Generating website traffic
No matter how good your content is, one thing is for certain. You will need to drive traffic to your website. Marketing is a vital aspect of any website’s plan. The plain simple truth is that if no one knows about your website, no one is going to visit it. You can create the best website in the world. However, if you do not use the many different ways of generating website traffic, you will find yourself dead in the water.
So the question on hand is how do we get people to visit our website. What are the things we can do that will attract people to view the wondrous content that is displayed on our website? Is there a specific formula you can follow and does website traffic even matter? Well, I think if you have found yourself in this article. Then it is safe to say you believe you need to drive some traffic to your website.
Let’s look at some of the different ways of generating website traffic that we can implement today.
Advertisements
Now the easiest and most thought of idea naturally when it comes to generating web traffic is of course advertisements. Pay to get the links to your websites in front of relevant audiences and people will undoubtedly come to your website. It’s a simple and straight forward view when it comes to generating traffic for a particular website. But just because something is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t expensive.
Price Concerns
Price concerns aside, you will have to look at what purpose your visitors are coming to your website for. Paying for ads will work for some types of websites, but not others. For example, if you are running a personal blog or some kind of news site; paying for ads isn’t the way you would like to go. On the other hand, if you are running a business and you have the right profit margins, paying for advertisements is just a cost of doing business.
One of the greatest advantages of paying for ads is that you get results instantaneously. You don’t have to wait for an ad campaign to take effect. The second it goes live, your ad will be instantly displayed to as many people as your budget will allow. However, touching on the biggest disadvantage is that once your budget has run out. Traffic being funneled to your site will abruptly stop.
Ad Networks
That being said, there are many ad networks that you can choose from. If you decide to go with this route of generating website traffic. The most famous of course is Google’s advertising network. Google will not only allow you to display your ads on the first page of its search results. But also within partner websites. Apart from Google, you have other big advertising platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Besides the big three social media giants, almost all social media platforms have some form of targeted advertising so you’re spoilt for choice here.
Social Media Platforms
As we touched above, social media is an excellent avenue for generating website traffic. Don’t just think of their advertising faculties but also think of building a following on these social platforms. Build pages on social media sites that promote your business or website. By doing this over time you can gather a fair number of followers. These in turn have the potential to convert into website traffic. The best part, of course, is that its free.
When talking about developing social media followings, you have many different options to choose from. Just to list the main platforms which include but are not limited to, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, and Pinterest. The list just goes on and on, take your pick. Be sure to post relevant content regularly as this helps you to engage with your followers. An outdated page rarely gets much if any attention.
Once you have made for your business or website the social media pages you have chosen, don’t stop just there. You can share the social media posts on your pages to the different groups within your niche. These groups that exist within social media platforms, often have hundreds of thousands of members who may be persuaded to visit your website. That is certainly an opportunity you should not ignore.
Email Marketing
On every website, it is important to compile users into an email list. This is done so that users within the marketing list can be emailed. As it is a free way to remarket your new content to past visitors that have been to your website. An email list will ultimately consist of all the paid and organic traffic that you manage to convert into subscribing or contacting you via your website. You worked very hard to gain subscribers, don’t let it go to waste.
Email Marketing Software
There is plenty of awesome email marketing software you can use to manage and design beautiful emails to send to your subscribers. Two great solutions are Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. They allow you to design beautiful HTML emails that are sure to grab the attention of readers. They also have features that allow you to verify your email address so you won’t get caught in spam filters.
With all these features email marketing is something that you must consider. It is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Almost everyone has an email account these days. Email marketing is hands down one of the cheapest ways to build a personal relationship with your audience over time. Since your subscribers can unsubscribe at any time, they feel a sense of control over the relationship. Which translates to a level of comfort with your audience. This helps build trust. When your audience trusts you, they are more likely to click and share your content and this will become a factor that drives traffic to your website.
Search Engine Optimization
Why pay for ads in search engines when you can naturally rank over time. Paying for ads often is not the ideal way you would want to generate traffic to your website. It is not an efficient long term strategy and can eat away at your marketing budget. An excellent long term tactic would be to rank on search engines. These days even popular websites are views by clicking on search results first. Many people for example might choose to search for FaceBook instead of enters FaceBook.com into their browser.
Search Engine Traffic
Ranking on search engines for your brand name and keywords related to your niche is very important. Especially if you are serious about generating sustainable long term traffic to your website. The traffic you gain from search engines like Google is not only free but will go a long way towards achieving your goals. Whether you are a business or just running a blog. Search engine traffic is targeted and has a high potential to bring in not only new views but also to convert them into paying customers.
Some websites make money by serving ads to their visitors. For them, it doesn’t make sense to buy ads just so you can serve ads. Websites like blogs and news sites cant pay for ads. As their main source of revenue comes from affiliate marketing and ads placed on their websites. For these types of websites, it is vital to rank well in search engines so that traffic can be organically generated.
Guest Blogging
There are plenty of websites out there that already have a high volume of visitors. These websites such as news sites or niche blogs often have more than hundreds of thousands of page views per month. If your website gets featured on one of these sites, the traffic they receive might flow to your website as well. That’s essentially what guest blogging is all about.
By approaching these established popular websites and pitching them a great article. You may be able to publish your blog post on their website. By having a relevant natural link that links back to your website. Those who are interested in more of the content you have created will visit your website. This is an easy and simple way to generate traffic as your backlink will stay active for a very long time. Generating a steady stream of new visitors.
Guest blogging also serves as an electronic referral to search engines. Indicating to them that your website is trustworthy and authoritative. When search engines trust you and view your website as an authority within your niche they are more likely to rank the content on your website for the keywords you hope for. Guest blogging is a great way to join together two different ways of generating web traffic synergistically.
Internal Linking
Often visitors to a website will view a single article then leave as they have fulfilled the reason they came to your website in the first place. This is why the importance of having internal links should not be overlooked. When a visitor comes to your website, you do not want them to leave after visiting a single page. You want visitors to spend as much time on your website as possible.
Here is where internal linking comes into play. The pages on your website should interlink to each other taking your visitors on a natural ride throughout your website. The longer a visitor spends on your website the more likely they are to convert. Depending on what type of website you are running you may want to convert them into lifelong readers or in cases where you are running a business into paying customers.
Internal linking is an awesome way of driving traffic from popular pages on your site to pages that rarely see any attention. Generating traffic to a website is hard as the internet is filled with every conceivable type of website with whatever content you can imagine. Hence, when you manage to get some traffic to one page of your website, be sure you don’t let it slip away.
Awesome Content
They say content is king, and that’d because it most definitely is true. You can have the most beautiful website but if your content doesn’t match, you will have trouble generating traffic. Without great content, your website will not have any visitors. And without visitors what would be the point of having a website. Don’t let your website be lonely, drive traffic to it by having awesome content.
Your content will not only have to be informative but also grammatically correct. Great content doesn’t have spelling mistakes or factual errors. Nothing turns readers to a different website than poorly written content. Take your time, do proper research, and craft a masterpiece and you will see how much traffic your website will receive. If you have the best content, even other websites on the internet will use your articles as a reference. Search engines will see this and send even more traffic your way.
The different ways of generating website traffic
Now you have a better understanding of the different ways of generating website traffic at your disposal. Be sure to implement them all, as they will work to complement each other. In summary, you could use advertising but it isn’t a viable long term solution. With awesome content interlinked together and a healthy amount of guest posts and websites that naturally reference to you, search engines will prioritize sending traffic to your website.
In addition to the traffic generated by your social media platforms which will complement your search engine rankings. Your website will hit new levels of web traffic that you haven’t even dreamed of. Furthermore, when you convert the total sum of all the traffic you have received into your email list, you can recycle and promote your new content via email marketing. All these methods working in synergy is sure to give your website a traffic jam.