Here is the question that I get asked more often than any other question.
How do I drive more qualified visitors to my website? Fast!
While every website, company and category is going to be different, here are seven strategies that I've used many times to drive traffic to mine and my clients' websites. And best of all, if you get working on them today, they'll start driving traffic tomorrow. Not all of them are free and some of them will take more work than others. If you want good results, you need to either pay good money or put in a really good effort. Driving qualified traffic to a website isn't easy, but it ain't rocket science either. And one more word of advice - before you get started, please make sure that you have Google Analytics (or any other sophisticated web tracking system) installed on your site.
So, in no particular order at all, here are seven tactics that can help drive traffic to your site immediately.
Participate in conversations on blogs
Start by reading ten different blogs relevant to your business, and get in the habit of leaving a comment on each blog at least once a week. Be smart about your commenting, and make sure you contribute actual thinking. Leave your url in your user profile (not embedded in your comment) and respond to any comments left in response to your comment. This will drive some traffic immediately, but most importantly you will build valuable relationships and traffic will continue to trickle in over time.
Resources:
- Google Blog Search (to help you find relevant blogs)
- Technorati (also a blog search engine, to help you find relevant blogs)
- Compete.com (to see how much traffic those blogs receive)
Offer bloggers to review your product
Now that you've identified and began building relationships with popular bloggers in your category, why not give them the opportunity to test run your products, services or website. If it's relevant to their audiences, they likely won't be opposed to it. Of course, you should expect for them to write an honest review and fully disclose that you offered the product for review. You don't have to pay bloggers for this but rather should look at this as an online PR strategy. Just be aware that if they don't like your product, you'll likely receive a negative review. If that's the case, learn from the feedback and improve what you can. Otherwise, you'll appreciate driven by this tactic and the incoming link should also bolster your long-term SEO efforts. As an example, the friendly folks over at DogPause have done a fantastic job with this as many popular dog bloggers have reviewed their dog bowl.
Write a guest blog entry
Ok, one more strategy that involves the medium of blogging. Sorry, but it's a lot easier and impactful to participate and work with blogs, then to try and get your neighborhood newspaper to work with you. Next, I want you to think of some blog entry ideas that you could pitch to one of those ten bloggers above. They usually appreciate the free content and as long as you're contributing valuable content (no, not just about your products), there's a good chance you'll get to guest blog. If you have contributed to the blog as an active commenter, your chances are even better. Last but not least, don't just point readers back to your site. If you have a blog, point them to your blog. Otherwise, point them to your Twitter feed.
Get Twittering
By now just about everybody has heard of Twitter. It's a medium where people tweet about what they're doing right now in 140 characters or less. If people like what you tweet about, they'll follow you and the more people that follow and actually listen to you, the more traffic you can drive to whatever you might link to from your Twitter feed. So if you're selling a dog bowl that's mostly used by larger breeds, then why not start a Twitter feed that is about news and tips for dog owners of larger breeds. If you post good content you'll build an audience, and whenever you post a tweet that links to your site; traffic will follow. Also, oftentimes your followers will re-tweet your posts and therefore expose you to their audiences. On some of my sites, I see up to 20% of my traffic coming from Twitter.
Write a viral article
The power of web 2.0 sites like Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Stumbleupon is truly impressive. I've had clients featured in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, yet the amount of visitors that drove crumbled in comparison to a first page appearance on Digg.com. It's not uncommon to generate 20,000 - 50,000 unique visitors in a day when featured on a popular social web property. So, why not write a very good piece of content, host it on your site (or your blog if you have one) and then use all your social media muscle to get it hyped up on those social sites. How do you do that? It's all about writing great content - content that people pass on to their friends because it's really interesting, valuable or humorous. The folks over at Billshrink seem to be doing an exceptional job in writing these kinds of articles, such as The Summer of '69 vs. the Summer of '09 (1355 Diggs so far) and How the Recession Changed the Game of Monopoly (1717 Diggs so far).
Start a Google Adwords campaign
You might have already done this, as the benefit of advertising on search engines seems fairly obvious. But if you haven't already, then now is still a good time to get started. While Google Adwords has grown to be very competitive and more expensive than in the past, advertising on Google is still a great way to a) drive traffic immediately, b) learn what kind of keywords people are using to search for your products and c) learn how visitors behaved on your site. I like to set-up simple goals in Google Analytics (filling out contact form, subscribing to email newsletter, making a purchase) against which I can measure the success of all my online marketing initiatives but especially the ones that I am paying for. Oh, and while you're at it, you should also turn on Google Adwords' content placements which allow you to run your ads on third party sites that are contextually relevant to the keywords used in your ads. It's usually cheaper than Google's search product and once you've tested a number of sites, you can scale the ones that bear a positive ROI for you.
Advertise on Facebook
Advertising on Facebook is a much newer, and yet to be completely exploited by online marketers, advertising strategy that I've seen work very well. Facebook allows you to target your campaign based on very niche user profiles. Therefore this is a much more traditional method of buying ad space and the people who see your ads are probably less likely to want to purchase your product compared to somebody who is searching for your product on Google. With that being said, Facebook ads are way cheaper (it's a new system, no public API, smaller user base) and you can test a ton of different ad variations that are easy to set-up and measure. So, give Facebook a whirl, test like crazy and try to find the ads and audiences that produce a positive return on your investment.
There are obviously many more strategies that you can use to generate qualified visitors for your website, but these seven are tested and true. Some have more potential to drive traffic than others, which depends on your business. Pick the ones that are right for your business and get started.
What tactics do you use to drive traffic to your site?