7 Ways to Drive Website Traffic
Your business may depend on your website. Are you getting enough visits?
The success of any online business (and to a degree, storefront businesses) often comes down to the success of its website. Your business’s website serves as the core element of public outreach. It is how people find out about you, learn about you, and eventually become convinced to buy from you. If you hear of a company and want to find out what it does, or are looking for any company that can fulfill a need, the Internet is going to be the first place you turn to, followed by social media accounts. But even a company’s social media accounts have the ultimate purpose of driving traffic website. Because it's this simple: the more traffic you get, the more successful you will be.
Use any of these seven tried-and-true methods to start increasing website traffic immediately:
1. Employ free search tools.
Take advantage of Google and other Internet search engines by optimizing your website to reflect keyword search results.
Adding new content to the website on a regular basis makes the website appear more prevalently on search engines, and so does being active on Google +.
Use social media search bars (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram in particular, as hashtags make searching easier) to promote your page and website--the more you post, the greater chance of attracting attention you have.
2. Use other people’s traffic to increase your own.
One of the best targeted traffic-increasing methods is by guest writing on another business blog that complements, but doesn’t compete with, your own business blog. Be sure to incorporate a link to your website!
3. Pay to receive traffic.
Advertise your website using Google AdSense.
Pay for an a post promotion or ad on social media. Spending just a few dollars on a single campaign could generate over a thousand views.
4. Network on social media.
Simply participate in discussions and engage with users of social media to generate traffic.
Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn have been proven to be particularly effective at generating traffic for you.
Discover what people are searching for, and supply them with related, unique content.
Reach out to other website owners for mutually beneficial promotional agreements.
5. Network face-to-face.
Depending on the nature of your business and your industry, some professionals may choose to have direct contact. Meetup.com is a great resource for arranging such contact.
You might meet with other website owners, instead of just reaching out online, to discuss in greater depth mutual arrangements to promote each other’s websites.
Discover and attend nearby business seminars or conventions.
6. Promote your website offline.
There are tons of ways to increase website traffic and brand-name recognition off the Internet. For example, you might:
Hang up and hand out flyers.
Sell cheap T-shirts.
Put up stickers around town.
Take advantage of public speaking opportunities. Visit joesabah.com to see if you can get on a radio show to briefly promote your website and business.
7. Try to guarantee personal and professional referrals.
Word-of-mouth remains a highly effective promotional tool.
People that get recommendations from people they know, like their friends, or respect, like a celebrity, are more likely to take that specific advice.
Even referrals from people that someone doesn’t know, like people on the Internet, are highly effective at generating traffic.