How to get more traffic to your website is likely the most often asked question in Internet marketing.
Whether you're selling your products, advertising affiliate offerings, or seeking AdSense clicks, if your site isn't getting any traffic, you won't make any money.
However, getting more traffic is only part of the equation. You want focused traffic, which is people who are interested in what you have to offer.
We'll look at a few different strategies to gain more visits to your website in this article, both paid and unpaid. Some of these techniques can get traffic practically instantly, while others will take longer.
You may gain fast traffic while progressively building it up over a longer period of time by diversifying your traffic creation strategies.
Let's get started...
Obtaining the Appropriate Traffic
We should definitely talk about what kind of visitors you should be targeting before we look at any specific tactics for generating traffic to your website.
Because there is a difference between good and bad traffic.
Visitors that are not only interested in what you have to offer them but also eager and able to take the action you want them to do, are the proper kind of traffic. The incorrect kind of visitor is one who is unlikely to do your "highest desired activity."
Let's have a look at a few examples...
Let's suppose you run an affiliate review website. You publish product reviews and other information on your website, along with affiliate connections. You get paid a commission every time someone buys one of the offers.
If you get a lot of traffic but only a small percentage of those individuals are ready or able to spend money, you're not going to make much money. A market where the majority of your customers are teenagers is an excellent illustration. While they may be enthusiastic about the issue and willing to purchase what you're selling, a huge percentage of them may be unable to do so since they lack credit cards and their parents may refuse to allow them to use theirs.
A site that displays AdSense ads might be better suited for a market like that, which leads us to our second example. Assume you have a site that is solely based on AdSense revenue. It doesn't matter if your visitors can buy in this situation because you are paid every time they click an ad, regardless of what they do after they leave your site. The advertising won't pay very well if the market contains a lot of "clickers" who don't convert into customers, but we'll ignore that for now.
From a conversion standpoint, you'll want people who are looking for a solution to their problem, and hopefully, the advertising on your site provide that solution. Again, you'll want to target the correct folks to receive the most clicks on your advertising.
You could not get many hits if you're producing a lot of traffic looking for free answers or merely information. As a result, greater traffic isn't always more profitable.
Make sure you're targeting the proper people for your offer before you start conducting any kind of traffic creation. Otherwise, you'll be wasting a lot of time, money, or both with little or no return on your investment.
The more popular of the two options is undoubtedly free traffic (the other being paid traffic). Because many Internet marketers do not have the financial means to begin paying for traffic, free traffic is a preferable option.
Some marketers are also unfamiliar with the economics of paying for traffic, which is a completely separate issue. It's not costing you anything if you can make a profit or even break even on what you pay to acquire traffic to your website. Marketers frequently focus on the expense side of the equation while overlooking the profit side, but we'll go over this in further depth when we explore paid traffic sources later.
There are two sorts of free traffic available: short-term and long-term traffic.
Some strategies can bring people to your site in a matter of minutes, or even seconds in some situations. Other strategies will take longer to achieve traction, but once they do, they will continue to drive traffic to your site for a longer period.
We'll look at three short-term traffic sources that can be quite effective if correctly implemented:
Forum post-marketing is one of the simplest ways to get short-term traffic, especially if you're already a member of any famous forums in your industry.
Note: Many of the examples in this study will be related to Internet marketing specialists, as most people reading it will be familiar with it. All of the tactics work in other marketplaces as well, so don't fall into the trap of believing "this just works for Internet marketing websites" - it's simply not true.
Most forums allow you to create a "signature" that appears at the bottom of every post you make. In your signature, offer a link to your website as well as a brief call to action to encourage visitors to visit it.
People will click on your signature link if you're active on the topic and provide high content in your posts. Especially if you provide them with anything of value connected to the market, such as a free report, webinar video, or another sort of reward.
The key is to be an active member of the community and to put the community's needs first. Expect little traffic if you simply sign up for a forum, add your signature link, and start posting randomly with things like "Hey, excellent post!"
People will respond by checking out what more you have to offer them if you provide value initially.
Another wonderful technique to "steal" traffic from a group of people interested in your business is guest blogging. A blog is less interactive than a forum, yet it shares many of the same characteristics.
Look for some of your market's most popular blogs and see if they welcome guest bloggers. Some websites are transparent about this, with a page explaining how to become a guest blogger for them. Other sites don't advertise it, but if you read through the existing entries, you can tell if they're all written by the same individual or if the site has employed guest posts in the past.
In most cases, guest posts will include a resource box or author byline with further information about the author and a link to their website. If you notice any of these, it's a safe bet that the site welcomes guest post submissions.
The key to getting your post published is to provide a high-quality piece that the site owner would be insane to reject. Spend even more time researching, developing, and composing these blogs than you normally would. While it will take more time, if your guest post is published on a popular blog, you will be able to gain a lot of traffic to your site.
While the amount of click-through traffic will decrease after the post has been published for a while, it will continue indefinitely as the content acquires momentum in the search engines. This is a great tactic because the resource link leading back to your site will also help you with SEO in the long run.
Article submissions, also known as article marketing, are another effective traffic tactic that offers both short- and long-term rewards. Short-term traffic will come from users visiting your website after clicking through on your resource box links, similar to guest blogging.
You may use the power of high-authority websites to get your articles ranked rapidly and generate traffic by submitting them to high-authority websites. If your content gains momentum with Google and other search engines, this direct traffic can last for a long time, but it also helps your site rank higher, allowing it to generate search engine traffic on its own.
This takes us to traffic plans for the long term...
We'll look at three long-term tactics for increasing traffic to your website:
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The most prevalent free traffic approach is search engine optimization (SEO). There are thousands of ways to enhance your search engine rankings, as well as a plethora of products that educate you on how to use them. Some of these strategies work year after year, while others are only effective for a limited time.
You'll also see a lot of approaches that are deemed grey hat or ***** hat, meaning they may violate one or more search engines' terms of service, or perhaps transcend legal boundaries.
You'll have to decide for yourself what lines you're willing to cross to increase traffic to your website but keep in mind that the strategies that cross those lines are usually the more temporary ones. They may need less effort upfront, but because things change, you may end up paying more time or money to sustain your traffic in the long run.
Although SEO is a vast subject that goes much beyond the scope of this research, let's have a look at some of the most significant principles.
On-site and off-site optimization are the two basic components of SEO. Things like employing your keywords in strategic places on your pages are examples of on-site optimization:
Keyword stuffing (repeating your keywords over and over on a website) is used to help you get better results, but search engines have progressed far beyond that. Don't do this; instead, naturally, incorporate your keywords and other related terms into your text.
Off-site optimization essentially boils down to the number of links that point to your website. The more links you obtain from comparable sites that have some search engine power of their own, the higher your site will rank (and the more traffic you'll get as a result).
The short- and long-term strategies begin to converge at this point. Any of the short-term traffic methods we just covered will help you with SEO in the long run if you use them to acquire quick traffic to your site.
While you may see a short-term increase in traffic when the links in your forum signatures, guest blog posts, and submitted articles become online, they will continue to work for you for a long time.
This is why, even if your site begins to gain momentum in the search engines, it's a good idea to remain to perform those things. Both immediate and long-term traffic will continue to be driven by it.
Because social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are such a new techniques to generate traffic, they are sometimes misinterpreted. Many marketers use them as an "announcement" service, publishing links to new deals, affiliate promotions, fresh blog entries, and whatever else they want visitors to see.
But that's all they ever post, and they conclude that social media is ineffective because no one clicks on their links.
Social media is, after all, a long-term traffic strategy. Before you can expect people to click on any of the links you publish, you need to create relationships with the individuals you follow.
Consider this scenario in "real-world" terms. Would you just make a sales pitch to everyone you met if you went to a party or a meeting? Or would you prefer to have a chat first to get to know each other and what you have to offer?
Treat social media as if it were a "real life" meeting: provide value first and establish trust with your followers before bombarding them with offers.
Building relationships isn't a traffic-generating strategy in and of itself, but it does apply to almost every other technique to some extent. You'll be a lot more successful in the long term if you create relationships with visitors to your website or other locations where you post your material.
Visitors are much more likely to return if you build great ties with them. Return traffic is one of the most important aspects of a successful website.
Consider it this way: If you receive 100 visitors per day and don't know how to get them back when they click an ad or an affiliate link, you'll need to acquire 100 new visitors every day to keep your results.
You've increased future traffic without needing to attract "new" visitors if you receive 100 visitors per day and get 10 of them into your "relationship funnel" so they return to the site. Let's say they return the next day, which is oversimplified. You now have 110 visitors, 10 of whom will be returning visitors.
With each passing day, you're gaining more traffic while only needing to generate 100 new visitors. Even if you don't do any more work to find new people than you already are, your traffic will expand over time.
Our next traffic tactic, list building, is one of the best ways to create these relationships and produce return visitors.
One of the most significant benefits of having an email list is the ability to manage your traffic. It doesn't matter if Google, Facebook, or any other traffic source goes down tomorrow if you have a list of people interested in your industry; you can still generate traffic by sending an email to your list.
You can also use this if you have a brand new page or website that you want to send traffic to.
In the next half hour, you could build up a website, send an email to your list, and have visitors to your site within minutes.
Even if you pay for traffic, getting visitors within minutes after launching a new site is difficult.
However, list building as a traffic strategy is a Catch-22. You won't be able to produce "on-demand" traffic until you've developed a list, and to build a list, you'll need to get traffic from other places first.
That's why it's crucial to implement all of the methods we've discussed, but also to persuade those people to sign up for your email list so you can keep in touch with them in the future.
Paid traffic intimidates a lot of Internet merchants. They may have been burnt before, or they may be fearful of losing a significant amount of money. This is a legitimate issue, and you should proceed with caution when dealing with bought traffic.
Paid traffic, on the other hand, doesn't have to be expensive to test, and once you find out how to make it lucrative (or even break even), it doesn't actually cost you anything- you put X dollars in and receive Y dollars out.
We won't go over all of the bought traffic sources in this study because there are so many, but let's look at a few of the most prominent (and effective).
Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter are examples of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. For each individual who clicks on your ad and visits your website, you pay a set amount. Depending on the market and the keywords you're targeting, this fee can range from a few cents to several dollars.
PPC advertising can eat up a lot of money in a short amount of time if you're not careful, so you must handle it right.
Make sure you're not targeting broad keywords that will generate a lot of traffic but aren't well-targeted.
For example, you wouldn't want to target the keyword "lose weight" because it would be quite expensive, and those visitors could be seeking a variety of things when they arrive at your site.
You'd be better off targeting the search phrase "how to lose 5 pounds in a month" (provided your website can assist with that problem) because while the volume of traffic would be lower, those folks are looking for something extremely specific.
You should also stick to a daily budget that you are happy with. That way, if your advertising doesn't convert for any reason, you won't lose too much money.
Once you've found a profitable keyword/ad combination, you may start expanding on it. PPC advertising requires a lot of testing and tracking to be successful.
For more than a decade, some have claimed that banner ads are no longer effective, but the truth is that they can still be effective if used correctly. It's unlikely to be very successful if you simply blast a bunch of banners with "punch the monkey" type of content to as many websites as possible.
However, if you choose the sites where you want to promote based on how relevant they are to your target demographic and create effective banners, you may still get a lot of traffic for a low price.
Start small and track your outcomes, just like with PPC advertising. Start expanding those successful campaigns to additional sites once you've found a banner and/or website that's working for you.
Paid ezine advertisements are another "old school" traffic creation approach that can still be effective. You're paying for an ad to be sent to another marketer's email list. This could be a short ad inserted into a larger newsletter or a "solo" ad containing only your offer.
This is an excellent approach to gain visitors to your own site by leveraging someone else's list (and hopefully onto your email list in the process).
The idea is to tailor your offer to the intended audience. Make sure you sign up for that marketer's email list and read a few of their letters to discover what kind of tone they use and what kinds of deals they advertise.
You want your ad to appeal to the individuals who receive that person's emails, so make sure you're offering something useful and that what you're offering will appeal to the people who receive the email.
Facebook is a relatively new paid traffic source that is continuously evolving as more people utilize it. However, with hundreds of millions of users and the capacity to target very particular interests and demographics, it's a must-have for your sponsored traffic plan.
The key to efficiently using Facebook is to remember that the majority of people are there to socialize, not to be marketed to. Even while it may appear that way to us, online marketers, most Facebook users aren't doing business there, so hitting them with a high-pressure pitch (paid or not) is unlikely to go over well.
It all boils down to initially establishing relationships with individuals so that they know and trust you. Once you've earned their trust, you may gradually introduce them to your websites and other services.
Native advertising has a unique advantage over other forms of paid media in that it looks natural and consistent for viewers. Native ads usually look like all the articles and content pieces on the website it’s on. They might appear under the “related articles” or “recommended articles” - directing the reader to get more value, as opposed to “intruding” their natural experience. Native advertising can work great to promote articles, landing pages, and knowledge products.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of not just how to get traffic to your website, but also what you should do with it once it arrives.
New traffic sources appear and disappear all the time, but the majority of the tactics we've covered here have lasted the test of time. While it's never a bad idea to try out new techniques and incorporate them into your current strategy, don't get caught up in the next "shiny object" that promises infinite traffic with little or no effort.
Those kinds of claims are almost always too good to be true, and even if they do work, the results are usually fleeting. It won't take long for the strategy to stop working once everyone hunting for a magic button starts abusing it.
If you develop a solid foundation for your traffic generation plan, you'll see an increase in visitors to your website for years to come.
