Generating traffic to your business website requires significant marketing through spending your own time to attract visitors, paying for visitors directly, or hiring helpers to do the work required to get the visitors. Getting a top spot on Google isn’t free — even your time has value.
Having said that, here are seven core categories to generate traffic to your website:
Free search: With all the hype suggesting how much time people spend tweeting on Twitter or posting on Facebook, just about everyone who uses the Internet still searches for something on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing every day. Creating new content for your website weekly or even daily needs to be a primary focus of your traffic-building plan.
Although time and effort have a cost, many search engines and directories don’t require you to pay a fee to get listed. Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are good examples. Simply find out what phrases people are searching for, and then add content to your website to address those issues. Search engines will find your pages of content through automated processes developed by the search engine companies.
By getting new pages of your website visible on the preceding search engines alone, you have the potential of being in front of more than 80 percent of all search engine traffic. Optimizing your site content can help you appear higher in search engine results.
Using other people’s traffic: After you’ve had some experience creating content for your own website and getting some search engine positioning for those pages or blog posts, you’re ready to make use of one of the hottest ways to build targeted traffic to your website: Write a guest blog for a business that complements yours, but doesn’t compete with it.
Always include a link to your own website as part of the blog post and follow up with comments.
One of the hot traffic generators of today is to take guest blog posting to a higher level by conducting a blog tour. Line up 10, 15, or 50 blog dates so that readers can sequentially follow you from blog to blog. The blog owners all benefit from the shared traffic from other blogs and your own promotions.
Paid search: With the growth in development of measurement tools (such as Google Analytics, for example), paid search has become an essential form of promotion for nearly every product or service.
Social networking: Participating in discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn are proven website traffic-generating processes. Remember to always link to your website. Internet users will always search for and exchange content. You just have to find out what they’re searching for and supply them with unique content.
Face-to-face networking: Some people still enjoy meeting face to face for their networking. Meetup helps with the organizing, scheduling, and promoting of such groups. So, you can easily find many niche or industry-targeted networking groups to attend that meet regularly in person.
Consider starting your own Meetup group! It’s a great way to network with potential customers.
Other offline efforts: Don’t overlook your opportunities to use offline resources to promote your website. Radio talk shows are always looking for guest experts. Offer a giveaway to listeners every time you’re on the radio.
Networking events, associations, leads groups, and schools and churches are always looking for interesting speakers to deliver short, 30-minute messages to their audience. Deliver content-rich information and suggest a visit to your website for a free download or for more information about your company. And, always provide the opportunity for people to be added to your e-mail list.
Referrals: Of course, no one is a higher-quality visitor than a personal referral. Referrals will spend more time on your website and are much more likely to buy from you because they have reached a certain level of trust in you because of the referral.