Everyone who owns a website, whether it’s for their business or the site is their business, wants to know one thing. What they want to know is: how can they pull in more traffic to their site? There’s no point having a website if it doesn’t get any visitors. And attracting more people will give you a better chance of making money from it.
But it’s understandable if you don’t know where to start with getting and holding people’s attention. If you want to start bringing in more traffic to your site, there are many methods you can try. They may not all work for you, but some are bound to bring you success.
1. Test changes on your site.
One of the first things you can do is check your website to see what increases the chances of people finding and staying on it. Testing some of the different elements of your site will help you learn what keeps people on your site and what turns visits into sales. There are lots of things you can test, but some of them include your site’s layout, your sales copy, and your site navigation. Don’t try to test everything at once. Otherwise, you won’t know what’s successful and what isn’t working. If you don’t have any traffic, try giving your site a quick boost with paid advertising.
2. Use a variety of media.
Content is crucial when it comes to increasing traffic to your site. However, it’s a good idea not to focus too much on written text such as articles and blog posts. Although these are certainly valuable, you should try to use some other media too. For example, you could create infographics or videos that you can share on your site. As well as helping to keep people on the site, it will bring visitors in too. Shareable content that’s useful to people who see it will get your brand spread far and wide.
3. Create link bait content.
When you think up your content strategy, you should consider sharing information that’s useful, funny or informative. If what you come up with is successful enough in any of these things, people should link to it on their own. This type of content is referred to as link bait. You will naturally get backlinks to your pages because of the awesome content you’ve created and released into the wild. There are lots of different things you can do to get people to link to your content. For example, you can write list articles (or listicles); e.g. “5 Awesome Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site”. You could also produce a case study, write a how-to or guide, create an infographic or make a video.
4. Try paid advertising.
While it would be fantastic if you could get all your traffic organically, paying for advertising will help you. Sometimes you need to spend money to make money, and this is one of those occasions. Choosing PPC (pay per click) advertising can mean you get good value traffic. So you won’t be forking out too much money for a service that isn’t worth it. There are several options you can choose, although most people decide to get started with Google Adwords. However, don’t rush into creating your ads. Make sure you have a strategy, and you’re not randomly entering words.
5. Pay attention to Search engine optimisation
Of course, you do need to work on your organic traffic too. The world of SEO can be a confusing one that’s difficult to navigate. But it’s worth it to try and get to grips with the basics, at the very least. However, you might find that there’s only so much that you can do for yourself. Many business owners decide they would much rather hire a professional service to do all their search engine optimization for them. If you do decide to go down that route, it’s still essential that you know a little so that you can choose the best company.
6. Use viral marketing
Everyone has heard of videos “going viral”, but what does it actually mean? If you use viral marketing, you get people to share something you’ve created so that it snowballs and keeps getting passed on. Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person.
For example, it might be a video or article, but it could also be a contest, a free trial or a referral program. There’s no magic formula for getting people to pass things on, but you can learn from what other brands send viral.
7. Affiliate programs
If you want to get other site owners more involved in promoting you, you could try starting an affiliate program. They will advertise you using links, banners, reviews and more, in return for a reward from you. For example, you would usually give them a commission on each sale that their promotions lead to. This sum can be up to 50% of the profits from the sale, but can be less in some cases. If you decide to create an affiliate program, it’s something that you need to maintain. You need to put effort into bringing in new members and managing them.
8. Email marketing still works
Increasing your traffic isn’t just about bringing in new people. It’s also essential to keep existing visitors coming back time and again. Newsletters and other forms of email marketing are perfect for this purpose. You can remind people who sign up of your existence, let them know the latest news and give them special promos and offers.
You could send out tips and advice, share your new products and let your mailing list know about sales and other news before anyone else. People will appreciate feeling part of a club that gets deals no one else receives. You have to keep prompting your visitors if you want them to come back, or they could forget about you and never visit again.
Increasing the traffic to your website isn’t light work, but the effort is worth it if you want to make more money. Start developing a strategy and you could see an immediate improvement once you implement it.
