Starting a business blog is only half the battle. Your next challenge is attracting qualified visitors who will consume your content on a regular basis and follow desired actions based on your marketing goals.
Website traffic is the number of people who visit your site and the data that is sent as a result of those visits. Not only will you get a boost in SEO ranking when you get regular visits, you’ll also have a good chance of converting those visitors into loyal customers.
In this article, you’ll discover a list of useful strategies to increase your traffic. See what works for you.
1. Create interesting, valuable content.
Creating great content won’t always happen if you’re just starting out. Whether you aim to feature podcast episodes on your blog, capitalize on video content, or write daily blog posts, compelling content takes time and a lot of research.
The first step is knowing what your audience wants. The better you know who you’re dealing with, the higher your chances of building trust. You need to create an audience persona. This involves collecting demographic information. Visit competitor websites and find topics that get the most shares.
Lastly, when crafting content, always remember to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Solve their pain points. Answer to their needs.
2. Run a viral contest or giveaway.
Take advantage of the fact that everyone loves winning prizes. Launching viral contests or giveaways is a smart (and quick) strategy to increase your online presence and get site visitors. The only challenge in running giveaways is making sure that you get quality traffic – because there are people who seem to only be interested in your prize and not your brand.
Choose the best time of the year to launch your contest. Pick a prize that is relevant to your niche. For example, if you run a health and fitness business online, you will need to feature prizes like a health ebook, an exercise equipment, or diet supplements. This will help you target the right people.
Clearly state the mechanics of your contest. Make sure that people won’t bypass the step of signing up their email addresses (for email marketing purposes) and sharing your contest multiple times to their friends on social media.
3. Participate on Quora.
Quora is a great place to start for increasing your blog traffic. Depending on the niche of your business, you’ll be able to find millions of like-minded people who ask and provide quality information daily.
A Q & A site full of knowledge, you can start signing up on Quora and participating in discussions with other users. Start by following a couple of topics related to your business. When you comment on a question, make sure to provide answers that would benefit readers. Write your answer like you would craft a blog post. You can incorporate a link to your site somewhere in your answer.
If readers love what you’ve written, there’s a high chance for you to get a lot of upvotes. This entices more people to check out your answer and click through your website link.
4. Add social sharing buttons on your site.
It’s not enough to write persuasive content. There must be a way for satisfied readers to help get the word out for you after reading your blog posts.
When you promote your pieces of content across social media platforms using a social media management system such as HootSuite and people click through your shared content, they’ll be able to share it more using your social buttons. This will help you cast your net far and wide.
If you manage a WordPress site, a free social sharing plugin you can try is Social Media Feather. For more features and functionality, you may want to check out Social Warfare.
5. Repurpose your content.
You cannot expect one type of content to appeal to all your target customers. You can attract more people, even your competitor’s loyal fan base, by repurposing your content. This means recycling an existing content into another format.
For example, you can turn a regular blog post into a lead magnet such as a whitepaper guide, a free ebook, or checklist. If you often work on podcast episodes, you can have these transcribed and edited accordingly into articles.
Content that deserves to be repurposed is evergreen content. Evergreen content refers to any kind of content (articles, videos, etc.) that remains to be relevant for years to come. Examples include “how-to” tutorials, FAQs, and definition of terms.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know some best strategies to grow your traffic, you can start implementing them today. Most of all, don’t forget to monitor the results of your traffic building efforts and see which platform or method gets you the best results.
