Whether your blog is personal, business or just meant to bring you friends together, the most important thing you will need to do is to drive traffic to it. There are various ways to drive traffic to your website and if you are willing to put some energy and time, you can be able to accomplish this without spending any money.
There are many techniques that you can use to drive traffic to your website, namely;
- Search Engine Optimization
- Guest Blogging
- Social Networks
- Forum Marketing
- Article Marketing
- Press Release
- Paid Advertising
To get better results, you will have to test various methods to find out the one that best suits your needs. Try not to waste your time on techniques that don’t work. It is better to focus on finding one or two techniques that provide the best results and stick to them rather than jumping from one technique to the other.
However, incase you are find something that works best for you, keep repeating it and ignore the rest, unless you have spare time or you want to try something like paid advertising.
Always remember to analyse and evaluate your traffic results. Free tools like Google Analytics, Ahref, among other, will give you a clear picture of how your website is performing. Monitor the results for sometimes and study it. Learn what kind of traffic is converting well and know who are the kind of audience visiting your website more often. If you have a newsletter, you will most likely notice a spike in sign ups, a proof that you traffic is increasing.
What are the Common Sources of Website Traffic?
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – You basically optimize your contents so that it is easily visible by search engine or ranked among the top search results. Search engine optimization entails a little bit knowledge of SEO. However, with introduction of easy to use WordPress Plugin like Yoast, you can easily achieve this without much struggle. Though, you will still need to work more on building links.
Setting your posts permalinks is also another great way to drive traffic. Permalinks are automatically created when you publish a post, however, you can be able to control the way they are published by making them more search engine friendly. A permalink should;
- Have a structured hierarchy to make it easy for robots to crawl the page.
- Not be very long or have unnecessary coding – visitors may cut off part of the URL when copying it to a browser.
- Should have relevant keywords to help it rank better in search engines
- Have correctly set up titles, avoid stops words like ad, or, for, whenever possible.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is another great way to drive traffic to your website. If you are able to write atleast one or two guests articles in a day, this can improve your traffic and overall ranking of your website. You just have to make sure the website you are writing for link back to your website.
Create Videos or Start a Podcast
You can start a podcast and submit it to iTunes or simply create a video and submit it to YouTube. There many web based video creator like Cloud Video Maker that will allow you to create a video within a few minutes.
Social Networks
Create a Facebook Fan Page, Google Plus and Twitter account for your website or business.
Forum Marketing
Forum Marketing is another great way to generate traffic to your website. You just have to search for a forum related to your niche that you can join. Once you become a member, you can leave comments. Some forums do allow linking back to your website or a signature.
Article Marketing
Another great way to generate traffic is through article marketing or article writing. Joining sites like iSnare, Submit Comfort and many more can help you in generating massive traffic to your website since some of them tend to rank higher in search engines. Some of these sites also do allow writers to link back to their website.
Press Release
Creating a press release is another great way to generate traffic to your offers. Even though most press release websites will require you to pay an upfront to get your story submitted. There are a few other free release websites that you could utilize, such as betanews, newswiretoday, among others.
Paid Advertising
The other way to generate traffic is through paid advertisement. Paid advertising can be a great way to generate traffic but I wouldn’t recommend this method for beginners. It is much better to start with free method before moving to paid advertising.
Lastly, to evaluate effectiveness of any kind of traffic or any traffic generating method as discussed above, you can decide to test one traffic method per week, until you determine what works best for you. Start with Facebook by creating a Fan Page, Twitter account, YouTube and do each one of them for a week or two. Compare the result and decide what is working for you, if you find something that is working, stick to it and ignore the rest.
