Do you have a website that is not attracting a large audience? It can be depressing to work hard on a website that no one visits. Fortunately, if you are willing to put in the work to implement the following steps, you should have little trouble drawing traffic to your website.
Make Your Content Sharable
You should have two main goals in your quest to increase traffic on your website. First, you need to find an audience that is likely to share your content with others. Next, you need to give them content that is worthy of being shared. If you can do those two things, you will be well on your way to building a website that continually attracts new readers.
Tip: Research similar blogs in your niche and see which content has engaged users, either sharing content via Facebook, Twitter or Google+ and also check which articles receive large amounts of comments.
Be Creative
Of course, this is much easier said than done. Most of your potential readers will not be particularly motivated to share your content, so you need to give them a compelling reason to do so. The key is to provide readers with interesting content that is presented in a unique and fascinating way.
Tip: Instead of a simple article, you could get creative by adding an image, video or an infographic. You can embed YouTube videos created by other users. If you can pique your audience’s curiosity, they will be more likely to spread your content far and wide.
Join the Conversation
If you want to find people who would like to read your content, you need to go to the websites that they already frequent. Unless you are developing something in a very obscure niche, there are already many other websites that offer content that is similar to your budding site. You could treat them as competitors, but the long-term health of your website would be better served by working with these established brands.
Engage Your Readers
Once you figure out the popular destinations of your potential audience, you should engage them on their turf. If your audience posts regularly on a certain message board, you should go there and join the conversation. If there are a few blogs that touch on your website’s subject matter, make informative comments on posts and offer to write guest articles. By doing these things, you will gain free advertising in front of an audience that will already be receptive to your message.
Tip: Get involved in forums and blog commenting. You can also engage in conversions via twitter by performing a simple topic search and replying or re-tweeting others posts. By doing these simple things they might reward you by sharing you content.
Optimise Your Content
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help your website be found by search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Learn the Basics
There are plenty of SEO strategies that can produce valuable content for readers while simultaneously helping website owners drive additional traffic to their sites. Therefore, it is time for you to at least learn the basics of SEO: proper keyword placement, building a link profile and targeting content to current trends.
Tip: Make sure you insert your keyword in your content several times. Google will index your website and rank your website based on relevancy to that keyword. There are many other metrics that assist with your search engine rankings. Online Marketing and SEO agencies, like White Chalk Road, can assist you with your SEO efforts.
Build Your Social Network
Other than perhaps search engines, the best way to find new readers – and engage with your existing readers – is to embrace the most popular social networking websites: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Not only do these networks make it easy for you to communicate with your audience, but they also make it easy for your audience to communicate with each other.
Tip: Do not spam your social network just about your business. Engage with others and help them solve their questions.
Have a Plan
Of course, you can’t just put up a profile page on Facebook and expect traffic to start flooding into your site – you need a coherent social networking strategy. You need to actively promote your content and encourage your readers to do the same. For instance, you can place social media buttons at the bottom of every post, which will allow readers to easily share content on their preferred platform.
Tip: If you have a WordPress / Blogger website, you can install a plugin to automatically insert these social media buttons on all your pages.
Google Analytics
One service you should definitely consider using is Google Analytics. It’s free and you can get information about all of the following:
- Your total number of visitors
- The number of new readers
- The average time spent on your site
- The most popular sources of traffic
- Your most popular content
Amazingly, that only scratches the surface of what Google Analytics can provide you. Even better, all you need to do is paste a small piece of code – provided by Google – on your site. After that, you are ready to start analysing the data that will make your future marketing strategies much more successful.’
Charles Ryder, CEO of White Chalk Road, runs several Google Analytics Workshops throughout the year.
