As a Web Blogger it’s important to understand exactly where your website traffic is being generated from.
With a solid content marketing strategy that attracts readers you can increase your subscribers with greater conversions through social media and search engines.
While search engine marketing and email campaigns are an essential component to increasing your subscribers social media has the potential to drive even more readers as your business attracts an audience through attractive posts and tweets.
Here are several ways you can drive more traffic with a focused marketing strategy:
Optimize your web site for Google
Let’s start with Google so that it gets out of our way. I am sure that you all agree that the best and hardest way to get free traffic is by optimizing your web site for Google. Google holds more than 70% of search engine market share and a place in one of the top positions of Google search is a great source of free traffic. The problem is that the competition is huge so you need to have a great web site both in terms of content and SEO if you want to take a part of the pie.
Share your content on social media and use Hashtags.
Social media gives you a free platform to share your website content, so make sure that you take advantage of this. It is important that you identify the best social media accounts to use for your audience and focus on these, rather then spreading yourself too thin and wasting time promoting on a social platform that your target audience doesn’t participate on. You need to use the social media platform of your readers’ choice, not your own. Try all of them and see what gets traction in your niche.
Comment on industry Blogs with heavy traffic.
One of the quickest ways to send highly relevant traffic to your website is by commenting on blogs within your industry that are extremely popular and have high traffic numbers. When you leave a comment on a blog post the majority of comment systems will allow you to input your own URL along with your name.
Add your web site to the Chrome web store
The chrome web store is a fantastic source of free traffic and yet many webmasters are not taking advantage of it. It is very easy to add your web site to the Chrome Store and the traffic you can get is free and continuous. If you are not familiar of the chrome web store read my previous post which also includes a case study on traffic gains.
Add your blog to Alltop.
Alltop is a very popular aggregator for a wide variety of website content. Several websites and bloggers will look for content to share with their readers and media outlets will often look for news worthy information via Alltop. You can quickly add your blog feed under the correct category and attract new website visitors as well as inbound links.
Join relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
Facebook and LinkedIn groups are great for networking and building relationships. Along with these relationships come website visitors from those people that you begin to interact with. Curiosity drives most of the traffic in these groups. Find relevant groups and if you feel that your website content would benefit the members of the group don’t be shy — share it!
Submit your blog posts to StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is a website that helps its users find information relevant to their interests. When signing up, users identify topics of interest and then StumbleUpon presents them with random content based on those topics.
Don’t forget about Yahoo and Bing
Yahoo and Bing may not have the market share of Google but a top position in either Bing or Yahoo can bring in a good number of visitors. I have web sites that rank on the first positions for popular keywords on both Google and Bing and although the traffic I get from Bing is ¼ of what I get from Google it is still a good source of free traffic.
Yahoo! Answers.
Register a Yahoo! account and participate in their “Answers” program. This is a Yahoo! community program that allows users to post questions as well as answer questions. In the example below you can see that a user had read that tuna is bad for cats so they posted the question to receive feedback from fellow Yahoo! users. The question quickly attracted 21 answers, all designed to answer the question posted.
Create a mobile version of your web site
More and more users are searching the web using their mobile phones. The numbers of mobile searches are increasing dramatically and you just can’t ignore them. Recent studies show that 28% of mobile searches are converting within an hour so it is very important to provide for a mobile optimized version as well.
What you can do? Mobilise your web site! Creating a mobile version is not very difficult. You can either use a plugin (if you are on WordPress) or a dedicated service. Howtogomo (a website by Google) has all the information you need (including information on how to go mobile).
Create an Android native app and publish it to the Google Play Store
Do you know that there are more than 1,300,000 new android users per day? What does this means in terms of traffic? You can create an android app and publish it to the Google Play store, users will download your app and some will visit your website. I am a big fun of this method for getting free traffic and it works very well. Read my post mobile web site vs native app for some real case studies.
Guest post on high traffic web sites
Many people believe that guest posting is about getting links but this shouldn’t be the case. The main reason of why you should guest post to another website is the traffic benefits and not getting a link pointing to your website. A guest post on a trusted website may rank high as well and this will create a steady flow of free traffic to your site.
Keep your content fresh
‘Keep it fresh and keep it relevant’, this was Google’s reply on the importance of having fresh content on your website. New content can get you more free traffic either through more loyal visitors (people will come back to check if you have published new content), more social media mentions or more organic visits (search engines will crawl your website more often).
Engage with Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, YouTube, LinkedIn)
Social media platforms are getting popular day by day and if you don’t have a clear strategy of what you want to achieve, you many end up losing your time without having a real benefit. In my opinion the best social media platforms in terms of traffic are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Stumbleupon, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Keep your content fresh
‘Keep it fresh and keep it relevant’, this was Google’s reply on the importance of having fresh content on your website. New content can get you more free traffic either through more loyal visitors (people will come back to check if you have published new content), more social media mentions or more organic visits (search engines will crawl your website more often).
