Attracting website traffic 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
Twitter
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!
Facebook
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. :)
