Countless brands are focusing their efforts on getting higher conversion rates. Don’t get me wrong. This is extremely important for the overall success of your company. For the most part, conversions typically translate into dollars. They also encourage sales and add to your bottom line. However, before people can convert, they first need to find your website. This is why it’s essential that you drive more traffic to your website.
Growing a website flat out takes time. It requires consistent sharing of superb content for months on end. Usually, it takes most people about two years to get big. This means that your growth is slow and steady, just as the traffic to your site is slow and steady. This strategy ultimately works, but it’s always nice to get a big jump in traffic every now and then. This is why it is vital that you drive more traffic to your website.
On that note, here are 25 tips that will help you drive more traffic to your website!
1.) Drive more traffic to your website via your email list
There are a ton of new content marketing strategies out there today. So it can be tempting to ignore the timeless approaches – email marketing being one of them. Email marketing needs to be part of your advertising base foundation. Over the years, email marketing has withstood the test of time. That being said, a strong email list is still one of the most profitable marketing techniques.
I mean, common, take a look at how email marketing compares to other direct marketing tactics:
Email marketing is typically inexpensive and delivers a high ROI. Furthermore, email marketing is also flexible. There are lots of different ways for brands to leverage their email subscribers. One of these methods includes driving more traffic to your website. You can also encourage your email subscribers to share your content with friends and family. This typically results in leads from new website visitors and your current subscribers.
Furthermore, email marketing software makes it easy for you to track and analyze the effectiveness of your email campaigns. If you see a spike in website traffic, you’ll know exactly where it came from without making any assumptions. You must take advantage of these analytics. Make sure you track the source of new traffic to measure the effectiveness of each email you send. Doing so will also show you how you’re getting new leads.
2.) Increase your social media presence
In this day and age, you cannot afford to ignore social media. This is especially true if you want to drive more traffic to your website. Social media usage has increased dramatically over the past few years worldwide. Just take a look at the user growth across social networks worldwide:
Simply having a Facebook profile isn’t enough these days. You need to make sure that you have an active presence on other platforms, such as:
- YouTube
- Snapchat
Do more than create a profile. Post content regularly!
Try your utmost best to garner more followers. Create posts that encourage engagement. Respond directly to your followers to entice communication. These actions make it far easier for you to generate new leads.
Just because someone follows your brand on social media doesn’t mean they visit your website. But now, you can post links to your social pages to drive more traffic to your website.
Frequently posting links will increase the chances of you getting an increase in clicks and traffic.
3.) Start blogging to drive more traffic to your website
Making one should be a top priority if your site doesn’t already have a blog. It doesn’t matter what business you have or what industry you’re in. Blogging is, without question, one of the best ways to increase website traffic and generate new leads.
Take a moment to analyze your brand. What exactly are you offering? Is it important enough for people to visit your site daily? How about once a week? Realistically, the answer is likely no.
However, if you have a blog, it gives people a reason to keep coming back to your site. Blogs also help improve your SEO rankings because you regularly add new content to your page. We’ll discuss this in greater detail later on.
As a result of your improved SEO strategy, your organic leads will also increase. The more often you post, the more traffic and leads you’ll get. It’s that simple. In short, SEO is a great way to drive more traffic to your website.
Take a look at how publishing frequency impacts the results bloggers see on their websites:
As you can see, there’s a strong correlation between posting frequency and “strong results.”
You can even pair your blogging tactics with the other previously mentioned strategies.
Every time you write a new blog post, email it to your subscribers. It’s also a wise idea to post about it on social media. Doing so allows you to generate new leads and drive more traffic to your website.
4.) Produce video content to drive more traffic to your website
This isn’t really a secret, but consumers want more videos from the brands that they follow. This is why 87% of marketers produce video content. Videos yield a 157% increase in organic search traffic as well. Furthermore, 46% of consumers take action after watching a video advertisement.
Give the people what they want. Your business should have a YouTube channel setup, and you need to publish new videos regularly. You don’t need to spend a king’s ransom to produce video content. It’s pretty easy to create and edit your videos in-house.
People prefer to watch a video about a product than read about it. This is why marketers say video content helps them drive more traffic to their websites.
It’s pretty simple; you flat out need to have videos on your website.
Add videos to your emails and social media pages. You can even embed video links into your blog posts.
This is a strategy that many marketers have been using for years now.
Ultimately, videos will help you generate new leads and increase website traffic. If you’re not already producing videos, you need to start as soon as possible to maximize your reach.
5.) Broadcast live videos to drive more traffic to your website
Live video streaming is a relatively new practice when it comes to marketing. However, multiple social platforms (Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram) have incorporated the feature. All of these are ways for you to engage with your audience. This also relates to the previous discussion about having an active social media presence. Live streams are a great way to drive more traffic to your website. One tactic involves directing viewers to a landing page, which you can use to generate new leads. This essentially kills two birds with one stone.
Live video streaming ultimately has a positive impact on sales:
You should go live regularly to benefit fully from this tactic.
You’ll gain a strong audience of viewers. Doing so will increase the chances of driving more traffic to your website and ultimately generate leads.
6.) Use influencer marketing to establish credibility
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but a credible website tends to generate more traffic. One of the best ways to develop credibility is to leverage your relationships with influencers. You can approach this task in several different ways.
One such method is to use celebrities to endorse your brand. This often proves successful since these individuals are already known and trusted. Working with a celebrity shows that your brand is legitimate. Their endorsement will also reach a wider audience. The problem is it’s obvious to consumers that these celebrities are getting paid to pitch your products or services.
An alternative solution is to engage with micro-influencers to increase your credibility. One of the top reasons I support using micro-influencers is their high engagement rates with their followers.
If you can get these individuals to post about your products, you will undoubtedly drive more traffic to your website. Furthermore, your new leads will more likely trust your brand if the recommendation comes from a social influencer. Engaging with micro-influencers will provide a smoother road toward generating conversions and driving higher profits.
7.) Improve your SEO to drive more traffic to your website
Search engine optimization is a great way to generate leads and drive more traffic to your website. Implementing some of these other lead-generation strategies will also help your SEO. By using tools to improve your SEO, such as keyword research, you’ll garner more traffic via organic search results.
When someone is looking for something online, whether a product or service, they’ll probably start with a Google search. 85% of consumers use Google to help them find information about products before they make a purchase. Someone doesn’t even need to know that your company exists now. However, you can still get them to visit your website if you master the art of SEO. It’ll be easier for you to generate a new lead now that they’ve found your site via a search engine.
8.) Leverage long-tail SEO
Who doesn’t want to rank for “SEO tips” or “social media hacks”? Thought so. Everyone under the Sun aims to rank on the first page for these phrases! While these search phrases are highly lucrative, they are extremely difficult to rank for.
On the other hand, long-tail keywords are far less competitive and will drive most of your traffic. The vast majority of websites generate most of their traffic from long-tail phrases. This doesn’t mean I don’t aim to rank for any head terms (single/two-word searches). It just means that I rank for more long-tail phrases. You probably experience the same since most sites rank for dozens of head terms and hundreds of long-tail keywords.
9.) Drive more traffic to your website by writing ‘ultimate Guides’
Ultimate guides are a great way to generate more traffic since people like to share them via social media.
Here are a few tips for your first ultimate guide:
- Subscribe to hundreds of blogs in your field: Get to know what is happening in your industry. Then wait for that single piece of eye-opening content nobody has blogged about. Once you’ve identified your topic, create an ultimate guide!
- Read posts on your topic: Once you have an idea about your ultimate guide, see if there are others. If there are, how can you differentiate yours from the rest of the pack? Can you combine some of the current guides to make an ultimate guide that is unlike the rest?
- Provide a ton of screenshots: Even if the topic of your ultimate guide is pretty basic, provide screenshots. The visuals break up the content and help people scroll through it. If the topic is complex, take screenshots of the individual steps.
- Present case studies: An ultimate guide comes to life when you share real-life examples. People tend to believe what you’re saying when you provide credible examples.
Once you’ve produced your guide, it’s time to promote it. If you lack a large following, you may want to offer to share it on a popular blog.
10.) Write a high-quality guest post
One of the easiest ways to increase traffic is to write a guest post for a popular blog. This, of course, is easier said than done.
Your first step is to build a relationship with the blog’s owner. Thanks to social media, connecting with said bloggers is relatively easy.
- You can contact them via Twitter and comment on their site. Make sure you use their Twitter handle, so they know what you’re doing.
- From there, you’ll want to head to their blog and leave high-quality comments on their posts.
- You can also forge a new relationship through a pre-existing connection. Contact one of the writers who has published on the blog before and ask them for an introduction. This will give your credibility when contacting the blog owner.
- Meet them face-to-face. It’s flat-out awesome when people strike up a conversation in person.
11.) Interlink your posts to drive more traffic to your website
An XML sitemap is a great starting point to make sure Google can index all the content on your site. However, it’s also a good idea to ensure that people can do the same. Ask yourself – if they’re reading this post right now, what do they do at the end of the article?
If you cannot answer, your site lacks “stick-ability,” which keeps users involved and on the site longer. This, in turn, improves your relevancy score with Google and ripples across to your SERP rankings. Buzzfeed is a superb example of a site with stick-ability. At the end of each article, there are more related articles to whittle away at your productivity.
12.) Comment on other blogs to drive more traffic to your website
To most people, blog commenting is an old-fashioned tactic that no longer works to build backlinks from Google.
In reality, they’re right, and it likely won’t work. However, that’s not the point.
Setting aside just 15 minutes a day to comment on a handful of respected blogs in your industry will get your name out there and drive traffic to your site and forge relationships with other commenters and the blog owner.
Don’t just comment, “me too” or “I learned a lot from this post,” but rather comment on specific elements of the post. Perhaps the author mentioned several helpful resources, and you’d like to add another that they may have missed. Maybe your clients have struggled with a similar problem, and this is how you solved it.
Meaningful, well-thought-out blog comments can also convey that you have the depth of knowledge and expertise on the topic that makes you a valuable contributor to the industry. Who knows, perhaps your blog comment can lead to a guest posting position within that blog?!
Naturally, you’ll ideally want to be one of the first to comment, as the more comments come flying in, the more your well-crafted response will sink to the bottom. To help with this, there’s “If This Then That” or IFTTT.
IFTTT makes use of “recipes” to perform pointed, user-specified actions. For example, “If I post a photo to Instagram, save it to my Dropbox.“
What does this have to do with blog commenting?
Great question! Well, there’s an extremely helpful recipe that will send you an SMS whenever there’s a new blog post on a blog you’re following. Joining IFTTT is free, and there are hundreds of recipes to automate just about anything that you can imagine.
13.) Forum Commenting
Commenting in forums may seem medieval. However, as with blog commenting, the goal is not to generate backlinks. The real goal is to make yourself an essential, respected community member.
Nearly every forum has its knights in shining armor – members who contribute consistent, helpful, or new information that the community finds helpful. Some of these individuals may even become moderators.
While your status won’t grow overnight, taking just 15-20 minutes each day to browse forums and look for unanswered topics you can answer or posts you can add to will work worders towards improving your reputation.
The beauty of forums is that there is one for just about every topic, ranging from knitting to yodling. Wikipedia maintains a list of some of the more prominent forums. Still, you can also find relevant forums via a quick Google search for your chosen topic, plus the word forum/bulletin board/message board.
Once you generate a list of viable forums, it’s important to check several points – the primary point being when the latest post was made to that forum. Nobody wants to contribute to a ghost town, and one of the most troubling issues forum owners face is getting enough tractions to get people registered and keep them coming back.
14.) Market on LinkedIn to drive more traffic to your website
LinkedIn is its unique community, just as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest have their own collective microcosms of rules, expectations, and guidelines for behaving and posting. Since LinkedIn caters to a more professional scene, it requires a more polished marketing plan.
However, due to its targeted audience, LinkedIn can connect you with other “fire-starters” who can help you leverage your existing platform and grow your site beyond anything you could do strictly on your own.
HubSpot offers an excellent cheat sheet guide to getting the most out of LinkedIn, including third-party apps and browser plugins you can download to help you import your email contacts, take advantage of the new Company Pages design section and target your updates to specific groups.
LinkedIn & 3rd party apps
Certain third-party apps let you connect your WordPress blog to LinkedIn, leverage industry-specific applications, and find events near you to help you build your network.
LinkedIn’s internal advertising network lets you accurately target your ads – including specific job titles, company size, job functions, and more. You can even access LinkedIn statistics for groups you’re not a member of – this enables you to determine which groups will potentially bring you the best return on your investment of time and research.
According to LinkedIn’s internal research, posts made in the morning earn a more significant response than those made at other times throughout the day. This is why it’s best to use a social media management app such as HootSuite or one of the countless other programs available to schedule your updates accordingly.
15.) Create an infographic
You seriously cannot mention Pinterest without mentioning infographics in the same breath. These visual breakdowns of statistics and information, when done correctly, can be a huge traffic magnet on both the popular pinning site, as well as your website.
Doing the research
Conducting the research and gathering the statistics will be the most time-consuming part of the infographic creation process. However, several sites can help streamline the process. Two of my favorite resources are Statistic Brain and the Pew Research Center. Statistic Brain provides significant figures on everything from food to sports. The Pew Research Center offers a detailed look into popular topics, including politics, religion, and global and social trends.
Crediting your sources
Finding and citing the most recent sources for your statistics is crucial to creating your infographic. Why? Well, many sites often post questionable stats as facts. An excellent piece includes examples of what to do and what not to do when properly sourcing your figures.
Creating content that people want
The next step (and where most infographics go awry) is that the information you’re visualizing must be the kind of content people want to read about. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but someone created an infographic about this topic (see below).
Beyond these tips, however, there’s little information on how to go about creating the infographic itself if you’re looking to make it yourself. Thankfully, there are several tools out there that can help. One of my personal favorites is Visme. Visme starts with themes as a starting point for designing your infographics., You can then drag and drop individual elements for your stats/details.
Which topics work best with infographics?
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but piling stats for creating an infographic is never a good plan. Instead, certain types of data and topics excel more in this format than others. A few of these include:
- Comparisons: How does one thing compare to another? Have the changes made a noticeable difference? Why, or why not?
- Relationships/Cause & Effect: How are things interrelated? Has something happened to cause something else? How has a change impacted your business?
- Time: Timelines of inventions or processes in your industry can show how practices and strategies have evolved.
- Differences: How does one group or segment react to another?
What topics should you avoid?
Certain types of information also do not work well in the infographic format. A few categories include aesthetics, feelings, emotions, and in many cases, humor…even if to prove a point.
Lastly, if explaining the process is more cumbersome than helpful, or if the infographic is more of a massive promotional poster than something useful, it won’t be well received by your audience.
My infographic is ready. Now what?
Even after you’ve finished creating your infographic, you still have some leg work. The next task is to promote it and get traffic to share and re-pin it. For Pinterest, you’ll want to try out the Social Image Hover WordPress plugin or incorporate Pinterest Widgets.
Next, you’ll want to share your fresh infographic across various popular infographic galleries, such as Visual.ly and Daily Infographic.
Finally, you can make the best stats you’ve discovered “tweetable” on Twitter. ClickToTweet lets you copy and paste a stat in a box and create a clickable link that auto-fills in the person’s Twitter message area with that Tweet. It’s a great way to share mind-blowing stats and showcase your infographic on social media.
