Part One…
Do you need more website traffic? Do have a professional looking website with lots of great content and your current clients and customers consider you the “go to” person or company in your industry? But you aren’t getting much website traffic? It’s lokely because you are not using an integrated approach to drive traffic to your website. An integrated approach is multi-pronged with several layers. It is not a throw a net wide and see how many “fish” we can catch approach, it is more of a drop a line with the proper bait into the ocean and see what you can catch approach. There are key elements to develop the depth to drive traffic to your site, among those is consistency across all channels. Its called Branding. Branding is simply having a message that identifies you/your company and no one else. It is what sets you apart.
Here are 17 “channels” you can use to drive traffic to your site.
- Write articles. Submit those to reputable sites such as online magazines (with a page rank of 4 or greater). If you submit the article to more than one site, rewrite it for each channel. Change the title, the first paragraph and at least 20% of the rest of the content. Make sure your signature (bio at the end) is concise and consistent.
- Write special reports. People love special reports especially the “how to” kind. Use numbers in the title. People love numbers and so do the search engines. Its no accident I used “17 ways” in the title of this article.
- Write blog posts. Like this. Write often (at least once a week) or don’t do it at all. There is nothing worse than going to a site with content that looks “old.”
- Comment on other blogs. Most of the time you will get a backlink to your site. And links are gold on the net.
- Join online forums. I am a member of several Yahoo groups such as the South Florida Public Relations Forum. These forums are great idea generators, crowd sourcing channels and most of all the perfect place to become a thought-leader
- Write a Press Release. Submit it to online press release sites. Be sure and post the release to your site FIRST before submitting.
- Write an email newsletter to get repeat traffic.
- Use Autoresponders to drive traffic to your site. Come up with a series of email messages that keep you top of mind and keep people coming back.
- Host a contest – people love contests. And they love sharing them with their friends.
- Joint venture with others who serve a similar industry. It could be in the form of a blog carnival (where each of you post to the other’s blogs on a specific day/time) Create a message that each of your venture partners are willing to share with THEIR audience.
- Use social bookmarking to drive traffic. Social bookmarking is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. In addition to the top social media channels, some popular social bookmarking sites include Tumblr , Reddit , StumbleUpon and Digg .
- Use social media. Participate in at least one social media channel on a consistent basis. If you have time participate in the top 5 or so. They include Google+, Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook and Pinterest .
- Explore new channels to participate in such as RebelMouse and Maven .
- Use affiliate marketing. Create a product, invite people to share it for a commission, create backlinks.
- Create tutorials on your website. Share them on social media.
- Submit your site to online directories .
- Use organic SEO – make sure your content has good titles, keyword descriptions, tags and most of all quality content.
Stay tuned for part two with 17 MORE Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website .
