Common techniques to get traffic to your website
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You’ve set up your blog and started adding content but no one seems to be finding or visiting your posts! What to do? What to do? In order for those display ads to work you need to bring traffic to your website.
SEO & Keyword research
If you haven’t started doing this, you need to start right now. I’m serious, drop everything and learn about SEO and keyword research.
You should have done this even before you bought your domain name, to validate your blog idea.
Why is SEO so important? It helps bring organic traffic into your website. And that is what you want. Yes you can bring traffic through posting through social media or Pinterest but you’ll have to work hard for those, not so much if your SEO is right off the bat.
Create quality content
For years we’ve heard “Content is King” and that is because it’s true. If your content is original and adds value to your reader you’ll start to become a known name in your niche.
This means, you need to put something of yourself in your content, bringing your experience and knowledge in your industry. The differentiating factor here is “you” and your expertise. Don’t just regurgitate what everyone else is saying.
Guest Posting
In order to get your articles posted in other websites you need to do some outreach first and find what topics would best suit the companies you are reaching out to.
Writing a guest post establishes you as an authority in your field and lets others get to know you.You see how authority and expertise keep showing in these techniques? It’s because E-A-T (Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) is part of Google’s algorithm and helps in your rankings.
Link Building
Google likes to know other sites like you. You build links by creating inbound links to your website by promoting your content via different means like social media, guest posts and other channels like YouTube. The more inbound links you have, the higher your ranking in Google.
There is a downside, which is that link building is time consuming due to the research and outreach you have to do to get those links.
Use social media
Social media is one of the handiest tools to get your readers engaged and send them over to your website. You will need a strategy and should consider hiring someone to do social media management for your brand.
There are, however, a few things you can do yourself. Like adding social share icons to your posts so readers can share them and setting up boards and pinning through Pinterest.
You’ll find dozens of guides on how to use Pinterest to get traffic for your site.
Keep content fresh
Make sure you spruce up your content every now and again. By this I mean make sure the content is up to date and your SEO is firmly in place.
I know you could have hundreds or even thousands of posts in place already, so you need to have a plan for doing these content overhauls periodically.
Paid ads
I think paid ads should be a last resort and then you have to study a bit about them because I’ve heard horror stories about Facebook Ads. Other social media channels like Pinterest and Instagram also have ads that you can turn on to get traffic to your website and products if you have any.
Optimize website
Your website is the home of your content and it needs to be optimized for several things. First, you need to make sure it’s optimized for viewing in mobile, that means on your cell phone. A lot of readers are checking your blog out from their phones and they need to be able to navigate it properly while viewing it.
Another optimization is page speed. Google considers page speed very important so it might affect your blog’s ranking. Page speed can be improved by using a fast theme, limiting plugins to a minimum and choosing a fast web host.
Start a community
Communities, like a Facebook group, gather your readers and followers who will later turn into brand ambassadors. Your group can be a way to give value to them and you can link back to your website.
If a community is successful, sometimes the group runs itself with members helping each other out.
Host Webinars/workshops
A webinar, workshop or live event can be a valuable tool to help you get traffic to your website. You can tackle some pain points your readers have and direct them to your programs/services to get the solution to those pain points.
Email Marketing
Building your email list should be one of the first things you should do after you launch your blog/website. You will use this list to nurture your relationship with your readers. You won’t always be selling to them, but when you do, you’ll have a warm audience to pitch to. You can read about building an email list in my article “6 Reasons To Start Your Email List Right Now”.
Collab with influencers
Starting a collaboration with influencers can give you access to their audience. Reaching out to them might seem impossible but you can start by engaging them and giving them value.
Getting an influencer to be your brand ambassador can be a game changer for your brand.
Conclusion
As you can see, getting traffic to your website takes many moving parts to work successfully. It’s not just one thing, which might discourage you. But I think that is to your advantage because you are able to tweak and test different techniques to see what works for your website.
I suggest you pick one of these techniques and try them out, not all at once. If you are smart with your testing you will be able to see what techniques give positive results and how fast.
