One of the most powerful ways to increase your bottom line is to generate high traffic for your website.
There are over 1.16 billion websites that exist today. Seriously, go check out the climbing numbers right now.
Don’t be intimidated by these high numbers, though.
You shouldn’t forget that not all of these websites are generating high traffic.
Whether your website is e-commerce (meaning your business is exclusively electronic), promoting your store front, or not selling anything at all, website traffic is extremely valuable.
The first place to start with your business is providing an excellent service or product. Then build a beautiful, well-structured website.
Ever heard of a sales funnel? It’s a representation of how a business gets, and loses, customers.
Here is a quick explanation:
Think of a funnel that you use in the kitchen: widest at the top and narrowest at the bottom. The widest portion represents marketing, the middle represents interested customers, and the bottom represents actual customers.
This same concept applies to generating high traffic for your website.
The top of the sales funnel, marketing, is also known as the “awareness” stage. Getting as many eyes on your fantastic website as possible will only help you recruit customers, clients, or visits (if your website is making money through featuring ads, etc).
Here are some of the best ways to get high traffic for your website.
Ten Ways to Generate High Traffic for Your Website
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
In today’s competitive market, anyone with an online business or website needs to know about search engine optimization.
In order to get high traffic to your website, you need to be ranking in the first few sites that come up when people search for your product or services.
One of the ways you can do that by making sure your site features valuable, relative, quality content. That content needs to contain keywords and phrases related to your business.
SEO generates organic traffic to your site.
Google is smart. It filters out plagiarized and repetitive content so make sure your content is original.
The higher traffic your site has will also help rank it higher and higher.
There are businesses out there to track and improve your SEO. Consider making room for one of these in your business’s budget or better still learn to do it yourself. Your return on investment (ROI) will make the expense well worth it.
Related post: Off Page SEO
2. Social Media
As you are probably aware by now, social media is not just social anymore, it is a valuable marketing platform.
If you are not using social media for your business, you’re wasting a great opportunity to generate high traffic.
Depending on your product or service, your business should have some or all of the following free social media profiles:
- Snapchat
- Youtube
On these profiles, you can get your business in front of new customers easily by allowing people to share your products, services, news, announcements, blog posts, etc.
You can easily interact with current and previous customers, and allow them to advertise for you through sharing, liking, and otherwise promoting your business.
You can also purchase ads for your business on these sites if you have room to pay for advertising in the budget.
3. Email List
Email lists are a fantastic way to get right in the inbox of your customers.
Generate an email list organically by allowing people to sign up on your website and social media feeds. Also automatically opt them in when they make a purchase. This practice is common and those who want to opt out can simply uncheck the box.
Don’t annoy away customers with over-use of an email list, however. Email valuable marketing such as product announcements and promotions.
Keep emails in line with the short attention spans of today, and don’t forget to have them formatted for mobile devices. According to Campaign Monitor, 53% of emails are opened on phones.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay per click is a way to feature an ad on another website that you pay for every time it is clicked on. This is a good system to make sure you are getting value for your ad.
This is a good investment for a lot of companies because it gets your brand on other high traffic websites. (You will obviously want to choose sites that have a similar target demographic to yours).
5. Blogging
Content, content, content keeps your brand relevant and improves your SEO.
Not sure what to blog about?
Promote your products and ways to use them. Look at your product reviews and notice common themes. Research your competitors that have high traffic and their product reviews. Find out what is relevant to your target customers and
Find out what is relevant and interesting to your target customers.
For example, let’s say you own a company that sells succulents:
Feature a blog post on how to care for the most common types of succulents.
Write a post about 5 signs that your plant has root rot and how to solve it.
Create an article on the ways succulents brighten up your home or office or make great gifts or creative ways to plant them.
Get creative and post consistently.
6. Promotional Items
Don’t shy away from giveaways. Everyone loves freebies. Consider including a sample of another product with every purchase. Several companies like Sephora and Lush do this technique. It works.
Send out promotional items as a follow-up to past customers that you want to retain. One idea could be a pen that serves as a business card. You could also send out a relevant product: if you sell coffee, send out a logoed coffee mug!
You could also offer promotions or discount codes in your emails and social feeds. This will encourage both high website traffic and return customers.
7. Make Your Website Sleek and Interactive
Like mentioned earlier in the concept of a sales funnel, once you get your high traffic customers to your site, you want to keep them engaged.
Have a professional looking site that can be viewed on all digital platforms easily and comprehensibly.
Consider featuring quizzes, classes, surveys that fit with your brand. These and other interactive materials will help you get your visitors to both enjoy and promote your website.
8. Guest Posts
Find other companies and websites with similar audiences to feature your content on. A great way to do this is to also feature their content.
Guest posting can get those potential high traffic eyes on your posts, and provide backlinks.
What is a backlink, you ask? Wikipedia states: “A backlink is a reference comparable to a citation. The quantity and sources of backlinks for a web page are among the factors that Google’s PageRank algorithm evaluates in order to estimate how important the page is.”
That citation for the source as Wikipedia with a hyperlink to the page is a prime example of a backlink.
As stated, backlinks are great for SEO and a big reason behind the popularity of guest posting.
Guest posts are mutually beneficial, so why not?
9. Create Satellite Websites
You can create other websites to promote your main website. Feature backlinks and blog posts to help improve your main page’s rankings.
Don’t just build a duplicate of your current site. Satellite websites can be built on niches within your main business.
You should not try to hide that you own these other sites. In fact, disclosing that you run them as well can increase the traffic on all of them.
Creating a website does take a lot of effort, so this technique may not be right for everyone. In fact, just one website won’t really do the trick. Satellite websites are most effective when you make several of them and post content on them regularly as well.
Many bloggers use this method and swear it helps them with rankings. Well, maybe, but you could also run the risk of being slapped with a Google penalty. Use with caution!
10. Partner with Influencers
Influencers are really big right now. Influencers are the celebrities, Instagram models, Youtube stars, or otherwise icons in your business’s field.
Many of these people make a living by basically creating their own ad for your product.
For example, one of the big trends of late is men with beards.
The ones with a lot of followers profit off of it by being paid big bucks to post a picture or video or even just a tweet marketing a product.
A company that might reach out to them, such as a beard oil, clothing line or watch manufacturer, sees the value in advertising directly to their demographic.
Getting your product out in front of the massive followings of these influencers can lead to high traffic results and a great return on investment.
In Conclusion
In summary, generate high traffic for your website by staying on top of your stats, utilizing social media, following up with customers, embracing giveaways, and creating content consistently.
If all of this sounds great but you want to back up and learn the basics of your online business: check out the Let’s Work Online Getting Started page.
If you have any thoughts, questions, or concerns on starting, managing, or amping up your online business, feel free to leave a comment below.
Nice article. I really enjoyed it as I’m am struggling to get more visitors to my site. A lot of the methods you suggest I’m not really confident yet to do. But hopefully with time I’ll be brave:)
What do you think are the best social media accounts to have?
Yes I know it’s hard when you start Hollie, most bloggers have the same problem. So don’t get discouraged! Concentrate on doing your keyword research, writing your posts and carrying out the on-page SEO. Little by little you will become more confident and try some of the off-page methods. I use Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest for my social media. I concentrate on Google+ to get shares because it’s Google but to be honest I don’t know if it’s the best plan. Facebook ads are quite cheap and you can drive traffic to your website, so it’s definitely worth creating a page for your online business and trying this.
Good luck with your website,
Peter
Great article on how to get traffic to your website. Without traffic, you have zero chance of making a sale. You can have the best product in the World on the best website ever created and not make one sale because you have no traffic. People can’t buy what they can’t see. Thanks for the great article and tips!
Jack
You’re right Jack we all need traffic! When we start it’s hard to attract visitors but over time it builds. The most important point is to publish awesome content and carry out the on-page SEO for every article you post, to try and attract organic traffic. Once you are used to doing the on-page SEO it’s not very hard, but it can make a lot of difference to your search engine rankings. Once this is mastered you can move on to the other methods.
Thanks for your visit,
Peter
Hello,
thank you for sharing a very interesting article about ways to generate traffic to the website using simple but effective techniques. Obviously, there are a lot of ways to generate traffic, but not all of them works. But I know that techniques that you pointed out works because I try them out myself,
Hi Karlo,
There are several ways we can generate traffic to our websites but it’s best to start with the easiest methods – producing great content, getting your on-page SEO right and posting on social media. With these methods alone you can be successful and you are in complete control. If your content is outstanding you will start to get other websites linking back to you which is great.
Glad you’re having some success,
Peter
Hi Peter
I liked the idea of satellite sites, what I would like to know is, do satellite sites really help boost your link juice?
You know building a website is hard work, don’t you Peter, I’m having trouble as it is with my current website, it requires too much effort and there is also College on the side.
Creating a satellite site is really not on the table for me, what are some other ways I can generate high traffic, without spending a dime? I’m already leveraging social media, blogging and guest posting. How can I partner with influencers?
I would really appreciate some more information on all these points.
–Khanya
Thanks for your comment Khanya. Satellite sites can help boost your link juice but they are a lot of work, too much for me and today they may lead to a Google penalty, so I would concentrate on building out your main site. Yes, I know building a website is a lot of work but if you’re guest posting, using social media and blogging, you’re doing all the right things. I don’t know how long you have been building your site but be patient and keep adding quality content. To get backlinks from the influencers this post from Brian Dean might give you some ideas.
Best of luck and keep building your site,
Peter