Getting a website up and running is just the first step towards building a business online. The next big step is to generate traffic to your website. There are many things you can do to increase traffic to your website. We’ve created a list of some of the best things you can do right now to bring in targeted visitors. Much of the focus is on tactics that can bring you traffic in a couple of hours or days. Let’s get started.
1. Provide Multiple Ways for Visitors to Follow You and Share Content
When you start a blog, one of the first things you want to do is make sure that you provide multiple ways to follow you. Set up an RSS subscription link, Facebook page, Twitter account, etc. Every one of your visitors will have a preferred way of following you, so make sure you create an account on all the major social media sites. You’ll also want to enable your visitors to share your content with their network. This should include everything from emailing your friends forms, copying and pasting HTML codes, to social media share buttons.
2. Be Active on Social Media and Share Great Content
Speaking of social media, you want to make sure that you are active on all the channels that are relevant to your audience. The biggest social media sites are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You want to use these channels to engage your followers and also use them to distribute your content. If you’re short on content in the beginning, you can always curate content from other sites and publishers. Just make sure you’re always adding your own insight to add your own commentary on it and avoid copying the entire content to avoid copyright issues.
3. Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines
Even if you don’t plan on pursuing SEO as one of your primary traffic strategies, you’ll still benefit from optimizing your website. Make sure that you optimize the important parts of your page such as the title, h1, h2, image alt text and page URL. If you’re looking to start a blog with WordPress, you can use the free Yoast SEO plugin to make it easy to optimize your page every time you create a post. You want to be prepared just in case one of your posts becomes popular and receives backlinks from other sites.
4. Start a SEO Campaign by Targeting Long Tail Keywords
Building a SEO campaign is challenging and can take several months. However, you can still get results from SEO early on by targeting on what’s called long tail keywords. These are keyword with lower search volumes and less competition. They are often multiple words and very specific. While you won’t get much traffic from these keywords, the idea is to target multiple long tail keywords and slowly ramp up your traffic. This approach will help you get the ball rolling and invest your revenue into growing your SEO campaign even further.
5. Create Outstanding Content
Nothing beats outstanding content. Whether you’re creating content for SEO, social media, or your blog, you want to make sure that it’s relevant, engaging, interesting and valuable to your target audience. People like sharing great content with their network on social media, so it’s easy to get distribution if you create something that impresses your audience. While there are many websites who like to focus on creating a lot of mediocre content, it’s almost always better to focus on quality over quantity.
6. Use Content Distribution Channels
We’ve discussed using social media to distribute your content, but there are many more distribution channels that you can benefit from. You can start with video sites like YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion where you can post your own videos. Then you can start by looking for online forums related to your niche or industry and share your content with the community. There are more communities available on Reddit, Facebook Groups, and LinkedIn Groups. You can continue to image sharing sites like Imgur, Giphy, and Flickr. Finally, you can post documents and slides on sites like Scribd, Slideshare and Authorstream.
7. Use Email to Bring Back Your Visitors
Email is still a viable digital marketing channel and shouldn’t be ignored. You need to understand that bringing your visitors back to your website is just as important as getting them there in the first place. You want to use email marketing to educate your prospects, provide them value, keep them updated, and promote your products/services. If your budget is tight and you don’t want to make a big commitment, there are many services like MailChimp that allow you to manage a small email list for free.
8. Partner with Related Websites and Influencers
One of the best ways to generate free traffic is to reach out to websites, blogs and social media influencers to form a partnership. It can be something as simple as an agreement where you push your partner’s content to your audience in return for them doing the same for you. These kind of partnerships are easy to pull off because they are easy to execute and do not require a big commitment from your partners. The trick to making these partnerships work is to reach out to somebody with a similar social media audience size or website traffic volume.
9. Host a Contest or Giveaway
If you have a decent following for your website already, a great way to attract more targeted followers is to host a contest or giveaway. You want to make sure that your website, blog, or social media accounts are promoted in your event. For example, you might have your followers share your post or repost your blog post on their site to get an entry. It’s important that you make the prize something that is specifically valuable to your target audience so that you don’t attract the wrong people. So skip the Amazon gift cards and electronics.
Those are nine solid tactics you can use to increase traffic to your website. All of these tips are focused on things that you pull off with little to no money. Whether you’ve just set up a new site or you’re running a small blog you’re trying to grow, you’ll see great results by applying these tips.
