How to Get Traffic to Your Website
Without traffic your website is stillborn
You have spent all this time and money on a new website. It's your baby. It's bright and shiny and in your eyes beautiful. You gingerly launch it into the world with the hopes that everyone will see it and Ahhh so cute, and millions will buy your product and make you rich. Yet as you watch the traffic stat all you see is nothing, zero, zip, nada. Your website that you spent so much time and effort on does nothing.
The reason is because there are billions of other websites out there that are competing for traffic also. It's worse that finding a needle in a stack of needles. Unless somehow they learn about your site and specifically come looking for it they will never find you. At least not the people you are looking, Not your potential customers.
You have to drive traffic to your site in order for your site to be successful and profitable. Here is a great summary from the people at Teachable about driving traffic to your precious website.
Let's talk about some of the most effective method to build traffic.
SEO
Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to build free traffic to your site. Organic or not paid ad listing are are preferred by 70% of people using a search engine. The problem is that very few people get past the first page of a search.
The old joke goes, "Where is the the best place to hide something you don't want found? On the second page of Google".
Ranking on the first page of Google takes work, hard work, or using someone like Allied Pixels to do the work for you. That work is well worth it. Once you get to the first page all that traffic that comes into to your site is then free. You are not paying per click or per impression. Sure it cost to get to the first page and stay there but it is much less than paying for each click as you do in PPC advertising.
Speaking of PPC or pay per click that is our next effective traffic builder.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
If you want to get traffic immediately and not wait for SEO to raise your ranking or if you want get traffic now as you are waiting for SEO, PPC is a way to get fast traffic to your website or landing page.
Many online marketers base their whole business on pay per click advertising. This type of traffic generating marketing encompasses a variety of sources to generate ads.
The process will vary from provider to provider but generally the idea is that your create an ad. The ad is placed in front of traffic from a variety of sites, Google, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, Instagram or private websites. When the viewer clicks on the ad they are directed to your website or offer. The price varies from platform to platform, and can be charged per click or per so many impressions (views or showing of your ad).
As long as you have an effective funnel (process that leads to sales), PPC can be an excellent source of loads of high quality and profitable traffic to your site.
Social Media Marketing
Social media can be a great source of traffic to your website, but like SEO it will take time to build. Most social media sites offer their form of PPC advertising but what I am talking about here is using social media to create and build an audience.
You will need to spend time creating post and interacting with others on social media. Social media needs to be a subtler form of marketing. Offering education and quality information needs to happen before you ever broach the subject of sales.
Some platforms like Facebook will not allow certain topics or offer from being placed on their site. It's all about building the community and keep what is best for the members in mind.
As you build your social media following you can make announcement about events and things of interest and then direct them back to your website.
Social media is a great traffic source but for free traffic but it will take work to build your presence. Allied Pixels can take some of the work from you and assist you in the process.
Email Marketing
Many people say the money of online marketing is in the list. Your email lists is your gold mine. These are people who have given you permission to market to them on a continual basis. The goal of getting traffic to your site is to get people on your email lists so you can market to them.
The most expensive part of generating traffic is getting someone to your site the first time. Whether it's PPC or the time, money and effort of SEO or social media, all those resources were used to get them to your site. Once they are there, you want to capture them so you can now re-market to them over and over again. That's where your list comes in.
You need an effective way to capture and re-market to your website visitors. Usually this involves some type of free offer to ethically bribe them to be on your mailing list. A form offering them to join your mailing list doesn't cut it any more. People get too much email. For them to part with their precious email address in this day of spam you need to give them something of value. Coupons, discounts, or free stuff like e-books or t-shirt or contest drawings need to used to get them to give your their email.
You need an system that will capture those addresses and deliver the promised goodies to them. You should have a system that then puts them in a stream of emails that come to them spread over time with interesting content and offers. All this should be automated and segmented. There are a variety of email list providers out there. We can help you set up a system that works for you. It can be simple or as complicated as needed.
I talked about this process in the article on Attraction Marketing.
Messenger and Bot Marketing
Another marketing method that is newer on the scene is messenger bot marketing. Most of you are familiar with Facebook Messenger. It's that chat program that you can talk back and forth within Facebook.
Did you know that you can automate your messenger profile with a bot so that it can respond to inquiries from your Facebook business page and even understand requests and give people specific information they ask for.
It can be use to broadcast informational messages to your messenger contacts and even setup with a drip campaign that can create a whole set of pre-created posts that will be sent out over a schedule. This schedule can be run over days or weeks.
You can even setup your messenger bot to be on your website to answer questions when visitors come to your site.
I talked about chatbots in an article on Chatbot Marketing and mentioned the benefits they can provide to your business.
This is just scratching the surface of getting traffic to your website. If you would like help in getting traffic to your site you can contact us here at Allied Pixels to get a full marketing audit of your website.