 Traffic is undoubtedly the most important aspect of running a website because traffic is your website’s lifeblood and without traffic your site would be rendered useless!
Traffic is king!
Traffic brings in the leads and the sales. Quality traffic is what produces your online revenue, whether from advertising or from sales on your site. Whether your site gets 50 visitors, 200 visitors or 1000 visitors a day, a site that’s getting 50 visitors can be just as effective as a site getting 1000 visitors a day as it is all to do with the quality of the traffic and how it converts to revenue for your business and of course the amount of revenue you receive from each “successful” visitor.
Regardless, you have to get that traffic in the first place if you want your website to produce results. The more traffic you have, usually in my experience, the more you will successful your website will be. Since traffic is very important it is imperative to study your website stats to see exactly where your traffic is coming from. This way you can keep on top of what produces the quality traffic and how to get it.
Listed below are the most important traffic sources and/or marketing techniques that we recommend to get traffic to your website.
1. Search Engine Optimisation and the Search Engines
The majority of the traffic to websites comes from the search engines and mainly Google. It is important that your website contains targeted keyword phrases that strongly reflect your product/s or service/s to ensure that you get the best quality traffic to your website – visitors that are actually looking for the product/s or service/s that your are offering. Take a look, for a start, at the index/home page of your website – does the page include strong, keyword rich phrases which clearly describe what you are offering? If not, talk to us about rectifying this. Get the SEO right and ensure you have a lot of quality one-way links from related sites and you will get the traffic.
Another proven tactic is to consider your website as a long-term business which you will keep building for years. Don’t just sit on a website that is 1 to 10 pages – keep adding pages of quality content and you should get plenty of quality visitors in return. Our contract client – www.redpathaghort.com is a fine example of what can be achieved with the regular addition of quality content (this site contains close to 700 pages) – this website regularly has over 10,000 visitors a month viewing over 30,000 pages!
2. Article Marketing
Another very effective way to attract quality traffic to your website/s is article marketing. Just write short articles related to your site's keywords and place your keyworded links in the resource box. Distribute these articles all over the web. Here is a link to a previous newsletter with more information on how to go about this << Using Press Releases to Drive Traffic to Your Website >>. Article marketing is still one of the most effective ways to get quality traffic, so why not give it a go.
3. PPC - Pay Per Click Advertising
This can be very expensive but PPC can be a quick way to get quality traffic to your website. Just be careful and approach it with caution until you find campaigns which work for you - then scale them up.
Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Marketing have now joined forces and this could be worth a try. Google Adwords is probably more effective but they are not easy to work with and have become very expensive for anything but “niche/uncommon” keywords. But if you have the resources, don't rule out Adwords or any of the PPC programs.
4. Social Media Sites
From Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn, social media sites can provide a lot of traffic and word of mouth advertising for your website. Getting your pages bookmarked in some of these sites can bring in a flood of traffic overnight, while most of this traffic will be temporary, you can get a lot of sign-ups to your newsletter and different follow-up lists. Also YouTube videos can also bring in targeted traffic. Don't ignore these social media and video sites in your traffic strategies.
5. Email Marketing and Follow-up Lists
Mailing lists provide a major source of "repeat visitors" to websites. You should constantly work on increasing your mailing database lists for on-going follow-up. This will bring in more visitors than you would expect, especially if you put some simple viral messages in your emails. If you supply valuable information, people will recommend your content to friends and co-workers; again word of mouth can bring in a lot of traffic especially in this age of Facebook and Twitter.
Of course, there are many more traffic sources such as Press Releases, Banner Ads, RSS Feeds, Off-line Advertising ... and if you have your own products to promote, affiliates and joint ventures will provide valuable sources of traffic to your website.
Check out your website now and see what you can do to improve the traffic you are getting! |
