Learning to build traffic to your website is one of the most important parts of making money online. The more people you can get to visit your site, the more money you can potentially make.
The primary reason why people fail online is that they don’t generate enough traffic to their website. Many people just give up because of this. This is unfortunate because there are simple methods to attract large numbers of people to your site. It likely won’t happen overnight (though it can!) but if you invest the time working on the right method, it will reward you in the end.
These simple traffic attracting methods are great for new websites and even long running blogs. It lets you use your time wisely to advertise your presence without costing you any money!
The bottom line is all about saving money wherever you can!
If you are fortunate and have money that you can invest in advertising for your website then great, you will be able to attract traffic in many different ways.
If however, you are just starting out and need people to come and visit your site, then this strategy is perfect for you!
Make the most of Social Media, Free Marketing, Content & Videos!!!
1. Social Media Marketing
I’m sure you have heard of Twitter! You may already have a personal twitter account that you are addicted to, perhaps you have never considered going on it before.
Twitter is a revolutionary social media application that allows people to communicate across the globe. Admittedly, a lot of this communication is idle chit-chat and gossip, but it can be utilised as a powerful tool. The recent democratic uprising in the middle-east is said to have been organised via twitter and other social media.
Now I’m sure that most of you won’t be planning anything on that revolutionary scale, but I hope this demonstrates the powerful reach that Twitter can have.
You can view twitter as an amazing marketing tool that can enable you to communicate with existing and new people that would be interested in your website.
So, for starters you need to set up a twitter account for your website. Find or create a great profile picture and write a short descriptive bio that explains what your website is about. With Twitter, you only have a limited amount of characters, so make them count!
For example, a website about gardening could promote themselves through twitter. They could create a new account under the name ‘amateurgardeners’. A photo of a flower could be used as the profile picture and the short bio could be “Teaching amateurs to be better gardeners and grow their own food!”. Something along those lines, so that anybody that stumbles upon the Twitter account is in no doubt what it is about.
The next step is to start following people. Don’t just jump in and start following anybody! You need to follow people that are relevant to your niche. Find some of the biggest names in your niche and follow them AND whoever they are following. This way you are easily targeting potential visitors of your website. They will see that ‘amateurgardeners’ is now following them and seeing that the two of you have a common interest, so they may follow you back. Don’t be disheartened if not everyone follows you back straight away, the ones that do will be interested in your niche.
Time to start tweeting! There are loads of people that have twitter accounts, but don’t tweet anything. They shouldn’t complain if they are not getting enough traffic because they are not putting in the effort to engage with their audience. The more often you tweet, the more traffic you will get. But it’s not just about frequency, its about quality. You need to tweet regularly about your niche, tweeting recommendations, tips, news and most importantly what’s happening on your website. There is no point in ‘amateurgardeners’ tweeting about celebrity gossip!
For more Twitter tips, read our post – ‘10 Twitter Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Site‘
For obvious reasons, most people tweet when they are awake. If you think about it, when you are asleep you are missing out on millions of people on the other side of the world that could be interested in what you have to say. Luckily, there is software available like MarketMeTweet & Tweet Adder that allows you to automate your tweets so that they can be broadcast 24 hours a day.
There are a variety of automated software on the market that allows you to manage your twitter account more economically. Programs like MarketMeTweet, Tweet Adder and HootSuite make it easier to manage your Twitter account, follow, un-follow and automate tweets, saving you time that you can spend working on your website and thus, making more things to tweet about!
Check out our review of Tweet Adder – ‘Tweet Adder Review – How To Drive Traffic With Twitter‘
Facebook is another huge social media phenomenon that you can use to market your website. Just like twitter, many people have Facebook pages that they just don’t do anything with. They let them sit there not doing anything for them. They are missing out because Facebook can be used to attract huge numbers of traffic to their website. There is an estimated 600 million users worldwide, that’s almost 10% of the earth’s population! That is a lot of people that you could potential interact with.
To start with, you need to create a Fan page for your website. This is easy to do and takes minutes to set up. Just like Twitter, you need to assign a good quality profile picture and fill in some information about what your website is about. This is to help people know what your website is about and ultimately make them ‘Like’ you and follow links to your site.
Tell all your friends about your Fan page so that they will ‘Like’ your page. After that you will begin to see that your Facebook page starts to get a bit of notice.
To help increase this, you need to network with more people, preferably people who are interested in your niche. A good way to do this is to search for popular people that are related to your niche and become their ‘Friends’ and/or ‘Like’ their ‘Fan’ page. This way you are advertising your presence to people that you want to attract to your website. Some of these people will respond by becoming your friends and visiting your ‘Fan’ page to ‘Like’ it. You will begin to build a good following of people that are interested in what you have to say.
Once you have built yourself a bit of a reputation within your niche, you can try to attract more people. A good way to do this is to politely ask high profile people within your industry to become fans of your page. This way, when they do, all of their followers will see that they are friends with you, which will attract more people to you.
Obviously, just like Twitter, you need to be posting updates to your page regularly. Updates, news, upcoming events, workshop dates, etc. with links to your website. This will all help to drive traffic to your website.
Other Social Media Sites
There are countless other Social media and bookmarking sites that you can sign up to. Sites like Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Google+, etc., all have huge amounts of members. Creating your own profile/page on a number of these can help bring in more traffic to your site. Though the initial signing up process will take time, the benefits will be worth it.
You will need to add regular updates to these sites, linking back to your site, to make them worth it. You don’t however need to do all this manually. There are many software programs that you can use to automate the process. Software, such as OnlyWire allows you to post content to all of your sites within one window. This is great for posting links to your website when you upload a new article or video.
An added advantage of all these links means that not only do you have more chance of people following them to your website, you grow the amount of backlinks to your website. The more links you have pointing to your website on the internet, the better. This is because search engines like Google and Bing crawl the internet and find all of these links. The more of these links there are, the more the search engines will find them, which will result in the search engines listing you higher in their search rankings, creating more traffic for you!
2. Video Marketing
The world is video crazy. More and more people are watching videos online on popular sites like YouTube. This is helped even more by technology allowing us to watch videos on the go on our mobile phones.
People like watching videos because they are much more attractive than reading text. Many websites have cottoned on to this and have started to make videos for their website. This is a great way to promote your website to people as it offers them a more exciting way of finding out about you.
You can make loads of videos for the different aspects of your website. Many people just make short videos advertising themselves, which is great. But the best type of videos to make are ones that offer something to the viewer. The most common type of these are tutorial videos that people can follow. People find that these are easier to follow that text based tutorials because they can see for themselves how someone has done something. Of course this depends on the quality of the teaching!
Whatever type of video you decide to make, just remember that the aim is to get people to your site. A good way to do this is to display links to your website at both the beginning and end of each video as well as underneath the video where you can write descriptions. If you watch the video back and there is no reference to your website at all, then nobody will ever visit your site, making the whole video pointless!
There are many video websites out there that you can post yours onto, it doesn’t just have to be YouTube. The more publicity you can give your website through videos, the more traffic you are likely to get.
3. Blog Marketing
When you are just starting out, it can be difficult to build an online reputation. A method that you can use to increase your presence is blog marketing.
This method involves posting comments on other peoples blogs. Try to find blogs that are related to your niche and start commenting on them. It’s important that you don’t just blatantly promote your site! Posting “Come visit my site at www.vchdjwvcdjhvwjh.com” will not get you anywhere. More than likely, your post will be deleted as spam and you may be banned. Instead, post valuable content relating to the post that you are commenting on. Over time you will begin to build a reputation as someone that knows what they are talking about.
This is a great way of spending your free time. Not only are you reading up and researching information that you could write your own posts on for your website, but you are also building your reputation.
All that is very good, but wouldn’t it be better if you could actually post links to your website on other blogs. As stated before, doing this directly will get you banned, but there are ways of doing this.
Many blogs use ‘Disqus’ that let their readers add comments. The good thing about ‘Disqus’ is that you can add a link to your website under your profile name, this way whenever anybody clicks on your name, it will take them to your website. Again, you will need to be adding quality comments for people to do this, but this is a great way to increase your online presence. Therefore the more blog comments you make, the more links to your website there will be.
If you notice, we use Disqus for our comments. So feel free to leave your comments on our site and link back to your website.
4. Forum Marketing
This method is very similar to blog marketing and is great for a new start-up website. There are loads of online forums focusing on different subjects. If you can find an online forum that specialises in your niche, then you can begin to build an online presence.
By offering helpful information to others, you will grow your profile and be seen as an expert in your field.
Like many blogs, a lot of forums don’t let you place links to your site, or if they do they are links that can’t be clicked on. These are called No-follow Links. A quick search on a search engine for ‘Do-follow Forums‘ will reveal loads of forums that will be beneficial. These types of forums let you comment as normal, but let you add links in your signature that people can follow directly to your website.
These are great as people who value the information that you are posting will be able to click on a link to your website and follow you there. It also increases the amount of back links that you have pointing to your website, helping you rank higher on search engines.
Did you find this post helpful? If so, please spread the word about it, so others can also benefit. You can leave your comments below & feel free to ask any questions.
About Matt Smith
CommentLuv vs Disqus – Why I Don’t Use CommentLuv!