Marketing your business online widens your reach. To do that, you get a website and hosting, and maybe an email list.
These things cost money and after a few months, the expenses begin to add up.
You need to make money to pay for those services and you need customers to make that happen.
Getting traffic is the only way you can get those customers online, and here are 17 way you can get that done.
1. Promote Existing Content
Every marketing plan revolves around content. It may be short or long form, but you just can’t communicate on the net without content.
Getting content on your site will either be an expensive (if you’re hiring writers) or a time intensive (if you’re writing the content yourself) process.
Here’s a tip: You’d be combining lots of strategies and you don’t have time, if a campaign isn’t getting you results, shut it down.
Content promotion is a numbers game, not everyone would respond.
2. Blog Commenting
Marketers ruin everything. Back in the day, you could get a share or links to your post from popular bloggers from a basic outreach template.
Today, the more popular a blogger is, the more likely it is that they’re getting thousands of these templates daily.
So you need to find new ways to build relationships, and blog commenting is a very effective method.
Try this killer tip: Use white space and bullets in your comments, many readers are going to scan through and you want your comment prepared for that.
3. Quora
A great way to drive traffic to your site is publishing on a popular website and converting visitors to yours.
With over 50 million monthly page views, Quora is the site to get that done.
A Tip: Bold important statements. If you’re providing valuable answers on Quora, you can produce a mini blog post without noticing.
So look for those statements that summarize your point and make them bold but don’t overdo it. Emphasizing everything = emphasizing nothing.
4. Case Studies
People want to see results, so you need to get it across to them.
Your business site shouldn’t just be a platform for you to show what you “can,” try to display what you’ve actually “done” also.
Pro Tip: Don’t allow prospects to go searching for reviews of your product, ask for permission to use a third party review on your site and stick a link in your homepage that says “Read Case Studies.”
5. Infographics
You can do this yourself on Canva or hire a designer on places like Fiverr for it.
The reason it works is simple, many blogs are starved of content and some of them don’t want to go through the troubles with editing regular guest posts.
So you pitch an edutaining infographic, something that’s both educative and entertaining, and offer to write a short intro.
Killer Tip: Cite your sources. Many people forget to do this, or just fail to see this part as the link magnet of your infographic.
So get your sources at the end of your infographic and let them know when it’s published.
6. Broken Link-Building
Companies are closing shop every day, brands are constantly getting into other projects, so there are some quality web pages out there that are offline.
Because these quality pages were able to garner lots of links while they were updated, it’s an opportunity for you to grab those links now that they’re redirecting to a 404 page.
You get traffic when you’re mentioned on different sites on the web, and links or hyperlinks are the technical names for these mentions.
Use this tip: Try to grab broken link opportunities from sites that look like they were designed in the 90s. Most of the webmasters managing these sites don’t know a lot about marketing and are usually very happy when you try to build a relationship with them. One of these email templates will help.
7. Lead Magnets
Your search engine rankings can drop to zero if you’re considered to have gone against the rules.
Social media platforms are tweaking their algorithm daily so spending the whole day on just Facebook or just Twitter doesn’t work as much as it did in 2011.
The only traffic source you control is your email list, but you can’t promote to a ghost town, so you need to add people to that list.
Creating intriguing lead magnets is one way to get this done.
Try this: Offer a content upgrade.
Webmasters struggle with creating the perfect lead magnet for every post.
For a website with millions of monthly visitors, this shouldn’t be a problem, the site’s revenue would comfortably pay for the lead magnet.
For your small site that needs traffic, you shouldn’t be investing that kind of time or money, at least not now.
So do this instead- convert your ultimate guides and posts to short actionable checklists that visitors can start using, so anytime you’re done with a post, you already have a lead magnet ready.
8. Press Release
Are you launching a new blog? Product? Service? You should create a press release. Sending out a press release is a way to get the word out there about your business.
But marketers have spammed this tactic to death so you need a new trick you can use.
Here’s what you can do: Check out the site you’re pitching, it’s possible they have guidelines for these things. You don’t want to pitch a vegan blogger a press release about your new barbecue restaurant.
And make it easy for readers to contact you, mention your details at least twice in the post.
9. Affiliate or Referral Program
Affiliate marketing is a $7 billion industry, and it’s that big because the companies that are investing in it keep seeing results.
If you sell a product or a service, you have two options, you can do the hard work driving traffic to your site or you can use your relationships with industry leaders to do that.
Offering incentives in the form of affiliate commissions only hasten this relationship building process.
Try this: Hire an affiliate manager who has connections with super affiliates, it’ll save you lots of time getting to the top 1%.
10. Interviews
Interviewing industry leaders or who most people call influencers helps boost your credibility. If your interview has a large following, which is common with these leaders, they would help promote your interview to their fans.
And after a great interview, you can use that as samples to show off to other influencers that they have a lot to gain as your guest.
You need a great “Request for Interview” email to get on the radar of these leaders.
Try this: Smash all objections your interviewee will have, promise to do the hard work, convince them you won’t waste their time and try sending your questions and all other details ahead of time.
11. Webinars
Back in the day, if you wanted to host a conference or just a mini-seminar, your costs would include things like venue and sound equipment.
Today you can host it all on the web – in many cases for free.
Use this tip: Highlight what you want people to see on your site by using pointers, use this for any self-promotional aspects of the webinar, it’d help them pay attention.
12. Industry Conferences
Conferences are a great way to network with the top influencers in your market.
It’s the perfect opportunity to position yourself as an expert and if you’re so good at networking, you can line up speaking gigs for yourself at other conferences.
Do this: If you can, go very early so you’ll get familiar with the conference space. You’d also not miss valuable information and lateness is a bad first impression that’ll be a little difficult to fix.
13. Blog
Search engines, social media, everybody loves fresh and updated content. It establishes your business as an authority in your niche and people trust what you say.
To do this you need to produce lots of content and warehouse it on a platform where each piece of content is connected to the other.
Starting a blog is a great way to get this done and even better when you can harness it to convert readers into buyers.
Here’s a Pro Tip: Make snippets of your post that people can simply click to share on social media.
Have social share buttons or plugins on your site and something like click to tweet that converts sound bites on your post to traffic magnets.
14. Guest Blogging
Starting a blog is a great way to keep visitors that are already on your site busy. But getting these visitors on a newly launched site is next to impossible.
A witty shortcut you can use is offering to guest post on the top blogs in your niche. But these top bloggers have very strict processes, they don’t accept just anybody.
Here’s how to get in: Read their guidelines. Seriously, most people don’t.
Use advanced search queries to get to the guidelines page or if the blog has none, look at other guest posts on the site.
15. Search Engine Optimization
This is under the long-term strategies for getting traffic to your website. SEO changes, whether you’re doing on-page, off-page or technical SEO don’t give overnight results.
Use this tip: Hang around top SEO blogs and forums and make use of new tactics the moment you hear of them.
And no, I don’t mean gaming the system for short-term gains, it’s just that people are going to abuse a popular tactic after some time.
16. Medium
On Medium, anyone can share their ideas with the community and also interact with content put out by other members.
It’s like a blog where you can guest post but this time without a pitch and without having to obey any set guidelines, apart from spamming, by the host blogger.
You can win on medium by republishing posts on your blog. Search engines won’t see this as duplicate content, just leave a link to the original post and they’d still rank the original source.
Killer Tip: Use your medium tags. It’s an often missed opportunity by many authors. Medium tags are like YouTube or Google tags and will help position your content for users searching for the keyword topics.
17. Paid Ads
All traffic boosting techniques are divided into two sections, you either work to get free traffic or you pay to get traffic though you still need work to ensure you’re getting the highest return on your investment.
Almost every search engine and social platform sell ads. And there’s a very popular technique you can use, retargeting. Retargeting pixels solve this problem by having you place cookies on the browsers of visitors who are familiar with your content.
So you can use this information and advertise only to those who’ve seen your content and may most likely click on an ad that redirects to your site.
Every business craves attention on the internet. The struggle for that attention is the struggle for traffic.
Is this something you can win at?
Definitely, with the 17 techniques outlined in this post.
