Consider this scenario: You’ve spent hundreds, even thousands of hours perfecting your craft. Your website functions well, looks professional, and offers amazing products and services…yet your website traffic and therefore sales are non-existent. Makes for a bleak visual doesn’t it? Fortunately, steps can be made to achieve massive improvement. Whether you’re just getting started with online business or have a few years under your belt, the following strategies will help grow your customer base. With that said, let’s explore how to increase your website traffic.
How To Increase Your Website Traffic
If only, “build it and they will come”, would apply to building your own business. Unfortunately, it’s not always the case and business owners need to invest in ways to grow their customer base. Traditional brick and mortar stores place ads in the newspaper, create a yelp profile, create a radio jingle, among numerous other strategies. The advantage of online business is that it scales outside of a local region to the entire world. This provides plenty of avenues for growth and we’ll cover a number of them here. Consider each strategy and narrow down on a few that are worth your time and money.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization should be the foundation for any quality website. SEO optimization generates more organic traffic and displays higher in search results. This is a very effective way to receive consistent, long term traffic to your website but it takes time establish.
2. Paid Advertising
If you don’t have the time or patience for SEO or simply want greater traffic, there’s always paid advertising. Paid advertising takes place on many different platforms including Google Adwords, Facebook, Instagram, and countless others. Many of these can be extremely effective in driving traffic to your website, but it will cost you. As long as you see a return on investment (ROI), you’re doing well.
3. Social Media
Social media is another great way to drive traffic to your website. There are a number of platforms to choose from, so it will take research and testing to see what will work best for your particular business. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, and SnapChat are a few in use today. With a proper social media strategy in place, you’re sure to increase awareness and traffic to your website.
4. Free webinar/content
With enough social media awareness, you can present a live webinar and/or give away free quality content. This is what’s known as a lead magnet and can be quite attractive to those looking to purchase a product or service that will solve their problem. This also provides consumers an introduction to your brand, which can build long time customers.
5. Guest Posting
One very effective strategy is to build a relationship with a known website in your niche and provide a piece of high quality content. Your content will then be placed on their website with a link back to yours, also known as a backlink. A backlink not only improves SEO, but drives traffic directly to your website and builds positive association with your brand. For example, a small financial website could see a huge spike in traffic with a mention in Forbes.
6. Reverse Guest Posting
If you’re apprehensive about posting your content on another companies website, ask them to post on yours! The writer will most likely share the article within their own network, therefore driving traffic to your website. This may be a more difficult strategy, but could be very effective.
7. Intriguing Hook
In today’s age, we have become inundated with information. With millions of articles, videos, sound bites, etc., one needs a way to stand out. I believe this is accomplished by setting a hook. Give your article a click worthy title, present an interesting teaser video, anything you can to hook your audiences curiosity. This will help your business stand out among others who comes across as dry and boring.
8. Email Marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website, given you have a list of subscribers. Consistent and strategic email marketing ensures your audience becomes familiar with your brand and grows trustworthy. This familiarity will not only lead to future sales, but further advertising by word-of-mouth.
9. Hosting Events
Although not quite as simple as other options, hosting live events is another effective way to drive traffic to your website. Rent a space (if necessary) and present information that consumers will find extremely valuable. Once people experience the value your company has to offer, they’ll be motivated to visit your website to learn more and make a purchase.
10. Interview Thought Leaders
Everyone loves a good story and interviews are exactly that. How did you get started, tell us how you found success, what was your most challenging obstacle, and many other questions present an inspiring story of success to your readers. As a thought leader in the space, people will be eager to consume the interview content, driving further traffic to your website.
11. Radio & Television
Although potentially pricey, radio and television can be an effective way to drive people to your website. The key is to effectively communicate the value your business can provide. Do your research and see if this form of advertising is worth the cost and effort.
12. Signage
Stickers, magnets, decals, billboards, and many others can advertise your company. Although not as effective as other forms of advertising, these may help drive traffic to your website locally. Although worth mentioning, an online business may want to focus on large scale marketing.
13. Internal Linking
When presenting content across your website, it’s important to have solid internal linking. Internal linking is when you link certain words to other areas of your website. For instance, mentioning the free resources page provides a link to the mentioned location. Doing so allows the Google “crawlers” to index your site more easily, therefore improving your SEO and traffic.
14. Online Groups & Discussions
Another effective strategy to increase traffic to your website is to become active in online groups, forums, and discussions. Let’s say for example you created a website about do-it-yourself home improvement. By posting valuable information and providing helpful feedback on facebook groups, forums, and online discussions, people will begin to seek out further value you provide. This is an excellent strategy, one that targets your audience and builds direct relationships.
15. Affiliate Programs
If you have a product or service you provide, an affiliate program may also drive traffic to your website. This works by offering a cut of the profits to another business/person promoting your product. For example, say your website sells athletic shoes and a sports blogger mentions a pair of your shoes on their website. This will not only lead to higher sales of your product, but increased traffic and familiarity as well.
16. The Cold Approach
Although time intensive with marginal results, a cold approach may be effective to some degree. Phone calls, email, and networking will raise awareness of your brand if done properly. No one likes spam or sleazy sales pitches, so reach out with honest intent to help others succeed and it will come back to you in return.
Increasing Your Website Traffic
Increasing traffic to your website can be difficult. There’s no singular strategy that’ll work for everyone, which is why there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Some strategies require more work, others more money, and others a combination of both. I suggest choosing one strategy and diving deep into that area of marketing. This will be more effective than trying to learn and apply ten different marketing strategies at once. Dive deep and once mastered, move on to the next marketing strategy. Keep this process up I guarantee you will see results over time.
Personally, I haven’t marketed Succeed at Scale as much as I should, but have been working on SEO and plan on diving deep into Facebook advertising. This is my initial approach and will branch out into others as I see fit. It’s a challenging process, but an invaluable learning experience non-the-less.
Which strategies increase traffic to your website? What would you consider to be worth your time, effort, and money? Leave any comments or questions below!
