Getting more visitors is always one of the biggest challenges if you own a website. If you are trying to promote your business online, build a brand or spread any type of message, you must find ways to boost website traffic. There are many ways to accomplish this. The methods you choose will depend on your goals, skills and budget. Ideally, you should use as many methods as possible. Let’s look at seven of the most effective ways to generate quality traffic.
1. Buy Traffic
The simplest and fastest way to boost website traffic is to purchase paid advertising. The main drawback of this method is that it’s the most expensive. On the other hand, if you are careful with your budget you can use advertising to build targeted traffic in a short time. Pay-per-click advertising, such as with Google Adwords, Facebook ads and many other platforms. In general, paid ads are more effective at getting people to ask for more information or join a mailing list than to sell products directly.
2. Submit to Aggregator Sites
One free or inexpensive way to boost website traffic is to submit links to content aggregator sites. This is good for generating backlinks as well as for getting traffic directly. Popular news sites like Reddit and Digg, which will accept just about any type of submission that isn’t blatant spam. There are also more selective sites, like alltop.com, which only lists what it considers to be highly relevant content.
Blogengage.com is another site that can provide you with traffic and links, but you have to pay to post there. There are many other aggregator sites as well. Find one or two that work for you and submit content to them regularly. You can build followings on these sites.
3. Build a Social Media Following
Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others can be valuable sources of traffic. Focus on a few social sites that are appropriate for your type of website. Pinterest, for example, is very good for visual content, so it’s perfect if you are marketing art, clothing, jewelry or something else where people want to see images. LinkedIn is designed for business-to-business marketing.
It’s not enough to simply join social media sites. If you want to use them to boost traffic, you’ll have to be very active. This means posting lots of quality content. You also have to monitor these sites and respond to questions and comments. If you’re using multiple social media platforms, you may want to investigate tools such as Hootsuite to automate some of the tasks.
4. Become a Guest Blogger
Having articles published on other blogs in your niche is another effective way to boost website traffic. The best way to do this is to search for popular, high traffic blogs that are on the same or similar topic as your website. You will, of course, include a link to your site at the end of the article.
If you follow the latest SEO news and analysis, you may have heard that Google no longer values guest blogging or even penalizes it. This is not, however, quite true. Google has been cracking down on low quality links. As long as you are getting links and traffic from sites that Google considers to be relevant and high quality, you can get as much out of guest blogging now as ever before. It’s not like Google has people reading posts and separating them into ones written by the site owner and by guest bloggers. Google focuses on the quality of the content and the site. Therefore, you should only do this for blogs that publish quality content and get a decent amount of traffic.
5. Make Your Content Visually Interesting
The web is becoming more visual all the time. Images, videos, memes and infographics are more likely to be shared than blog posts that have nothing but text. You should take this into consideration when planning content for your website. There are many ways to make your posts more visually appealing. You could post your own images and videos.
You can share relevant videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites. You can share images, memes and infographics as long as you have the right to use them or give proper credit. This doesn’t mean you should only publish visual content, though. It’s best to mix it up and give your readers a variety of formats. This allows you to reach the widest possible audience.
6. Target a Variety of Keywords
Keywords make it easier for visitors to find your site. You should be targeting a variety of keywords, both popular ones and long tails. Long tail keywords are less popular, more specific terms that are easier to rank for in the search engines. You don’t get a huge amount of traffic from these keywords, but if you use lots of them it all adds up.
To come up with more ideas for keywords, use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner. You can also check Amazon to see what book titles and products are popular in your niche. This can provide you with ideas for long tail keywords. It’s important to use keywords in your headlines or post titles. You should also be sure to use them for your page titles and your general website description. If you use WordPress, you can get plugins that make it easy to get more out your keywords. SEO by Yoast, for example, helps you set up the meta data for all of your posts.
7. Interview Leaders in Your Field
Even if you aren’t yet well known in your industry, you can gain traffic by interviewing leaders and influencers who have a large following. You can conduct interviews in any number of ways. The easiest method is to send the interviewee a list of questions via email. It’s better, however, if you can conduct a live interview on video or on a podcast.
Regardless of the format, interviewing influencers in your field is a way to leverage the fans of the people you’re interviewing. After someone is interviewed, he or she is likely to share the link with fans and followers, which can provide you with a nice burst of traffic.