Arguably the hardest part about being an entrepreneur is not starting a business, but driving traffic to your new online business. There are many ways to increase your website traffic, and below, we will cover the most important strategies, many of which you can implement for free!
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Create stellar content
Your content attracts qualified leads to your website. No matter what type of business you run, you should always have the same goal: create stellar content.
Here’s where to start:
- Look at what the current incumbents are posting: For example, if you run an SEO blog, it would be smart to look at the content that SEMrush, Moz and Ahrefs publish to get ideas for similar blog posts that you can write.
- See what posts generate the most traffic: Sign up for a free tool like Ubersuggest and type in the domain name of one of your competitors. Ubersuggest will then show you the pages that generate the most traffic to the website. Your goal should be to write similar, but more in-depth, posts than those they wrote and publish those to your site.
Write amazing headlines
They say that 80 percent of people read your headline, while only 20 percent read the actual content. If this is true, then we must come up with a great headline to catch (and keep) our reader’s attention.
Here are some examples of types of headlines I share with my writers when I advise them on creating headlines. For simplicity, imagine that you’re writing about finance.
Here are some great headlines to use:
- Authority: Ray Dalio Said We’re in for a Long Recession. Here’s Why
- Informative: The 7 Best Finance Forums to Join in 2020
- Shock: Apple’s Quarterly Report Reveals This Unexpected Profit
- Fear: Over 20 Million Americans Have Lost Their Jobs—and That’s Just the Beginning
- Question: Is There a Recession Right Around the Corner?
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): If You Had Bought This Stock Last Year, You’d Be Up Over 300 Percent
- Hope: The Worst of COVID-19 is Behind Us: Here’s What That Means for Bank Loans
Work with micro-influencers
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to get your brand in front of millions of people, especially for product-based websites. Reach out to micro-influencers within your space and see if you can give them a free product in exchange for a review or shout out on their channel.
The trick to making this strategy work is finding influencers with under 50K followers, or micro-influencers. Don’t try to reach out to someone with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, as they will often require compensation for a promotion. They’re also not as connected to their audiences as micro-influencers tend to be.
Interview thought leaders
Interviewing thought leaders in your space is a great way not only to increase your credibility, but also to grow into a thought leader yourself.
When starting out, you likely won’t be able to secure any top-tier thought leaders, but you could land someone local within your industry. You may be surprised how many people are willing to be interviewed if you just ask them. Additionally, people love to hype themselves up, so if you interview them, they will probably share your content on their social media channels.
Related: Try These 10 Proven Tactics to Increase Your E-Commerce Sales
Email list building
Having a customer’s email address and cultivating a relationship with him or her allows you to market your products or services to them down the road in a warm manner. You do have to make sure that you aren’t just selling to them all the time in your emails, though. The most successful email marketing strategies are those that provide value and occasionally sprinkle in offers. No one wants to open their email and get a sales pitch every single time.
Create an irresistible lead magnet
We know how important an email list is, but how do you get people to sign up for your email list? You can just embed a form on your website asking people to join your newsletter, but that’s no real incentive. What you want to do is create a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an incentive that you offer your website viewers in exchange for their email address.
This lead magnet can be a free e-book, course, checklist, case study, etc. You offer them a valuable product for free, and in exchange, you get their email address, which you can use to build a relationship, marketing to them later on.
Use social media
Social media is an easy way to start driving traffic to your website. With social media, you don’t need to take the time to write long-form content the same way you do with blogs, and it’s great for engaging with your potential customers.
With free tools like Hootsuite, you can create one post and schedule it for multiple different social media accounts or platforms. The free version gives you up to three accounts to post on and makes the process effortless.
Generate high-quality backlinks
To drive large amounts of traffic to your website, you need to rank highly among search engines. There are many ways to rank higher in search engines, but one of the most important ways is by having backlinks. Backlinks, the links on a website that take the user to another website, show search engines that your website is an authority in its industry.
When people hear this, they go out and try to get as many backlinks as possible, but that isn’t the most effective method. You don’t want just to get any old backlink, you want backlinks from other high authority websites in your niche. So, reach out to blogs in your niche and see if they allow guest posts on their website, as that is both a win for you and them.
Use Pinterest
People tend to view Pinterest as just an image sharing social media site, but Pinterest can be a massive driver of traffic for entrepreneurs and business owners. With Pinterest, you can set up relevant boards to your niche and fill them up with cool pins. With these pins, you can include a URL to your website. If you pin consistently and put URLs in your pins that direct back to your website, you can transfer those Pinterest followers into website views. I’ve seen multiple people generate hundreds of thousands of monthly viewers using just Pinterest alone, so it’s worth checking out.
Use Quora
Quora is another great way to source traffic to your site. Quora is a question and answer website with “Spaces” that have questions around particular niches. For example, let’s say you have a food blog. You could follow the space, “Foodie Frenzy,” and start looking at some common questions that arise in the space.
When you see questions that may be relevant to your blog, you can answer them and then backlink back to your blog for more information on the topic. Now, Quora will flag your account if they think you are spamming the system, so make sure you are providing value with your answers and not just linking back to your website.
Post videos on YouTube
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world behind Google, and it’s a fantastic resource for driving traffic to your website. Some of the best performing videos on YouTube are tutorials and reviews. If you have a product, create a review of it, or show someone using it in action. Watching the product being used allows potential customers to see that the product can do what it is advertised to do and gives them peace of mind.
Engage in the comments section of other blogs
Odds are you already read the content of other blogs within your space, so why not join the conversation? Now, this won’t lead to a huge boost in traffic, but it may help you make a name for yourself throughout the community. Over time, people may come to see you as someone who knows what you’re talking about and check out your website, too. Again, just like with Quora, this isn’t to spam the comment section but rather to provide thoughtful commentary.
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Post on Medium
Medium is an online publishing platform with over 50 million monthly website visitors. When you write a post on Medium, you can backlink to your website, as well. Not only are you able to put your posts out in front of millions of potential readers, but you can also get a quick backlink from an extremely high authority website. That’s what I call killing two birds with one stone.
Create and share high-quality infographics
Did you know that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text? Plus, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual. A great infographic can give a reader all the information they need and is easily shareable. You can download a free tool like Canva and create infographics there.
Google Analytics
I saved the best for last. Google Analytics is going to be your best friend when it comes to learning how to increase traffic to your website. Google Analytics will tell you everything from how long someone’s visit to your website was to how many pages they visited to what source of traffic they came from and much more.
Key takeaways
You don’t have to use all of these strategies at once to generate traffic to your website. However, since all the strategies I mentioned here are free or require limited resources, you should test as many as possible. From there, you can cut back on the strategies that don’t work and double down on the ones that work best.
If you’ve got your own tips for increasing traffic to your website, I’d love to hear them. Which tactics have you tried? Which ones have brought you the most traffic? Let us know in the comments below.
