How To Website Traffic
When it comes to building long-term traffic potential for your companies online marketing strategies, SEO and content marketing will typically offer you the most significant return on your investment (ROI). They have virtually no risk and naturally, lend themselves to compounding returns over time.
Of course, this is as long as you can execute them correctly. However, there is one major disadvantage to these particular strategies; they take a long time to get set up before you even start to see a positive ROI.
Building momentum from your SEO efforts can take months, and sometimes even years before you begin to see more traffic to your site, and when you are trying to boost your website traffic, you want to see results fast.
Gaining more traffic to your website doesn’t have to take months and years before you see a noticeable boost in the number of visitors. If you want to get traffic to your site fast, many options have proven to be extremely useful.
While each of the following methods will have its advantages and disadvantages, they work well if you are looking to boost traffic fast.
Guest Blogging
Many business owners are passionate about their products and services but believe that they lack the expertise in online marketing to gain visibility and increase their web traffic. In reality, you don’t need to be an expert in SEO or online marketing to succeed with your online marketing strategy.
To increase traffic and establish your brand as a credible authority in your industry, you need to participate in guest blogging.
Providing guest posts for other websites serves multiple functions when it comes to boosting web traffic. However, there are two which make them a selling point for those businesses that are looking for a quick boost to their website traffic.
First, when you guest post, you get connected with Internet authorities and subject matter experts who already have established audiences. For example, TechCrunch’s readership is in the millions, so if you can find a way to get your brand featured on their site, you can lean on that already established visibility to gain more viewers for your website.
Unfortunately, the more visible and popular the publisher is, the harder it will be for you to get featured on their site. So, when you are first starting, you want to set your sights on working with smaller websites first.
The second selling point of participating in guest posts is the possibility of gaining direct traffic. This happens when you provide content that is both authoritative and valuable and can provide you with a strong flow of visitors to your site.
Besides, as a long-term advantage, guests posts will also help you to build your content marketing strategies and SEO, that will bring even more visitors to your site over time. For this reason, it’s one of the best ways to get more traffic to your site quickly.
Social Media
When it comes to building an audience on social media, it can be somewhat unpredictable. However, if you can get your priorities in order, social media is an effective and quick way that you can scale your potential user base.
With social media, you can engage directly and publicly with your audience. You can use your content to begin naturally attracting an audience, or ads, or even to funnel traffic directly to your site. More importantly, you can engage with people.
When you engage with users on social media, by engaging them in conversation, or by sharing and liking their posts, you introduce them to your company.
While it can take a lot of upfront work to reach out to viewers, it could take just a matter of weeks for you to build a substantial audience of thousands of social media users to serve as a platform that you can use to increase your growth further. Numerous resources on the Internet can show you how to build your social media platforms and get more social media followers.
Once you put in the effort to grow your audience on social media, it’s essential that you continue to market yourself regularly so that those followers that you do gain don’t get bored and move onto the next brand.
Now, remember, social media will only be able to drive traffic to your website if you actually have the fans and followers. To gain more followers, you have to be consistent with your approach and with how regularly you post to the various platforms.
Knowing what your audience wants will help you to create a social media marketing campaign that will grab the attention of your targeted audience and help to drive more traffic to your company’s site.
Leverage Influencers
Like with guest blogging, where you use high-profile publishers to help you gain a wider audience, leveraging influencers works in the same way, except you work with an individual instead of hosting your client on an external site.
To find influencers in your industry, take some time to crawl around in the world of social media or try to find one through a web search.
Once you find an influencer that you feel could help you build your web traffic, you will need to spend some time building a relationship with them. This could involve sharing their work with your audience, asking them questions about their skills and expertise, or otherwise showing them that you are interested in what they do and their work.
From there, you will want to work with them to see if they will share your work with their audience, or you can ask to interview them for mutual visibility. It is important to remember that you want to be respectful of their time and don’t ask them for free publicity directly.
You need to make a proposition that is mutually beneficial for both parties. If you are successful, you will instantly gain an audience of thousands. From here, you can continue to nurture the relationship, as well as looking for other influencers that you can use as resources.
Use Paid Ads
Paid advertising, while it can be useful, it has the lowest long-term potential. With paid ads, you pay upfront for a guaranteed stream of traffic to your site.
However, when you withdraw your budget, the ads are turned off and that once a steady stream of traffic becomes defunct. To look at it another way, you can compare it to building equity in a home vs. paying rent.
When compared to other strategies, like influencer, leveraging and guest posts, which both give you new relationships to draw upon in your industry, or social marketing, where your audience sticks around practically forever, paid ads don’t have the long-term ROI.
If you are looking for both a fast and profitable strategy, paid advertising can do the job, it just doesn’t have the potential for increased growth or substantial gains that you can get from the other organic strategies discussed. However, with that said, here are some of the best options for fast traffic through paid advertising.
- Reddit Ads
- StumbleUpon Ads – Moved To (Mix.com)
- Facebook Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Twitter Ads
- Google AdWords
- Bing Ads
You can find out more information on how each of these paid advertising options works through each of the platforms that promote them.
Run Promotions and Contests
Promotions and contests, in a way, are like paid advertising in the sense that you will need to make an upfront investment in the form of a hot consumer product, gift card, or something similar. Then, you can ask your audience to engage in some behavior to gain entry into the contest. This can be either liking or sharing your post on other social media sites.
Contests are a powerful way to gain more web traffic because they naturally spread themselves. Most users like to share these opportunities with their friends and social media followers, making them a great way to gain widespread visibility quickly.
They might even be able to provide you with long-term benefits if the users who engage with your social media contest end up following your brand. The key is to make sure that you find the right contests and promotions. It should be original, valuable, and interesting to your key demographics and target audience.
Conclusion
Remember, that “fast” traffic may not always be good traffic and it doesn’t always mean that you are getting a good return on your investment.
When it comes to getting the long-term return on the money that you spend, SEO and content marketing beat spending money on the paid advertising, almost every time.
Of course, this assumes that you have the proper strategic positioning. You can think about it like buying the seeds to grow your own vegetable garden versus purchasing the vegetables from your local store; with the right amount of time and care, your garden will return to you far more riches to your initial investments, but sometimes you’ll need to find a shortcut to tide you over while you wait.
You want to try to keep the short-term methods in line with your long-term strategies if you’re going to reap the benefits of both.