Whatever kind of business you run, your website serves as the nerve center of your internet presence. Even though it may not be the largest or most popular, it should be the point of convergence for all other channels of presence.
Getting traffic to one’s website can be challenging, especially for someone who’s just starting. But if you remain consistent and follow a strategy, you just might find that it’s not as steep a hill to climb as you might think.
Let’s look at some of the most common approaches to meeting that challenges.
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Table of Contents
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
Search Engine Optimization is the golden goose that most internet marketers are ultimately striving for. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of taking efforts to help a website and types of content rank higher on Google’s search results page.
The most significant distinction between SEO and paid advertising would be that SEO includes “organic” ranking, which implies that you do not have to pay to be seen in that particular sector.
Once major search engines like Google and Bing start displaying your content on the first page for various search terms your potential customers and clients are typing in, you’ll be enjoying free traffic around the clock.
The following are some of the requirements for performing an effective SEO campaign:
Keyword Research
To get the best chance of having your content displayed high for those search terms, you should start by carefully researching the relevant keywords and key phrases that are most likely to get your pages ranked. With that in mind, here are the three main criteria to consider:
- Search Volume: You could write the greatest article ever written about eel-flavored ice cream, but if nobody’s searching for it, you’re not going to get any traffic. Also, you should probably find a better product to sell.
- Difficulty: On the flip side, you’ll have yourself a real uphill battle if you aim for something like “how to make money,” because a gazillion people and their mothers have already written similar articles and blog posts. That’s not to say you couldn’t still drive traffic to such an article by one of the other methods listed below, but you’re going to have an extremely tough time of it through SEO alone.
- Relevance: Let’s say you find a keyword or phrase that hits the sweet spot of high search volume and low competition. It’s still not going to do you much good if it doesn’t have anything to do with the product or service you’re trying to sell. If 50,000 people per month are searching for “Tom Hanks’ favorite breakfast cereal” and no one else has written an article about that, you could conceivably draw a significant amount of traffic by writing such an article. But if you’re trying to sell car insurance, what good is that audience going to do you?
There are a variety of keyword research tools available to take a lot of the guesswork out of trying to find what’s most likely to rank high in the search engines.
Create Valuable Content
Once you find suitable keywords that meet the above criteria, you’ll want to create content that provides real value to the audience you’re targeting. Provide a solution to whatever problem they are dealing with, and you’re most of the toward acquiring them as a customer. You can either create the content yourself or outsource it.
Creating high-quality content involves several factors; here are a few of them:
- Quality: Posting material using a handful of keywords used to be common. Quality material that addressed an issue made you stand out and simple to rank.
- Intent: Google places a premium on intent. It wants to know what the user is searching for when they use the search box.
- Freshness: According to HubSpot, regular publishing increases Google ranks. Posting new material is simply one technique to impress Google.
Repurpose Content
Once the research is done and the content is written, the hard part is over. If you’ve written a blog post, it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to record yourself reading it aloud. If YouTube is your platform of choice, you can easily transcribe that content into a blog post. Now you’ve potentially got a written article, a video, and a podcast episode. Give your content as much potential to be discovered as possible, and give your potential audience the means to consume it however they choose.
Searches have gotten more fluent, conversational, and complicated for Google nowadays that 4.2 billion voice assistants are used globally (with the number expected to rise to 8.4 billion by 2024), according to Google. In addition, in a world where search engines are becoming more conversational, you must optimize your website towards voice search.
Here’s how to go about it:
- Use Long-tail keywords, which are defined as those that comprise three or more words, are very important in voice search.
- Structured data should be used. According to Backlinko, highlighted snippets are responsible for 40 percent of all voice search outcomes. The usage of structured data may increase the likelihood that your material will be utilized to reply to a voice inquiry rather than that of a competitor.
According to a poll conducted by Biteable, almost 60% of firms utilize video as a marketing medium. About 74 percent of marketers, generate a higher return on investment than static images. As a result, around 49 percent of marketers believe using video helps them interact with their target audience.
Update Your Old Content Frequently
Instead of writing a long-form blog article, you can just increase and expand an existing from 1,200 to 2,000 words Existing material has authority plus, in certain situations, a following. Rather than starting from scratch, it is easier to improve a current post’s performance in search results by updating and adding content. A content refresh is ideal for time-sensitive material (like SEO) and items that are receiving modest organic traffic but may gain much more.
When you’re ready to edit previous content, follow certain guidelines:
- Completely rewrite the introduction and conclusion.
- Remove or merge any weak portions.
- Research and write as much of it as you think will contribute to the overall worth of the post, but keep it concise.
- Update any statistics, facts, or quotations, and ensure that any references to the source are not over 2 years old.
- Replace any photographs that are no longer relevant or are obsolete.
2. Social Media
Love it or hate it, social media is a beast that can’t be ignored when trying to get the attention of a larger audience. You don’t need to conquer every social media platform out there, but you’ll find it well worth your time to find one or two that you’re comfortable with (or that your target demographic is likely to frequent) and put a little effort into developing a following on them.
A survey conducted by SMExaminer and distributed by TopTierAgency and CMIContent found that 87 percent of marketers believe that one advantage of SocialMedia is an increase in site traffic.
It doesn’t have to be anything too difficult or time-consuming. More often than not, it will simply be another case of repurposing content you’ve already created. If your blog has a featured image and a headline, which it absolutely should, that could easily be enough for an engaging Facebook post.
With that in mind, here are a few tips to enhance the effectiveness of your social media efforts.
Post Regularly
Content on social media platforms tends to move pretty fast. Your posts are one of the hundreds that your audience is scrolling past at any given moment, then they sink the well of obscurity. To have the best chance of catching their attention and keep your brand at the forefront of their minds, it’s important to post regularly and frequently.
Engage With Audience
Social media is social. It’s right there in the name. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to connect directly with potential clients and customers, and you should take advantage of it. Show them you’re not some faceless corporate entity solely dedicated to siphoning as much money as possible from them. You’re a real person who understands their wants and needs.
Respond to every comment they make on your blog, as well as any queries they may have. Or, you could pay someone to do the task for you.
Improve Your Social Media Accounts
When consumers are looking to learn more about your website, they go to your bio area for information. In a short amount of time, it should effectively explain your brand’s value proposition while also defining your tone and style. You are more likely to attract and connect with your desired audience if your bio stands out from the crowd without losing readability.
Make Use of Social Proof
You could also leverage social credibility to increase the perceived worth of your website. In the same way that a review or testimonial does, social proof introduces the human voice within your brand’s customer experience. People who are contemplating purchasing something or who are shopping for something they desire the search for reviews, suggestions, recommendations from the others who use the product or service, and feedback.
Use Less Popular Platforms
Depending on your demographic and subjects, two actively expanding social networks – Pinterest & Reddit are two examples.
Pinterest has 478 million active monthly users in Quarter 1 2021, up 30% year-on-year. Pinterest’s influence in consumer trends and community discovery is undeniable for content marketers. Women make up 60% of Pinterest users, therefore it’s ideal for female-targeted companies.
The other social possibility is Reddit, with 52 million daily users. It’s easy to locate niche-specific subreddits (forums). Participate in discussions. Post your questions, exchange educational opinions, and comment to build relationships. In addition, if individuals find your advice useful, they may visit your site.
Promote Sharing Buttons
Assume someone read your blog article and enjoyed it. They consider sharing it, but can’t find a convenient method to do so. They go. To avoid this and promote sharing, insert sharing buttons next to your content. Show the number of shares to show that others agree.
Make Yourself Noticeable
Visuals, from photographs & infographics through videos and presentations, captivate social media users. They might foster an emotional bond or elicit a powerful response. They may also make your material more engaging and digestible. Use photos alone or with text. Select photographs that let readers connect with the individuals in or serviced by your firm.
Publicize Your Work
Material marketers seldom utilize social media to promote their blogs or other related content. To boost your blog’s exposure, you must promote every high-quality blog entry. Publish snippets as well as teasers via social media with a link to your site. Incentives to visit your website for further information. Social media is also a fantastic location to promote previous but still relevant information.
Don’t Spam
Social media platforms shouldn’t be used for direct advertising. It’s ineffective, annoying, and often against the platforms’ terms of service. Also, it’s a surefire way to drive away followers, which is the last thing you want to do.
Instead, you should be driving them to the valuable content you’ve created. If it’s good enough, people will share it with their friends, family, and followers, drawing an even bigger audience to your brand. Let the ads and affiliate links on your website do the selling for you.
3. Email List
There’s an old saying that goes, “The money is in the list.” You should treat your email list as one of the most important commodities you have at your disposal as if it were gold, and you should exercise extreme caution while building it.
An email list is a sequence of email addresses being used to distribute marketing information to a large group of people. Simply said, an email list is a synonym for “the mailing list” or “subscriber’s list”.
Social media platforms are great but make no mistake. The audience that you build on that platform does not belong to you. It is the property of the platform, and it may be removed in the blink of an eye if necessary. An email list, however, is all yours as long as your subscribers remain subscribed to it.
We’ll cover how to construct such a list in a later piece, but for now, here are some pointers on how to make efficient use of it after you’ve amassed a significant number of subscribers.
- Be Consistent: In the same way that you compete with other social media postings, you’re competing with every other email list to which your subscribers are also subscribers. Send out newsletters on a constant schedule (but not TOO frequent) to maintain the interest of the customers.
- Send Mobile-Friendly Emails: Over time, an increasing number of mobile phone users has overtaken those using PCs or desktops. So make sure your promotional emails are easy to read on tiny screens. Almost all portable devices include email programs. Orders and traffic will increase if the majority of your mailing list could access and read emails from mobile devices.
- Send Personalized Emails: Prospects and customers will welcome customized communications from their favorite businesses. This entails segmenting your email list by client demands and preferences. Categorizing ensures that subscribers get emails that are relevant to their requirements. This often results in a 25 percent increase in conversions.
- Don’t Sell: Similarly, this is often not the best time or location to be direct marketing anything. Instead, your regular emails should be utilized to guide your audience to the fresh information that you’ve been adding to your website consistently. Allow the website to conduct the sale once again.
- Set Up an Autoresponder: Once you figure out what kind of emails are getting the best response from your subscribers, you can automate the process for when new people subscribe. Setting up an automated sequence of emails is easy to do and takes a huge amount of hassle off your back.
- Scannable Emails: Most individuals can’t concentrate or read long emails since their attention span is just 8 seconds. So keep your communications brief and precise. Make sure your readers easily skim your emails to get a quick notion. Enhance email scanning with subheadings and images. This spares readers’ time by simplifying the email. Always end with a powerful call to action.
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4. Paid Traffic
The quickest and easiest way to drive traffic to your website is to pay for it. Customers that visit your website after paying for advertising are called paid traffic. Many platforms, such as search engines, social media, and media networks, charge for traffic. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Ads, is a popular method of sponsored traffic. Other forms include Pay Per Acquisition (PPA), Cost Per Thousand (CPM), and banner ads.
As you might have guessed, however, it’s also the most expensive. Even with this caveat, if your advertising is bringing in new clients and consumers, it may be one of the most successful methods of bringing in new business.
This could be the topic of an entire post (or series of posts) all by itself, and it probably will be in the future. However, for the time being, here are a few tips to bear in mind while running sponsored advertisements.
Target the Audience You Want
One of the biggest advantages of paid traffic is that you can laser focus on your ideal audience. Depending on the advertising platform you use, this can be done via keywords, specific interests, or a variety of demographic breakdowns. If you can narrow down the ideal avatar for the sort of person who would be most interested in your product or service, you can avoid wasting advertising money on people less likely to be interested.
Know Your Margins
When you’re paying money for traffic, you must stay on top of what your costs are as well as your profit margins. It doesn’t do you any good to spend $30 on ads to sell an $80 pair of shoes if the shoes cost you $40 to source and $15 to ship. In that example, you just lost $5.
Track Your Data
Equally crucial is staying on top of your performance over time. After you’ve got enough data rolling in, you’ll begin to have a clearer idea of what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to optimize for greater profitability. However, this will only benefit you if you’re keeping meticulous track of that data. There are many tracking options available, both free and paid, depending on the advertising platform you’re using.
Test and Optimize
Once you’ve collected a significant amount of data, you can start trying new things, compare the data, and make informed decisions. Try out new images, new copies, or different targeting options. This is a constant and ongoing process and one that’s vital to your success.
Even though the precise magic combination may vary depending on your audience, these are the five paid traffic sources you should examine first when trying it:
- Ads on Facebook: According to the research of social media managers, Facebook advertisements provided them with the highest return on investment (ROI) of any social site. For anybody who is paying for traffic, Facebook ads are a must-have. However, Facebook offers a plethora of choices, and they are continuously changing.
- Outbrain Amplify Ads: Amplify is not like AdWords or Facebook advertisements in that we don’t run them. Their platform allows you to connect to your excellent content. Starting a connection with a prospective consumer is easy when you provide only informative, helpful, humorous, and appealing material.
- LinkedIn Sponsored Ads: LinkedIn’s native advertisements could be a wonderful paid traffic source for B2B marketers. You could target website visitors, contacts, accounts, titles, industries, demographics, or location. They may use display advertisements, sponsored posts in feeds, even InMail ads.
- Ads on Twitter: Twitter is intriguing because, if you’re successful at it, you should be able to produce a large number of organic interactions. However, people might be leery of businesses co-opting what they perceive to be a part of Twitter’s culture, which can lead to some confusion. Tweets that are offensive or ill-timed may potentially backfire in the face of a negligent social media manager.
- Adwords by Google: Paid traffic sources like AdWords are indeed a vintage paid traffic generator that still has a lot of promise, even though the cost per click is typically rather expensive. To summarise, you choose terms for which you believe your prospective consumers are searching and bid on having your ad appear at the top of the search results page, where it will appear as a sponsored search result.
5. Create a Tool or Resource
Everybody is seeking something for free. If you can provide them with something worthwhile, they will continue to return to you. That is, after all, the entire point of generating content in the first place, but the content isn’t the only thing you can do with your time.
Offering people a free tool or resource can not only draw new people to your website, but it can keep people coming back.
Website Tool
This can be something as simple as a feature on your website that converts centimeters to inches or something much more complicated. You’ll either need to have some programming knowledge under your belt or (more likely) outsource the creation of the tool you have in mind. But if you make a tool that makes your potential customers’ lives easier in some way, they’ll probably bookmark your website so they can keep coming back. That could be well worth the investment.
Free Resource
Similarly, you could create a resource to give away as an incentive for people to subscribe to your newsletter. This could be an ebook, PDF, infographic, template, checklist, or a multitude of other things. It probably doesn’t have to be as complicated as a website tool, but it should be something that provides enough value to entice someone to give you their email address.
Let’s take a look at the essential elements of a suggested tools and resources page.
- It must be a static web page instead: The tools & resources sections should be static pages, rather than dynamic ones. This sort of page isn’t updated very often. You may, however, provide a date and time at the bottom of the page indicating when the page was last modified.
- Categorize the tools and services: This page should not have a big collection of links. The reader must scroll the whole page to locate the essential information. It is best to categorize tools and services. This will assist the reader to discover information quickly. Topic, objective, or pain point are the best ways to organize tools and services.
- Don’t overuse affiliate links: The major goal of tool and resource sites is to increase your blog’s earnings. But it shouldn’t be the main reason. Instead, strive to be as supportive as possible. Not all of your affiliate connections demonstrate genuine endorsements. Recommendations for products or services should not be based only on.
- Optimize for both search engines and users: It implies you may target multiple keywords. You may use a competitive term as your page’s main keyword. Subheadings should include secondary and long-tail keywords. Optimize the title tag, URL, and permalink, Using H1-H6 hierarchy and Improve picture alt, title, and filename tags
Here are some ideas for promoting your tool and resource sites to boost your affiliate income.
- 1. Add your tools and resources page to your site or blog’s main navigation menu.
- 2. Include a link to the tools page in your site or blog’s footer.
- 3. Use the tools and resources page to link to your articles.
- 4. Set up a custom ad graphic in your sidebar.
- 5. Make a movie explaining your tools. Upload that to YouTube with a description linking to your resource page.
- 6. Share the page on social media. Notify your community anytime you update your page.
- 7. Examine each tool and connect it to your tools & resources page.
Conclusion
Businesses could expect to experience a rise in website traffic throughout time if they follow these recommendations. While several of these strategies may provide immediate results, others will need more effort and patience on your part. Continue to push ahead by experimenting with a variety of ways and assessing the outcomes.