Launching a website is comparable to opening a store in the real world. Awesome job, you now have a website online that has all the details about your business, about your products and services, about how you help solve problems for your customer and so on. This is one part of the job done. The more important part is to make sure that you can drive traffic to your website. Whether you are in B2B business or in B2C, it is very important to drive traffic to your website. Again, if you compare that to a physical store, you will never do business unless you have physical footfalls to your store. Wouldn’t you agree?
How do you then drive traffic to your website?
Let us talk about the different ways, ways to measure and optimize these options and ensure that you can drive traffic to your website.
1) Search Engine Optimization
Search engines drive traffic to your website. So, if you are found for specific keyword searches and rank well on a search engine (for e.g. Google), then you will be able to drive traffic to your website from the search engines. This is also commonly called as organic traffic. It does take a bit of effort to start ranking on search engines for selected keywords, but it is worth the effort. You may find it difficult initially to start getting higher ranking for high competition keywords. A better approach is to start ranking for low competition and low search volume keywords and chart your way up from there. Why SEO is Important for Business?
2) Google Adwords
If organic search does not get you on the first page of search, engaging in Google search ads can ensure that you land up in the first page of Google. This is a paid activity, of course, but your ad can start featuring on the 1st page of a Google search and you will be able to drive traffic back to your website. You will typically drive traffic back to a specific landing page, where you will try and convert the customer from an anonymous status to a known status. Basically, you will start capturing his contact information through the landing page. Google Search or Display ads – what is better for lead generation
3) Blog
Having a blog is a wonderful way to share your opinion on different topics. You can optimize these blogs for different keywords and then use these to drive traffic back to your website. Each blog post is considered as a fresh page on your website and each additional page will offer you additional options to improve your SEO rankings. Having a blog is a wonderful way to host your content at a central place and then use a variety of promotion mechanisms to drive traffic back to the blog.
4) LinkedIn
With every piece of content that you post, you can promote it on your LinkedIn profile. You can post in groups and use that to drive traffic back to your web pages. You can also post articles on LinkedIn with a short summary of what your blog post is all about and use that to drive traffic back to your web pages.
5) Facebook
Facebook also provides you a number of options to drive traffic to your web pages. Posting on your profile or on your pages, will engage with all the people who are connected to your profile or the people who like your page. Facebook also offers groups, where you can engage with like minded people and use posts there to drive traffic back to your web pages. Apart from organic means, facebook also offers a number of paid options to promote your content to a wider targeted audience. This can help you boost your reach substantially.
6) Email campaigns
Email campaigns are a great way to reach a larger set of users. Within the email, you can have a link back to the content that you want to promote. This way, you can drive more traffic to your web pages. Typically you should spend efforts to build opt-in lists by offering something interesting to the user like a white paper or an ebook. Once people opt-in to your email, you can engage them meaningfully and try and convert them to customers. In the absence of an opt-in list, people buy out lists and do email campaigns to these bought out lists. The response rate on some of these bought out lists is not so great. A 10-point email marketing campaign checklist to ensure success
7) Quora
Similar to LinkedIn, you can also post your short blogs on Quora and post the links coming back to your website. You can do this for your blogs. You can also answer questions on Quora and build your authority in the domain. Each of the responses can have a link back to some of your authority content on your website. This will help you drive traffic to your website.
8) Blog Comments and 3rd party posts
You can follow other influencers in your field and comment on their blogs. That way, you are building relationships with some of the influencers. At the same time, while you are posting back links to your content, it is likely that quite a few people will visit from the comments section back to your web pages and help to drive traffic to your website.
9) YouTube
If you are producing content, also consider creating some videos. Videos is one of the largest consumed content on the internet. If you have some videos as a part of your mix, then these can help drive traffic to your website as well.
10) Infographics
Similar to YouTube, Infographics also offers you some very good options to engage with your target market. Since the information is in a visual form, it is far more easy to grasp and comprehend. If people like what they see, they will want to come back for more at your website.
Launching a website is just step one in your journey. You must take a number of steps to ensure that you are able to drive traffic to your website. Once they come to your website, then you can worry about some of the next set of challenges like engagement time, bounce ratios, conversions from the website and so on. We will talk about some of these items in a subsequent post.
Read more about how to drive 10x traffic to your website
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