Are you looking for some proven traffic strategies that you can use to get traffic to your website?
If so, then this article is for you.
One of the most important factors of generating online income is getting visitors to your website. Traffic is the link between you making or breaking your Internet business. Getting a steady stream of unique or even return visitors is the ultimate goal.
Again, visitors equal exposure, which usually equates to sales or leads if your copy is compelling enough.
There are many different ways of getting traffic. Some of which are temporary solutions while others are on a more permanent basis. If you can combine these different traffic generating techniques, you can get that constant flow of visitors every online marketer is aiming for.
In this article, I will show you some proven traffic strategies that you can use to increase the amount of visitors that you’re getting to your website.
This article mainly covers the following topics:
- Instant Traffic Strategies
- Long-term Traffic Strategies
- Returning Traffic Strategies
Are you ready? Let’s get started!
Instant Traffic Strategies
Here I will show you 2 different ways of getting traffic to your website instantly.
01. Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. If you are popular on networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, the traffic you get from there can easily surpass the traffic from Google and the other search engines.
Twitter:
Twitter is the second main traffic source of my blog. According to Google Analytics, about 26% of my overall blog traffic in last six months were from Twitter.
How did I do it?
It’s simple. I’m using a plugin called Revive Old Post on my blog and it shares my old posts to twitter, Facebook, Linkedin automatically.
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.
Facebook:
Almost all Internet users do 2 things on a regular basis: first, they use search engines. Secondly, they use Facebook. Facebook is the largest social network on the Internet.
According to recent researches, Facebook drove 24.63% of overall traffic to websites in Q4 2014.
Regularly share your blog posts on your Facebook pages, groups. If you are popular on Facebook, you can easily drive visitors to your website.
Facebook wants to increase the engagement in its News Feed. So its algorithm ensures that only the most relevant and high-quality stories appear in a user’s feed.
Therefore, publish great content that teaches people something, entertains them, makes them think, or in some other way adds value to their lives.
Linkedin:
There are more than 300 million LinkedIn members, and the site gets over 187 million unique visits per month. Other than Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn is the largest social network in the United States. But more importantly, because of the way it’s designed, LinkedIn is an even better marketing tool for your business than those other social media platforms.
Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn in 2013. Originally, it was a content publishing platform that people could only post on if they were invited. If you publish content on LinkedIn Pulse, some links will be do-follow and will have a small positive effect on your rankings. Getting picked up on Pulse is a lot like guest-posting on the biggest blog in your niche.
02. PPC + Other Advertising
Aside Social Media Marketing, if you want instant traffic, you need to shell out bucks.
Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay when the ad is clicked.
So PPC advertising is fast: With some systems, such as Google AdWords and Facebook, you can generate targeted traffic within a few minutes of opening an account.
Aside PPC, there are few different compensation methods. Advertisers use a wide range of payment calculation methods. In 2012, advertisers calculated 32% of online advertising transactions on a cost-per-impression basis, 66% on customer performance (e.g. cost per click or cost per acquisition), and 2% on hybrids of impression and performance methods.
CPM (cost per thousand display) –
CPM means that advertisers pay for every thousand displays of their message to potential customers. In the online context, ad displays are usually called “impressions.”
CPE (cost per engagement) –
Cost per engagement aims to track not just that an ad unit loaded on the page (i.e., an impression was served), but also that the viewer actually saw and/or interacted with the ad.
CPV (cost per view) –
CPV is the default way to set the price you’ll pay for your TrueView video ads (when created with AdWords). With CPV bidding, you’ll pay for video views and other video interactions (such as clicks on the call-to-action overlays (CTAs), cards, and companion banners), whichever comes first.
Most popular online advertising platforms:
Long-term Traffic Strategies
Most of us publish blog posts the same way. We spend tons of time writing posts and optimizing them for search and social media.
When we publish a new blog post, we’ll excitedly watch as we see a burst of new traffic to our website… then get disappointed as we see the post’s popularity peter off.
It stinks, right?
Luckily, there are some things we can do to extend the shelf life of our content. Under this topic, we’re going to look at some long-term traffic strategies for making your content thrive beyond the initial publish date promotion.
01. SEO
Almost every blogger have a dream to push their blog posts into top 10 of Google SERPs. That’s why every blogger cares about the SEO than other promotion strategies.
More than 25% of my overall blog traffic were from Google SERPs.
How to generate more search visitors?
Long tail keywords domination is the best way of generating more search visitors. Targeting long-tail keywords in your content effectively can greatly increase your monthly search visitors.
Your long tail keywords may not rank in Google’s top 10 results, and it’s true that 60% of all organic clicks go to the top 3 search results, but that still leaves 40% up for grabs. If you consistently publish in-depth content around long-tail keywords, you’ll see an increase in search traffic, attract paying customers, and grow your brand.
02. Content Syndication
Content syndication is the process of pushing your blog, website, or video content out into third-party sites/networks, as either a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail.
These networks are similar to ad networks like Google, Yahoo and Bing, but they focus specifically on promoting other content like blog posts and other similar types of content.
You’ve probably seen these content ads on popular websites like CNN, Forbes, etc. The ads will usually be at the bottom of the articles next to the “Related Posts” sections. There will usually be a similar list of posts with something like “Similar Articles Around The Web”.
The first step of content syndication is to establish goals that match your business model. For example, if you’re trying to build traffic on your blog post to capture leads, syndicating full post content out to partners might not be the best approach. Syndicating a headline, the first paragraph, and a link back to the blog, however, might make sense.
Popular Content Syndication Networks:
01. Outbrain
Outbrain has been getting a lot of press in the content syndication or content discovery industry. They are one of the leaders and seem to be providing a great cost per click or cost per visitor for users.
02. Taboola
Similar to Outbrain, Taboola powers recommended content links on major publication websites. Unlike Outbrain, Taboola requires each link to have an associated thumbnail image. This may or may not take more work, but it also may help to boost clicks to your content. Taboola’s engine can also be used to promote internally related content.
03. Zemanta
Zemanta is similar to Outbrain. Your posts are syndicated across a network that includes hundreds of thousands of publishers including popular news sites and blogs.
03. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging helps you gain traffic, get in front of your audience, and boost your SEO ranking in a cost-effective way.
When you are going to submit a guest post, the first task is to decide what your goal for guest blogging is. Knowing this goal ahead of time is key in determining the right kind of blogs to submit guest posts to.
Typically, there are three main goals for guest blogging.
- Positioning yourself as an authority and well-known name in the industry.
- Getting exposure (traffic) back to your website.
- Building backlinks to your website.
With the right kind of content on the top blogs, you can do all three of these things. If you are trying to get traffic to your website, then you will want to find blogs that have a good sized and engaged audience. If you are just trying to build a backlink to your website, then you need to pinpoint blogs with strong root domain authority.
Knowing your goals in advance will help you in determining which blogs will be the best for you to submit guest posts to.
How to find a place to submit your guest post
The first thing you will want to do is find a place to publish. When looking for places to guest post, your main goal is to find sites relevant to your niche or industry.
Google is a great place to start in the search for guest posting opportunities. You can use any of the following keyword searches to find blogs that accept guest posts. Just replace keyword with keywords from your industry.
keyword “submit a guest post”
keyword “guest post”
keyword “guest post by”
keyword “accepting guest posts”
keyword “guest post guidelines”
These searches should lead you to a blog’s guest post guidelines page, guest post submission page, or actual guest posts by other writers.
04. Article (directory) Marketing
An article directory is a website with collections of articles written about different subjects. Sometimes article directories are referred to as content farms, which are websites created to produce mass content, where some are based on churnalism.
Article directories allow users to submit unique articles to the directory for content syndication. These directories allow articles to embed links to other websites with relevant anchor text. Popular article directories are considered authority sites and are constantly crawled by search engine bots. Webmasters submit articles with relevant anchor text linking back to their site to obtain backlinks.
Beginning with the Google Penguin release on April 24, 2012, Google began to punish sites that obtained backlinks from article directories. On January 29, 2014, Matt Cutts posted a video specifically warning against the use of article directories for SEO link building.
Therefore, I don’t think that directory submission is useful for SEO link building.
Nevertheless, still there are few useful things in directory submission.
Aside from SEO link building, a well-written article can drive traffic to your website especially if the article has an interesting content.
The next important benefit from article submissions is to be seen in the form of improved online visibility. When you submit articles to top article directories, hundreds of users will come across the articles and the link to your website. Your website name will become familiar and popular.
When the article is resourceful, users that read the articles will certainly be encouraged to visit your website. This will improve your site traffic rate. Such traffic will be highly targeted and the conversions rate with such traffic will be high.
05. YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Web, processing more than 3 billion searches a month. To put this in perspective, it’s bigger than Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and AOL combined and should not be ignored. In fact, according to YouTube, there are more than 100 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute.
It’s a very crowded place. There are plenty people who visit YouTube & watch the videos every day. YouTube in a way can turn out to be a gold mine for online marketers.
It can be a great source for website traffic and most of you must have seen plenty of YouTube videos in the Google SERPs for some of the most competitive keywords. Therefore, in my opinion, YouTube is a great place to get targeted visitors.
According to recent researches YouTube drives the most engaged traffic and it has the lowest bounce rate.
Below are the quick tips, which will help you to drive huge free traffic from YouTube videos.
Make the videos viral, and spread them to as many websites as possible. The easy way, when you done publishing a video on YouTube, create a blog post and embed the video on your Web page.
Embed your logo and website into the video somehow. You can do this with text at the end or beginning, or by including your logo or URL throughout the entire video.
Publish great videos that teach people something, entertains them, makes them think, or in some other way adds value to their lives. Therefore, viewers will watch it from beginning to end.
Choose the video thumbnail wisely. YouTube actually lets users choose their video thumbnails so do it carefully and thoughtfully.
06. Slideshare
SlideShare “The Quiet Giant of Content Marketing,” is a social media website where you can upload your presentations and show them to the world. This “Giant” gets 60 million visitors per month and has an Alexa Rank of 143.
SlideShare’s features make it the ideal tool to grow your web traffic. It’s a crowded site with a highly targeted audience and low competition.
You can use SlideShare for many purposes. For instance, you can:
- Get traffic
- Rank better on Google
- Grow your followers
- Get email subscribers
- Build your brand
- Create your own uses
On SlideShare, you can upload your presentation and if it gets popular, it can be viewed by millions of people. If you know how to make the presentation, you can not only get traffic to your website, but you can also improve your rankings with Google, expand your followership on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., attract more subscribers to your newsletter, or boost your brand/reputation online.
Similarly, if you want to get more subscribers to your newsletter, mention it in your presentation and include the link where people can join.
If you use SlideShare in the right way, you will find it is a very powerful tool.
07. Document Sharing Websites
Each blogging expert knows that a Document sharing sites can drive huge traffic to any blog or website. They allow users to upload documents in a variety of formats, including Word (*.doc) Open Office Word (*.odt) and the venerable PDF (*.pdf)
You can create resourceful documents and share on different high PR document sharing sites.
There is no rocket science behind the document sharing websites. As we use other techniques to get traffic, this one also helps to gain visitors.
Examples for document sharing websites:
- http://www.scribd.com/
- http://www.docstoc.com/
- http://www.slideshare.net/
- http://www.calameo.com/
Creating a document-based article to upload to sites like Scribd or DocStoc is easy. Here is a step-by-step guide:
- Research your keywords, like you would with a normal article.
- Create a blank Word file.
- Write a quality article of at least 600 words. Remember that list-based articles are very popular.
- Write a resource box at the end of the article, as you normally would. Remember to add a strong call to action to encourage people to click through to your website.
- Add links throughout the document.
- Add images to spice up your document; make sure you use text wrapping. You can hyperlink images as well.
- Use fonts, colors, and text highlighting to draw attention and make your article more attractive to read.
- Save it and upload to document sites like Scribd, DocStoc, and SlideShare.
- Rinse and repeat for more keywords.
It really is that easy.
08. Be Active in Forums in Your Niche
In my opinion, forum marketing is one of the most effective traffic strategies online.
Choosing the right forum(s) to participate in makes a big difference. Sometimes, you’re already an active member of a forum or two. If not, hopefully, you’re at least aware of some of the popular forums that cater to your niche.
If that’s still not the case, Google “YOUR NICHE forum” and you will find the results. If there are multiple forums in your niche, you should focus on being active in just one forum at first. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin, and you want to be sure you become a prominent member of the forum. That’s hard to do when you’re trying to post in half a dozen different forums. Once you’ve become established in one, then you can determine whether joining another would be best for you.
In order to get traffic from discussion forums, you should be present and publish something, at least, a few times a week. The more active you are, the more traffic you will get. I publish something 3 times a day, every single day.
I have a link in my signature. The most traffic to my blog comes from people clicking on this link. I always add a link to a blog post related to the discussion forum.
Comment on old threads. They can contain 10 posts and more. When you join an old discussion, all of the subscribers to this thread will be notified that there is a new message to the thread. In addition, the thread will jump to the top of the list of threads, and even more, people will see it and join the discussion.
Returning Traffic Strategies
Have you taken a look at how many of the unique visitors on your website are returning ones lately?
Odds are, the number is not very high.
One of the best ways to increase the effectiveness of a website is to emphasize the importance of repeat visitors. If you can encourage a higher percentage of your first-time visitors to come back, you’ll see your traffic numbers, engagement, and profitability rise. Returning visitors are the most likely to leave comments, share the posts on social, and buy products and paid content you host on the site. Truly, they are awesome.
01. Build a List
List building is the most important one of proven traffic strategies. When all of your traffic sources are dry, your email list will keep you alive.
List building in its basic form is the process of collecting email addresses of people who you wish to target in your niche. It is basically an act of building a list of your potential customers who you can send emails with an aim of making them interested in your products or services.
Not building an email list is the #1 mistake beginner bloggers admit. So why is it that beginner continues to make this mistake repeatedly? Because there is, a false presumption that email marketing is dead.
Is email marketing dead?
No, it is not. In fact, email marketing had never been more alive as it is today. Every website wants you to give them your email address, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or The New York Times. Why is email so relevant and important?
There is an important aspect of list building. You should build a specialized or ‘elite’ list and nurture your subscribers so they always open and act on your emails.
You don’t need everyone on your list if you want to succeed. In fact, do all you can to weed out those who don’t want or need what you have to offer. You ONLY need the right people.
Read: How to Build Your Email List with a WordPress Blog?
Let’s first get into the benefits of building an email list. Here are 5 major benefits of list building.
- List building is the best way to generate more returning traffic to your website.
- If you build your list of potential customers, you will make more sales.
- You will get more repeat buyers, especially if you treat your list with respect and courtesy.
- Your marketing will be much more targeted when you use a list.
- You can also gain valuable information from your list in the form of feedback and surveys.
Now that you know the benefits of list building. Here are the steps you need to take to build an elite list through your blog.
01. Define your main goal –
What do you intend to achieve by having a specific group of people on your email list? That goal has to be specific, realistic and achievable. Because the steps you will take afterward will be in line with your ONE goal.
02. Select an Email Marketing Service Provider –
I would recommend either GetResponse or MailChimp. They are both paid email marketing service providers, but MailChimp offers a free account for first 2000 subscribers. This is great for beginners because, by the time they surpass that number, that list should be paying for itself.
03. Strategically Place Beautiful Opt-in Forms –
Some WordPress themes come with built-in sidebar email widgets. Your email marketing service provider may also provide you with the embed code that you can place into your WordPress site.
In addition, you should consider using Thrive Leads, which allows you to place page takeovers, interstitials, sliders, and bars.
05. Guest blog on targeted blogs only –
To build your elite email list you also have to take a different approach to guest blogging and choose the blogs you pitch and guest blog for. For authority blogs in your niche, Google “Your primary keyword + submit guest post”. That will give you a list of the right places to guest blog.
06. Run a Facebook ad campaign –
If you have a marketing budget, you can use Facebook to drive the right audience and build an elite email list. Instead of sending your Facebook ad to everyone, use precise targeting based on interests, pages, groups, age and location for best results.
Read: 12 ways to get more email subscribers
02. Give ’em a reason to come back
What’s the quickest way to get visitors to keep coming back for more?
Give them what they are actually looking for. Survey them. Either informally on social or through an official service, find out what questions your visitors are actually seeking to have answered when they visit your site – and then answer those questions thoroughly and effectively.
This will help establish your brand as an authority, and visitors will start coming to you directly for answers rather than hunting through Google first.
Conclusion:
The biggest thing with traffic however, is recycling it. Making it stick.
Consistency is the key here. All of these traffic strategies are proven, but I can’t promise you overnight results. Stick to them and you will eventually get fresh visitors to your website, increase your email subscribers, boost your conversion rate and build a sustainable online business.
Did I leave out any traffic strategies that have worked well for you?