Boost Your Website Traffic
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................. 4
Chapter 1 – Content, SEO, and
Analytics................................. 6
Creating Content......................................................................... 7
Web Analytics............................................................................. 8
Search Engine Optimization..................................................... 10
Chapter 2 – Social Media.......................................................... 14
Utilizing Facebook .................................................................... 14
How to Establish Effective Posts on Facebook ........................ 16
Utilizing Twitter ......................................................................... 19
Getting the Most Out of Your Tweets ....................................... 19
Utilizing YouTube...................................................................... 21
Making the Most of YouTube.................................................... 21
Chapter 3 – Websites, Guest Blogs, and Forum Links.......... 25
Commenting on Competing Websites ...................................... 26
Commenting on Relevant Forums ............................................ 27
Submitting to Stumble Upon..................................................... 28
Guest Blogging ......................................................................... 29
Chapter 4 – Email Marketing.................................................... 30
Bulk Email Campaigns.............................................................. 31
Opt-In Email Campaigns........................................................... 32
Advantages of Email Marketing................................................ 32
Best Practices for Success ....................................................... 34
Chapter 5 – Paid Advertising ................................................... 36
Pay Per Click – PPC................................................................. 36
Pay Per View – PPV................................................................. 38
Facebook Advertising ............................................................... 39
YouTube Ads ............................................................................ 41
Paid Advertising on Twitter....................................................... 41
Conclusion................................................................................. 43
Introduction
Over the last several decades, the real world has moved online,
and so has the money.
Whether it's for a commercial website,
personal blog, turning a profit through online advertising, or
finding a way to improve the exposure for your business, today's
currency of success heavily relies on being able to cultivate more
traffic to your website.
While the world may be getting smaller, the Internet is quickly
getting much larger, and it seems that everybody wants a piece of
the pie.
The good news is that a majority of visitors to the millions of
websites, get funneled through the rather narrow search engines
to the various sites. This leaves the market far from saturated
regarding a division of resources. Therefore, there are still plenty
of ways that you can successfully direct more people to your website.
Unfortunately, with everything good, there has to be something
terrible.
Most of the ways that you can drive traffic to your site as
evident as they may be are only entirely understood by those
people who have dedicated themselves to understanding Search
Engine Optimization, (SEO) and digital marketing strategies,
merely because they are more driven to do so.
Consequently, a job that is so simple anyone can perform it with
the basic understanding of how to operate a computer ends up
being done by specialized digital marketing firms that increase the
operational costs for small businesses like yours.
Chapter 1 – Content, SEO, and Analytics
When it comes to driving traffic to your website, your first efforts
have to come from your own backyard.
The first and most important rule for building an excellent foundation for driving more
traffic to your site is creating unique content.
As a small business owner, you need to learn to fully appreciate
the vast array of tools that are at your disposal for you to use to
make your site a fantastic experience for visitors.
The first rule in content creation is that you need to diversify your
content among as many of the media formats as possible.
This includes textual, audio-visual, exclusively aural, and so on. Every
business will require a specific skill-set to survive and ultimately
succeed.
However, most people just shrug these skills off as an everyday occurrence.
This is why those people who are more willing to acknowledge their gifts will always receive more attention, more
publicity, and ultimately more business through their higher web
traffic numbers.
So, the first thing that you will need to do to start increasing your
web traffic will be to isolate the specific skills that qualify you to
succeed in your chosen profession.
This could be your salesmanship, creative business modeling, financial acumen,
investment skills, or strong research skills.
Most small business websites that make it big, don't do it because they are loaded with
business jargon, but because they can extract the qualities of
great businesses into various articles and anecdotes, that the
general public can relate to and can learn from.
This means that in addition to having your usual web content and
products listed on your website, you need to have a blog as well.
Your blog will serve as an exciting and informative target for your
audience. Having greater public visibility will naturally lead to an
increase in web traffic.
Creating Content
When you begin to create the content for your site, you want to
identify the styles of content that will benefit you the most.
Determine whether the information you are trying to convey will
be better discussed in a short video, or will it be better to create a
podcast or textual article.
Having a more significant variation in the styles of your content
will allow the visitors to your site to scratch different itches
depending on their mood at the time. By using various media to
convey your information you can satiate your visitor's need to
learn through video, audio, or literary outlets all at once.When it comes to the frequency of posted content, you want to
make sure that you do so on a regular basis. Nothing turns away
an existing visitor base quicker than a stagnant website.
People are only willing to invest their time in a site that continues
to develop and grow, rather than wasting their time on a site that
seems to be dying out and heading towards the cyber graveyard.
Web Analytics
Beyond the kinds of content that you need to create, you also
need to keep your eye on your website analytics.
This is usuallyprovided in-house through portals like WordPress, or through
Google analytics for general internet sites. If you don’t already
have it, head to Google analytics to complete an easy sign-up
process.
Google analytics for general internet sites. If you don’t already
have it, head to Google analytics to complete an easy sign-up
process.
Once you've signed up for the service, you should begin receiving
analytical data on the dashboard within a week.
The analytics that you receive will allow you to identify the favorite pieces among
your hosted content quickly and to determine whether or not a
new video or article received public approval, which is determined
by the amount of time spent, on average, on that particular piece
of content by your audience.
If they sat through an appropriate amount of time to view the
content in its entirety, then you can rest easy because you've
done your job. However, if they move on after just 30 seconds,
you may need to revisit your judgment regarding the topic or style
of the content.
Keeping an eye on the analytics of your website, and tweaking
your content accordingly will allow you to understand the tastes of
your regular audience members better. This will help you to cater
to your visitors appropriately so that you can work to nurture your
growing visitor base.
Happy visitors will always refer your site to those around them,
which will result in an increase in web traffic to your website
through word-of-mouth. One way to encourage this behavior is to
continually maintain a high level of credibility among your existing
visitor base.
Search Engine Optimization
Once you’ve determined the style of content that you are going to
create and as you focus on the quality and frequency of the
content itself, you need to start thinking about search engine
optimization, or SEO. Creating content that is SEO friendly is the
easiest way for you to push more traffic to your site.
The first step to making sure your site is SEO optimized is by
making sure that you submit your website links to the various
search engine platforms. While not every URL that is provided to
the search engines will make it onto their search indexes, a
majority of them do so without a hitch.
When you complete this
step, it allows Google's crawlers to index your site and display it
within their search results. This can also be done for the other
search engines like Bing and Yahoo.
Once you’ve submitted your website to the search engines for
indexing, you’ll need to begin performing SEO on all of your
current site content, as well as keep its basics in mind for the
content you create in the future.
In a nutshell, SEO is about allowing the search engine crawlers,
which trawl through all of the websites on the Internet, to
categorize and classify your site in order of its relevance to
specific keywords. The higher the significance of a particular site
in response to one particular keyword, the better the chances it
has of appearing higher up on the search lists.
This is extremely important because your efforts to drive traffic to
your site isn’t geared toward those people who already know
about your site, but instead toward people who aren't aware of
your business or your site and are only looking for options based
on the keywords they enter into the search query.
Search Engine Optimization is a highly competitive field. It is a
combination of art and science, linguistics and anthropology. It's
the ability to understand the mind of your customers and
determining a list of possible keywords that they might use to get
to the topical content that you provide.
Take a look at the content that you have already created and
make a list of all the possible keywords that you would use to find
an article like this.
Each of the key phrases that you consider
should be between two and four words long. These are known as
long-tail keyword phrases.
One way that you might want to consider to compile your list of
keywords faster is to use one key phrase and enter it into the
Google search bar.
When the results appear, scroll down to the
bottom of the page. Here you will find around eight to ten related
searches and key phrases.
This list might help you find a few more key phrases that you
believe are strongly related to your content.
Repeat this exerciseseveral times with different key phrases so that you can acquire a
slightly wider range of keywords that are relevant to your content.
When you've identified your keywords, make sure that the
keywords that you've determined are present in all of your
content. For each article that you write, define a distinct key
phrase that should be present in the title and subtitle of the piece.
It is essential though that none of the keywords that you use
individually account for more than 1.5% of the total word count for
the article.
When you include excessive keywords into your
content, it automatically leads to the search engines lowering your
rank in the index.
When creating your content, you want to add at least three to four
keywords in the title tag of your article and the important keyword
phrase in the metadata and description of your content for as long
as it's published.
Again, you don't want to get overzealous and stuff your tagline
with errant tags, since this will lead to all the search engines
lowering your rank. It is essential that you identify the best
possible search engine key phrases and dedicate a few unique
ones to each article or piece of content.
Properly optimizing your website content with SEO and keeping a
close eye on the web analytics for your site is the first step to
boosting your website traffic.
Chapter 2 – Social Media
Social media has become the best way to advertise your business
or website. Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to interact
with your audience.
The first step to utilizing social media and
drive more traffic to your site is to make yourself visible on the
various platforms.
Utilizing Facebook
If you don’t already have a business page on Facebook, this will
be your first step to increasing your visibility on the site. Along
with enlisting your employees, you’ll also want to have willing
customers like your page.
Once you’ve established your Facebook business page, make
sure that you provide information on your website that will inform
potential customer or visitors of your page.
Moving forward, use Facebook to announce any new
developments in your business that would be relevant to your
customers.
You can also use it to publish posts about offers or
discounts that are available on your site.
You can even provide
updates through your business page about new content that is
now available to use.
You can also utilize your Facebook page as an open forum to
pose subtle marketing research question and gather customer
feedback which would garner more interest in your business and
website because most customers prefer professional who are
engaged with their client base and who are interested in hearing
their opinions.
With the number of people who get on Facebook every day, it has
quickly become one of the main avenues for new media
advertising, which you can efficiently accomplish through its paid
advertising programs that would feature your business across a
broad range of people in your targeted demographics.
How to Establish Effective Posts on Facebook
Running your own Facebook post requires being able to create
posts that are sensible and easy to read.
The posts that you
produce have to include extensive detailed information that
relates directly to your business.
One part of creating useful posts on Facebook entails getting
messages that not only grab the attention of your visitors but also
that make them want to share your words.
As your posts are
forwarded to others, it becomes easier to market your business.
Tell Stories
Some of the best posts that you can add to your Facebook page
are stories. You can talk about anything that you want as long as
it is unique and relevant to your business. Tell unique stories that
relate to your business and let people know what makes it unique.
The best stories will always be shared with others.
With these types of posts, you have to be willing to talk about your
business’ background. Figure out a way to share what you’re
doing and why you are motivated to help them. Show that what
you are doing is making a difference in the lives of others.
If people see that you are doing something worthwhile and useful,
they will support you.
Work with Trending Topics
The Facebook search algorithm rewards people who talk about
trending issues. Favorite topics are highlighted more often
because people are more likely to search for or have a stronger
demand to discover.
Working with trending topics that are specific and important is
always useful. However, it is important to note that you never
want to post anything political to your Facebook page as it will be
inevitable alienate members of your audience.
When you discuss trending topics, it becomes easier for your
business to get noticed. You will show that your company
understands the trends and interests of today.
This will provide you with the opportunity to share data with your
audience in a distinctive way. However, you want to practice
caution with how you incorporate these trends into your posts.
You don't want to talk about something that has nothing to do with
your business just because it's a favorite topic.
Try to relate the trend to your business in some way.
Talk About Business Decisions
Today, people appreciate transparency, and it has become an
essential aspect of running a business. Consumers prefer to do
business with companies that are open and direct about what
they want to do or promote.
Customers appreciate companies
that are willing to talk about what inspires them and the reasons
they decided to start a business.
You can talk about any business decision that you’ve made and
how you operate.
Talking about results and ideas makes you
more open to your audience. You can even ask for feedback
about anything you want to follow up on. As you get a clearer idea
of what your audience wants, getting information from your
visitors can make a difference.
Use Unique Media
While anyone can post historical images, pictures from the news
or memes on their Facebook feeds, its better if you can find a way
to be unique and personal. Part of this will involve using media
files and images that are unlike anything else.
When you use unique media files, you show your audience that
you have a great plan in mind for your company.
They will realize that you are creative and inventive while remaining open-minded.
Using the same kind of image that everyone else utilizes is not
always the best option as it merely shows repetition.
Utilizing Twitter
The primary advantage of using Twitter to increase your web
traffic is that it is widespread and the character limit caters to the
atrophied attention span of today's youth. Twitter allows your
business to interact with others in short and witty bite-sized texts
while keeping up with the more significant trends and concerns on
social media in a concise way.
The first thing that you'll need to do is get a Twitter handle and get
involved with relevant discussions across the globe. When you
find an open conversation where you could supply pertinent
information, take the time to post your input along with links back
to your website or any other content that you feel would be able to
add value to the discussion.
Getting the Most Out of Your Tweets
The messages that you post on Twitter are vital to your success
with the platform.
It is essential that you create thoughtful, unique,
and appealing messages. You can utilize a few helpful strategies
to gain a better chance of your tweets getting read by more people.
More importantly, when people trust your work and your words,
your tweets are more likely to lead to extra followers and more
traffic to your website.
Be Creative
The most popular Twitter feeds are the most creative. They might
involve funny anecdotes, how-to information, thoughtful quotes, or
anything else that an audience might find interesting.
Think about what you want to say and stick with it as you develop
your Twitter feed. Let your audience know that you have
something unique to share with them and that you are someone
they can trust.
Stick With One Style
Take the time to think about how you are going to post things on
Twitter. Do you want to take a light-hearted approach? Would you
rather be straightforward with the public? Whatever you decide,
you need to determine the attitude and style you want to follow
and stick with it for as long as possible. Be consistent with all of
your posts on Twitter.
Be careful not to shift your style and attitude on a whim because it
might end up confusing your audience. Some might even think
that your Twitter profile was hacked.
Stay Transparent
Like with any other social media platform, it is important to remain
fully transparent when talking to your audience. Let people know
what you’re doing and what makes your business important.
People will appreciate when they hear from you and will see how
direct you are with them. They will retweet your message and add
to your exposure.
Utilizing YouTube
YouTube. In fact, the site has become extremely popular recently
thanks to how it highlights videos of all descriptions. YouTube can
be an incredibly valuable tool for your business. It will require
producing videos that are exceptional and worth sharing. To start
working with YouTube, you'll need to create a profile so that you
begin to post videos to the site.
Making the Most of YouTube
YouTube is great for social media campaigns and driving more
traffic to websites.
To get the most out of your efforts, you have to
make your videos appealing while also standing out from the
crowd. More importantly, you have to make your promotional
channel more intriguing.
make your videos appealing while also standing out from the
crowd. More importantly, you have to make your promotional
channel more intriguing.
This will help to bring in more subscribers and an increase in
visits to your site. There are a few special techniques for getting
your YouTube videos to be easier to read and more dynamic.
Get Verified
To get the most out of your YouTube Account, you need to get
verified. A verified account will give you more access to more
functions on the site. This includes the ability to add custom
thumbnails to a video and make your videos longer.
Getting your channel authenticated, ensures that you will be able
to do more because YouTube knows that your channel is
legitimate. People will be more likely to trust your channel if they
see that it has been verified.
Use Custom Thumbnails
When you begin to use YouTube, you will have the option to work
with random thumbnails on each video. After some time, you can
be approved to work with custom thumbnails. These will add a
unique image that allows people to see what you want to share
before they click on the video. It could include details about the
video or some other display feature that is more intriguing to the
reader.
Create a Channel Trailer
A channel trailer is a video that you upload that is played on your
channel page when someone who has not subscribed to your
page comes across it.
The video is set up to playback
automatically. You can create any kind of video for your trailer,
but it's best to use one that illustrated what your business is all
about.
This is generally the first thing that you should show to someone
who is not familiar with what you do. It creates a welcome
approach to explain to the viewer what your business is all about
and what makes your work unique. When a person subscribes to
your page, the channel trailer will no longer appear.
Creating Playlists
You can create playlists that highlight everything on your channel
that is similar in some way. With a playlist, you can share
information in a series of organized spaces that let people know
specific things about your business.
They might also include points on your business and how it
operates, or it could include your knowledge about matters
relating to your niche.
Using Captioning
There may be instances when someone wants to view your
YouTube video, but they have to keep the sound down to keep
from bothering those around them. Other users might be deaf or
hard of hearing. So you don't alienate any of your audience, use
captions on your video.
YouTube video, but they have to keep the sound down to keep
from bothering those around them. Other users might be deaf or
hard of hearing. So you don't alienate any of your audience, use
captions on your video.
If for whatever reason, someone needs to use captioning on your
video, all they have to do is click the proper captioning icon on
your video, and a series of captions will appear at the right
moment.
Add Calls to Action
You need to include plenty of calls to action around your YouTube
page and videos. These can consist of calls to encourage people
to visit your website or even your place of business. More
importantly, you need to add calls to action for things relating
specifically to YouTube.
It is fundamental for you to interact with your viewers through your
videos and other features if you want to boost traffic to your site.
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