You want more traffic to your site.
I get it, and I also get that you’ve read other guides on getting it and are probably searching for that one special tip or trick..
Well, I’m not going to give you a special trick or get rich quick scheme for getting traffic but I’m going to give you good, reliable and actionable advice on getting it that will actually work. Sound fair? I’m going pretty deep with this guide, so please don’t feel you have to read it all at once..
I’m going to just cover the basics before we dive into advanced tips for traffic building.. If you’re already fairly skilled at blogging and traffic generation, just skip this first few parts.
What Exactly Is Traffic
So traffic is just people coming to your website. You could call it visitors, Eyeballs, whatever you want but the point is it’s people on your site.
You want this, and you want LOTS of it because the more people on your site, the more people you can help and inspire with your content and ultimately, the more money you can make, or the more subscribers you can get etc, whatever your goals are.
How is traffic measured?
Traffic is measured usually by ‘unique visitors per day’ but you can also measure it monthly or by ‘visits’.
A visitor is one specific person coming into your site that hasn’t been there before, whereas a visit could be just one person visiting your site multiple times. The most accurate number to use and the one you should use to judge how well you’re doing is the ‘visitors’. How many DIFFERENT people are coming to your site.
Different types of traffic
There are different types of traffic, and they’re not all created equal. For example, consider the difference between these two types of person coming to your site –
Person 1 – Clicked a link from someone’s blog to a recommended resource on a certain topic. For example, if someone clicked from another site onto this site, expecting a guide on getting traffic
Person 2 – Someone who Flashed through hundreds of links on Stumbleupon and will judge your site in about 2 seconds before clicking away
You see, WHERE people are coming from when they get to your site is very important.
If someone’s got onto your site by typing into Google your target key phrase, then they’re LOOKING for something. If they’re just browsing through a lot of sites or see your link pop up on Facebook then they’re just BROWSING and aren’t looking for the exact answers and information you’re giving.
It doesn’t really matter too much when you start, but the more you get serious about websites and blogging the more you’ll care about where your visitors are coming from and how to optimize the experience for them when they get to your site.
For example, if you know by looking at your stats that people are coming to your post after typing something specific into Google, you could start the post off with something like –
‘I know you’ve been searching Google for answers, and I’m here to give them to you’. This instantly connects with the reader, because it appears you know who they are, what they want and what they’ve been doing.
The type of visitors you want
So moving on, the type of traffic you really want to get is ‘targeted’ traffic. This means people who are already sold on what you’re saying.
An example would be if their friend sent them a link and said ‘check this site out, it’s got the best advice for starting a website’ or if someone linked to your site from their blog and said ‘This is the best place to get advice on xxxxxx’.
It means people are coming to your site already knowing what to expect and you don’t have to ‘sell’ them as much. Cold traffic is traffic that knows NOTHING about you, your site business, brand or anything. They’re just coming to your site cold, either by stumbling across the link or clicking through from Google search.
The very basics of increasing website traffic
So before we go into some ninja tips for increasing eyeballs to your site, we’re going to talk about the very basics. This means things that you MUST do before you do the advanced stuff. It would be silly to try and build a house starting with the roof, so we’re not going to try and build traffic without first covering the basics.
Have great content
If you don’t have outstanding content, why would you want lots of people to see it?
Make sure that before you put lots of effort into getting people to see your stuff, that you actually HAVE good stuff to begin with. This should be obvious but it’s amazing how many people will spend hours trying to drive traffic to an empty site, just for the sake of it.. Or people spending hours and even money driving traffic to a blog with only 2 posts on.
Think about it, why would you WANT people to come to your site, and their first impression to be of a dead site.. It’s just a wasted effort. Instead, build up a thriving site at least with a handful of great posts and things.. THEN put effort into building traffic.
Have something for your traffic to DO!
Just building on what I just said, you want people to have something to do when they get to your site. Don’t just have people land on your post, and read it, and then not know what to do.. You should have things in place so that people know what to do.. For example –
- Join your email list (Where you can possibly promote products to them later)
- Follow your social media accounts
- Share your article (Have links and icons there so it’s easy for them)
So this means having an opt in form, and your email marketing (including autoresponders and sales funnel) set up BEFORE.
If I could turn back time the FIRST thing I’d do when starting an online business is build my email marketing autoresponder series, opt in forms, social media accounts, following on those etc, and then I’d guest post.. But more on that later.
Work smarter, not harder
There are some situations where you’re just working harder than you need to to try and get results or traffic. Think about your time like money.. What are you going to spend it doing? Think about what you spend your time on and whether it could be better spent doing something else.
An example would be posting to social media profiles. It’s very important, of course but do you really need to spend that 20 minutes EACH TIME you publish a post to share it to all of your networks? You can automate that stuff. Download a plugin for WordPress called ‘Jetpack’ and connect it to a free WordPress account.
Link up your social media profiles with the ‘sharing’ feature, and every time you publish a new post it automatically shares it to all of your connected accounts.
Diversify your traffic sources
You don’t really want all your traffic to come from one place.. I know most people will tell you to focus on one traffic source and then dominate it, but I really think it’s better to diversify.
I mean, what would happen if you relied on Google for ALL your traffic and then they changed their ranking algorithm or you had some serious competition start to rank and you lost it all?
You’d be faced with no traffic and therefore no income.. A big problem if you’re a digital nomad or you rely on that income in some way. Better to have your traffic coming from loads of different places! So don’t focus only on SEO for example, or only on guest posts.. Do it all. Have your link and a way for people to find you almost everywhere.
Giveaway/competition
A short term technique you can do every now and then is to giveaway one or more copies of your product, in return for some participation and sharing.. I ran a giveaway for an Ebook on my niche site, and within 3 days 90 people had tweeted about the competition and I sold about 8 copies in a day just because people were talking about it more.
Digital products don’t cost us anything to give away, so you’d be silly not to do a giveaway of some sort.. You can use a service like Rafflecopter to create rules for the competition. For example, the one I did, I made it so people had to either tweet, follow my profile or share my page in order to enter.
I’m only giving away one copy of the book but almost 100 people entered and tweeted.. Pretty good for 5 minutes work!
Email Re-Marketing
When you’ve got your site and some posts up, you’ll want to start collecting email addresses and engaging with people there, I’ve written the guide on that but you’ll also want to re market your content to them as well. This is a fantastic way to grow your business and traffic. The more people coming back to your site, the better.
You want to send an email every now and then to your new subscribers. Another great way to do this is to include some of your really good old posts in your auto responder series.. So all new subscribers will have to see your old content regardless of when they join your list. Clever, right?
I mean, you spent the time writing the content, so it doesn’t make sense to just have it sit at the bottom of your archives unused and unseen.. Promote it to your list! They may find it usefull.
Social media Re-Marketing
This is a great way to get site traffic.. When you’ve got a nice following and a nice number of posts on your website, re share some of the really old ones every now and then. Set up automation to have old posts automatically shared with your audience (Who are growing and most of them won’t have read your old stuff).
Brand Awareness
Your brand is important to think about when you’re thinking of building website traffic. Is your brand or business name something that people can easily remember? If not, you may want to consider changing it.
People are going to come back to your site MUCH more if they remember the name and know exactly how to spell it and type it in. Even better if they can just remember the entire website url and type it in. Hopefully moneyspkye.com is easy enough to remember and come back to.
Link Building for website traffic
Link building is a very important part of getting website traffic, although this is more for SEO. Search Engine optimization and Traffic generation go almost hand in hand.. SEO is all about making more people find your site through the search engines.. Which means more traffic.
Proper link building is just about getting your link in the right places.
You don’t want it on every spam site in the world, but you DO want a link to your site on other related sites in your niche. Google value quality over quantity.. So you could have one site with a thousand links from a load of porn sites, or a site with ONE strong link from an educational site, and the site with one link would rank higher.
Quality > Quantity.
So you may be wondering well how do I actually build links.. It’s all about reaching out. Before I get into this (Told you it was a long post) I’ll outline the main sources of links you want for your site –
- Social (Your own and other’s profiles)
- Mentions in other blog posts (Yours and other people’s)
- Resources pages
- Article and Link Directories
- Social Bookmarking
- Guest posting
Now I’m not going to share the exact percentage you want for each one because that would not only be boring but not useful either. Just do them all roughly the same amount.. That means spend the same amount of time on each approach together. Let’s discuss each of those briefly..
Social media link building
This is where you link to your new posts on your social media profiles. Let’s say you have a Twitter account, every time you post something new, tweet out the link. Set it up from WordPress to share it automatically.
This way, not only will you get more people to your site, but the people on your social media can tweet it to their followers and friends as well. It has the possibility of being shared around a lot. That’s a good thing.
Mentions in other people’s blog posts
This is something that you can’t really control that much.. But you want other people to be linking to your site and talking about you. This is usually done by either writing something really useful, or something that induces an emotional response. ‘Upworthy.com’ are great at making people get emotional, and therefore share their content.
What you can do to get more people to link to you in their posts is to simply email a bunch of people when you’ve got a new post up. Search Google for blogs in your niche and target the smaller ones at first, They’ll be more likely to reply and link to you.
Resource Page Links
This is a great place to have your link. Other people have resource pages on their site, where their readers go to find out about the tools they might need. If your site is on that resource page, you’re going to get targeted traffic almost ready to buy whatever it is you’re selling or sharing. A very easy way to find websites with resource pages is to do a little Google search trick –
In the search bar, type yourkeyword inurl:resources
You could also type yourkeyword inurl:links
(So for example, if your niche is lucid dreaming, you’d type ‘lucid dreaming inurl:resources’)
This will show all the sites relating to that keyword with resource pages. You can then contact them and ask nicely if they’ll include your link on the page. About 5-10% of people you email will put your link there, depending on niche and the quality of your content.
Here’s a sample email you could send people..
Hey xxxx,
Hope you’re doing well. I saw your awesome resource page on your site, and thought I’d share something you might like to include. Here it is!
Yourwebsite.com/yournewpost
It’s a great resource and I feel your audience would really benefit from it. I’d be very grateful if you’d include it. If not, have a great day anyway!
Thanks, Your name
Article and Link Directories
These are slightly less important than they used to be, but still worth a mention. Search Google for ‘places to submit your url’ or ‘link directories’ and then submit your site url there. It’s a great way to get free links, but be careful that the directory is not spammy and is somewhat regulated.
Social Bookmarking
This is also less important than it used to be, but still worth your time. I had one article go viral on Stumbleupon overnight and send me hundreds of thousands of people. Social bookmarking is submitting your new posts to places like –
- Stumbleupon
- Delicous
- Technorati
These places people can vote your content up or down, and if loads of people like it, they show it to even more and it can snowball. Tag your posts properly when submitting to these places and make sure your first line/paragraph is good enough to keep people interested!
Remember people will be browsing through possibly hundreds of pages on these sites, so unless your opening sentence is engaging, they’ll just keep clicking through and your bounce rate will look horrible. (People coming onto your site and leaving within 20 seconds).
Guest Posting on OTHER blogs
Probably one of the best ways to get your link out there. Guest posting is where you submit a blog post for someone else to post on their website. They’ll usually leave you a link back to your site at the bottom. (Sometimes these are ‘nofollow’ meaning Google doesn’t give them any ‘weight’ but they STILL bring traffic to your site! That’s the important thing).
A great way to guest post is to simply do another search like the resource page one except this time, change the phrasing..
yourkeyword inurl:guest
yourkeyword inurl:guest post
yourkeyword onpage:guest posting
This will show you sites in your niche that accept guest posts.
Always have a read of the old ones first and get a feel for the type of content they’re after. Look at the style of writing, and what sort of thing they’re sharing. Also look to see if the site is a good reputable and non-spammy site. You don’t want a link from a trashy website.
Google is smart! Be careful
A little warning with your link building, Google is very smart. It knows that if a site suddenly gets a million links overnight, either it’s viral news or it’s a scam and someone’s trying to game the system. It won’t do you any good to rush this.
Think of it like planting a tree.. You don’t plant it and then physically pull it out of the ground do you? In the same way, don’t try and rank faster than you need to. Water your ‘tree’ by slowly adding links here and there.. Don’t email a billion people in the same day, spend an hour or two doing it every week..
This way you won’t get slapped by Google for having too many links too fast.
Take action!
It’s up to YOU now. What are you going to do? There are many ways to build traffic, so get started DOING one of them!