Driving Traffic to Your Website

You know you want it: more traffic. You want people to go to your website and browse it, whether they buy something or not. You assume that once it’s built, people will come, and you want more people to come. You might even obsess over the numbers, and that’s okay. However, that’s not always how it works, unfortunately. Building it might bring some traffic, but it won’t bring the kind of traffic you’d expect on a beautiful, well-oiled design with one-of-a-kind content. So how can you bring more visitors and potential clients? Here are just a few, simple ideas that might help.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads

There are a ton of people who recommend that you don’t do these because you’re just not sure what kind of traffic you’re going to attract. This is true, and PPC ad targeting is tricky when you’re looking for a specific audience. However, if you buy your PPC ads strategically, then you can often find the right people who will eventually turn into leads and then buyers. This means that you should be filtering the websites your ads go to, and you should be using the proper systems websites to market to the most relevant audience. For example, advertising your new app on Facebook is a great idea; many bored or otherwise unoccupied people browse Facebook regularly, and they might be looking for something new to do. However, advertising your printing press company may not be as effective or useful; it would do better on a different set of websites, such as writing blogs.

Find Ways to Gain Free Press

If you can’t afford to buy any advertising for your company (don’t worry, we’ve all been there at some point), it’s time to start looking for free ways to gain some traffic. One of the ways you can start earning free traffic is by getting your name in the press. This could mean doing interviews for blogs, podcasts, and websites that have an audience that might actually be interested in your products. Those websites are looking for good content, too, and often an ad exchange or “shoutout” exchange will become very profitable for you. This does take more time, but it’s often worth it if you find the right partner.

Use Social Media

Places like Facebook and Twitter are free to use and have hundreds of millions of users that can “like” and share your business. Even if only a small portion of those people can actually use what you offer, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t 40,000 people who can benefit from your product and services, and probably many more than that. Tweet and Facebook relevant content – and the occasional silly post is never unwarranted – and you’ll start to see an increase in traffic. Pinterest has become especially useful in the past few years as the numbers have boomed, so that might be another great place to start marketing.

Whether you use social media, gain free exposure through new connections or use ads to bring traffic, know that once you find the right combination of tactics, you should begin to see more and more people coming to visit your website.