7 effective ways to increase your website traffic
When it comes to increasing the number of visitors who access and interact with your website, there are a variety of ways to increase awareness and attention of the platform displaying your company’s services and offerings.
Here are 7 top points to do just that.
1. Provide valuable content
Content can be presented in many different shapes and forms. Let’s start with the written form of the blog, an ideal format with which to connect with an audience provided your information is truly valuable to your reader by being consistent, informative, interesting and entertaining.
Other effective ways of providing rich content include white papers, infographics, resources or checklists.
In fact, if you can supply new and valuable content on a regular basis, you can encourage repeat traffic, which is the ideal kind of visitor to attract to your website in order to establish a relationship and trust.
If your information is really interesting, your visitors will be motivated to share it, further expanding your reach to a new audience.
2. The reciprocal effect
The internet never sleeps, which means that there is a constant need for fresh, interesting information. This need can be leveraged to get exposure to a wider audience by offering your services as a guest blogger where you write blog content for an industry related website and in return the website links back to your domain.
Do some online research into other websites and blogs in your industry, evaluating their relevance and popularity. Once you have selected the websites you wish to use, use their contact details to either call them directly or email them. In this way, you’ll establish who needs content and even develop online relationships in the process.
Write a brief paragraph at the end of each guest post, describing your business and making mention of your website URL, so that readers have a reference of who wrote the content and where to find you.
You can also return the favour by inviting guest bloggers onto your website, enabling you to have an additional source of content and in turn create awareness of your website with the blogger’s followers.
3. Become a giver
Although there is a lot of competition on the internet, it is also a global platform for sharing of content. This sharing philosophy provides another avenue for creating awareness of your website and its offerings by submitting your content to various sites such as articlegeek.com or articlesfactory.com.
4. The power of association
In cyberspace it is not only what you know, but who you know, and there are many ways of creating associations and support.
One excellent way of leveraging the power of association is by interviewing industry thought leaders. This not only provides great content for your blog, there is also the added advantage of this association which acts as an endorsement by the expert. There is also a good chance of the expert linking the article to your site, exposing you to their following.
Association can also extend to submitting your content to various online platforms such as popular social news sites such as stumpleupon.com, digg.com and reddit.com. Blogs also provide a medium of increasing your connections such as using blogger communities such as problogger.com or copyblogger.com; commenting on blogs and groups or answering questions on sites such as answers.yahoo.com or quora.com
5. Leveraging Search Engines
Although this doesn’t guarantee you a specific spot on the index of a major search engine, it is a good idea to get added to their index. The following major search engines should be considered:
- Google ( http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl);
- Yahoo! ( http://search.yahoo.com);
- Bing (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url)
- DMoz – the largest human edited directory (http://dmoz.org/add.html)
6. Syndication
Syndicating through contributing your blog or content to a relevant third party is an effective way of positioning yourself as an expert and creating awareness of your services while gaining traction from referral traffic from these sites.
Research the type of articles on the relevant sites in terms of topics and structure. Make sure you are providing value, then start submitting.
7. It pays to advertise
Paid search marketing means having sponsored listings on search engine results pages. Other online advertising mediums include social media and display advertising on relevant sites.
Getting your website out there is a journey which gets traction over time. Although this is not an overnight, miracle cure, if you begin putting each of these ideas into action by starting off small and then building on your successes and learning from your failures, you are sure to create awareness with the relevant audiences and in doing so, help others with the services which you offer.