designer to break down the topic into visual components. Then give your infographic away for free. Let it be shared all over the Internet and social media. And, of course, it links back to your website.

It works the same way with SlideShare presentations.

But the crucial thing to remember is you’re not creating a presentation about your business and your company.

You visually show the buyer’s journey, recognizing that they have questions to be answered before they get to your product. Your infographic or SlideShare presentation answers their questions and resolves their issues.

The best way I can demonstrate this is to show you. Along with this post, we have a PDF [link] that gives you an overview of all these strategies and their pros and cons, as well as a video that explains them.

If any new strategies come about, I can easily update this post, the video, and the PDF. And the video and the PDF have links back to my website. I can keep sharing them for free. If you do this with your own content, you’ll be able to attract more traffic.

Paid Strategies

If you have a bigger budget or want to attract traffic more quickly, you can always use paid traffic sources to get results right away.

8. Digital Advertising

One method is through online ads, whether on social networks, Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, Google Search, or Google Maps. You can place ads on any of these platforms to generate traffic from the day you start advertising.

The downside is you have to keep paying to continue receiving that traffic. Once you stop paying for ads, the traffic stops. This doesn’t happen with the free traffic sources. They just keep producing.

9. Influencer Marketing

You may have heard of people on social media with huge followings. They are called influencers because they have a certain amount of trust built up with their audience. If they recommend something, many of their followers will try it.

So you can pay the influencer to promote your product or service.
And you aren’t limited to social media influencers. You could use a trade publication or a trade media website that draws many of your potential customers to their website. You could pay to do a site takeover, meaning your ads will be featured on their home page. Or your business could be featured in the newsletter they send out.

It’s not just enough to pick any influencer that just has a large enough audience. Just be mindful of the influencer or brand you’re using to drive traffic. You don’t want to use someone who would be inappropriate for your audience.

Whatever influencer you choose, they need to resonate with somebody who’s your potential customer. So you have to be very careful in looking at their analytics. Doing a deep dive into what type of audience they have to see if working with them will generate a relevant audience for you. Not all influencer audiences are the same, which is the downside of this strategy. It will take some research to figure out if the influencer is the right person for you.

It will take a detailed look at their content, the people that engage with them, and the comments they leave. Think about those comments. Is that the type of audience you want to attract to your business? Going back to the dog daycare example. If the people commenting aren’t pet owners, they aren’t a relevant audience for you. A good influencer might be someone who often talks about pet foods or products, such as dog bedding.

That kind of person would make sense for you to do a collaboration or paid traffic campaign with. And then we have giveaways.

So monthly, you could work out a deal with the influencers you’ve chosen to offer a prize giveaway or coupon. These are things pet owners would want to win or use because it’s of value to them. This will help generate interest in your business, new leads, and ultimately, new sales.

There you have it, a list of nine proven traffic generating strategies, some free, some you’ll have to pay for. If you’d like a preview, check out the video [link] or the PDF [link]. It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re in. These strategies can work for you. If you have more questions or would like to know how we can help, give us a call.