Timothy Carter July 29, 2020 You can have the best website with the sleekest design, most intuitive interface, and best content in the industry, but it’s all for naught if you don’t have people visiting the site. Thus traffic generation becomes one of the most important elements of successful digital marketing. The question is, where do you start?
3 Traffic Generating Tips and Tricks
If generating traffic were easy, every website on the planet would have hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. But, alas, it’s not – particularly in the early days. (It’s much harder to go from 0 to 500 monthly visitors than it is to go from 2,500 to 5,000.) It takes consistent and disciplined effort, strategic vision, and a willingness to pivot when things aren’t working well (or double-down when they are).
Traffic generation best practices evolve over time, but here are a few current tips and tricks that are working well:
- Build Your Email List
There are relatively few elements of your company’s online presence that you control. You might think you own your social media presence, for example, but you’re ultimately dependent on the company. If Facebook wants to shut down your profile or suppress your content, they can. If Twitter suddenly collapses and the network disappears, there goes your audience. The odds of either of these things happening may be low, but the risk exists.
If you want total control and autonomy over your audience, there are only two things you can rely on: your email list and your website. These are two assets that you own, and the former can be used to drive traffic to the latter.
When building your email list, emphasize quality of contacts over quantity of contacts. A small yet engaged list of prospects will always outperform a large list of irrelevant and disengaged people.
While most people use freebie content to generate email leads, this can have the inadvertent effect of attracting tire-kickers and cheapskates who are only interested in whatever “free thing” you’re giving away next. Though it’s certainly contrarian to the current way of doing things, you can build a more engaged prospect database by requiring people to pay to opt-in.
Consider the following offer: Purchase our Marketing PDF for $ 2 and you’ll also get access to our premium members-only email! You aren’t doing this to generate revenue. You’re doing it to filter out the wannabes and build a list of people who actually want what you’re offering.
- Try Guest Blogging
When you publish content on your own blog and share it on social media, you’re only reaching people who are already in your audience (existing followers or website visitors). If you want to move beyond this inner circle, try guest blogging.
As this guest blogging guide shows, publishing content on other sites (with backlinks to your own website) generates referral traffic, improves your brand recognition and reach, builds out backlinks, and helps you reach a larger social audience.
- Repurpose Your Content
If you’re writing a 2,000-word blog post and you’re only publishing it to your blog, you’re missing out on a chance to truly maximize the value of your content.
Repurposing it allows you to reach more people and drive more traffic back to the original post. Here are some different ways you can splinter out posts:
- Publish the first three paragraphs of the post in the form of LinkedIn and Medium articles and ask people to click the link to your blog to read the rest of the post.
- Record a YouTube video where you scroll through the article and discuss different key points, linking back to the post.
- Pull out the top three to five sentences from your blog post and schedule them as social media content in Buffer.
- Take any data points and proprietary info from the blog post and turn it into a simple infographic using a friendly design tool like Canva.
It takes a lot of time and effort to produce a blog post, why not make the most out of the content by repurposing it? You can easily double your traffic per post by implementing these tactics.
Putting it All Together
In the pursuit of generating website traffic, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers. You religiously refresh your Google Analytics page and count the hits as they come in. You watch with elation as the numbers rise day after day and week after week. Or you silently despair as the numbers stagnate or decline for no apparent reason. That’s just how it goes.
Though numbers do matter, it’s imperative that you don’t get so caught up in the ebb and flow of traffic numbers that you fail to see the importance of traffic quality. (After all, we can all agree that it’s far more valuable to have 1,000 quality, engaged website visitors than 2,000 low-quality visitors who landed on your site by accident.) So as you attempt to drive traffic to your site, constantly reevaluate your approach and focus on the true metrics of success – like high average time on site, low bounce rate, healthy conversion rates, and strong click-throughs.
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