Whether you're trying to augment your existing brick and mortar customer base by having a website or you're trying to build a business completely online, without traffic your business won't survive. You need visitors to come to your site but how do you get them to your website without paying for them?
By following these 5 steps, you should see a rapid increase in the amount of traffic to your website:
1. Create a Company Blog: Create a company blog and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Make the website part of your domain so that the content you create through the blog brings people to your site and helps assist with SEO efforts.
2. Create Great Content: How can you develop great content that will lead customers to your products or services? Answer: Provide value. A great way to start generating content for your company is to think of all the questions you get from your customers and write an article about each question. Most likely there are other potential customers searching for answers to these same questions online.; by By answering questions in blog posts, you will build the trust of your audience and build the amount of the traffic going back to your site.
3. Invite other Industry Leaders to Join the Conversation: If you're writing great content about your industry or niche, chances are you aren't the only one. Invite other thought leaders from your industry to join the conversation on your blog and, let them share their opinion and weigh in on the conversation-- chances are they will promote the content they've written to their own network of people and you will be in front of not only yourthe same target audience, but and a new network of people.
4. Post Comments on Related Blogs: Commenting on related blog posts is an easy way to drive traffic back to your site. Readers of a blog article are often looking for more information than what they receive from the author.; by By adding a relevant link to one of your articles that adds value to the existing content, you are likely to gain new visitors that wouldn't have found you otherwise. For example, a few weeks back I wrote an article titled: LinkedIn Tips: A 12 Step Checklist for Optimizing Your Profile. I posted a comment on one of Inc. Magazine's Articles: Unlock the Secrets of LinkedIn that linked back to my article, and received 117 unique pageviews within 1 day of my comment.
5. Leverage social media: There are many social media tools that you can use to generate more traffic to your site-, pick the ones that will work best with the audience to whom you are trying to distribute your content to. Here are some examples of some things you could do for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. :
· For Twitter, a great way to target key influencers in your industry would be by using a tool called FollowerWonk. If you wrote an article about SEO, type in SEO as a keyword and find the biggest influencers, then tweet the article to these people and see if they will retweet it.
· For Facebook, a great place to start would be creating a Fan Page for your business and posting content from your blog on your Facebook Fan Page.
· For LinkedIn, set up a company page and try to build a following.- LinkedIn now allows you to send updates to your followers, so this is a great place to distribute your content.
Don't have a huge online budget? No problem. Follow these techniques and you should quickly see success in gaining new visitors to your website. Comment below if any of these techniques have worked for you.
About the Author: Benji Hyam is a Social Media Coordinator at Vistage International,an executive coaching organization that helps CEO members build better companies through unique business coaching opportunities.
