How to Increase Your Website Traffic

The very best looking website in the world will still be a failure if it has no traffic.  A website can’t make any money if it is a well-kept secret.  Getting more traffic, of and by itself, is not enough to make an unprofitable site profitable.  You’ve got to increase the right kind of traffic.  When you get more of the right kind of traffic coming to your site, your site is able to deliver a steady stream of leads or sales into your business.  Let’s look at where you can find the right kind of traffic for your website.

The best traffic for your website is traffic that is highly relevant to your business.

Website Traffic

People have to come to your website in order for your site to be a productive and worthwhile endeavor for your business.  In the absence of traffic, all that exists is a very expensive secret website.  There are several different types of traffic.  Let’s quickly see what they are and how they show up in your website stats or web analytics reports.

• Visitors  – think of this as the number of people who have come to your website.
• Uniques – this is the same as website visitors
• Visits – this is the number of times your website has been visited.  This number is always higher than visitors because some people will visit your website more than once.
• Hits – this is an outdated way of measuring the amount of people that come to your website.  Don’t rely on this number.  Use visits and visitors instead
• First Time Visitors – this is the number of people who have visited your website for the very first time.
• Repeat Visitors – this is the number of people who visited your website and have been there on at least one other occasion.

As you can see there are different kinds of traffic.  Each of the different kinds of traffic above is a little different.  Your efforts to reach new people and bring them to your website will show up in the number of first time visitors in your website reports.  The total number of people visiting your website (visitors) is one of the basic numbers that you should monitor on your website.  Remember though, large numbers of visitors will do you no good if they don’t stick around on your site and come back again later.  Those that come back later are included in the repeat visitors number in your web stats.

Now that you know the most important types of traffic on your website, let’s see how to increase the right kind of traffic by looking at where it is coming from.

How You Get Social Media Traffic to Your Website

Social media is a great way to drive quality, targeted, traffic to your website.  How this is done depends a lot on your target audience and on the product or service that you provide.  The key here is to be active, and provide relevant content in the form of links to articles, videos, blog posts, pictures, reports, etc. that will be of interest to your target audience.  Relevance is key.  There are a lot of automation tools out there that will help automate updating your social profiles, but this has to be done with caution or you risk crossing the line.  Nothing will turn off your social media audience faster than over use of automation.

One of the great opportunities for social media traffic lies in the ability of something to be shared with others in a circle of friends and followers, potentially going viral.  One of the things that you can do to facilitate this is to make sure that your website makes it super easy for your visitors to socially share your website with others.  They will do this by sharing pages on your website with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Talk about ideal traffic to your website – there is nothing that carries as much weight as a referral from a friend.

How to Get SEO Traffic to Your Website

Search engine optimization is a great way to bring people to your website.  The key is to optimize your site for the different key search phrases that people use to search in Google when they are looking for the product or service that you provide.  In order to do this properly, you’ve got to understand that when people come to your website, they won’t all come first to your home page and then from there go to what they are looking for.  They will type in a question or phrase in Google, and then go to the page that shows up in the search results that catches their attention and interest.  With this in mind, different pages on your site should be optimized for different key phrases.  SEO is a great source of highly relevant and targeted traffic.

How Blogs can Drive Traffic to Your Website

Blogs are a great way to drive traffic to your website.  By publishing a blog on your website, your site will naturally receive traffic from SEO and social media.  However, it doesn’t stop there.  Lots of bloggers are looking for guest authors to publish on their blog – this could be you.  What this means is that you can write a blog post and have it published on someone else’s blog.  This enables you to reach a whole new audience.  Some of those people will come to your site to read more.

Most blogs allow comments.  Usually those comments are linked back to the commenter’s website.  This is why you see so much blog comment spam.  Blog commenting can be a good source of web traffic, but only when it is done the right way.  The right way to use blog commenting is to write an interesting and thoughtful response to the blog post.  People who are reading the blog post frequently scan the blog comments to see what others have said.  Spam comments get overlooked, but intelligent insightful comments get attention and drive traffic to your website.

Very similar to blog commenting to drive traffic is forum commenting.  The same rules apply for effectively using your comments and interaction with others on blog posts and online forums to drive traffic to your site.  They key here is to not over-do it with aggressive “visit my website” style posts.

How to Use Advertising to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Online advertising can be a good source of highly targeted traffic for your website, but you’ve got to carefully measure your return on investment (ROI) in order for this to be profitable.  Advertising costs have been driven up significantly recently as a result of larger companies with big budgets coming in and putting lots of marketing dollars in this area.  Online advertising often takes the form of pay-per-click (PPC) adverting.  With this type of advertising, you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad to go to your website.  Google AdWords and Facebook Advertising are two of the most popular types of PPC advertising.  The best way to put this to work for you in driving traffic is to very carefully track the conversion rate of converting that traffic (clicks) into customers.  That will enable you to calculate the return on your marketing investment.  You’ll likely need to make a lot of tweaks and changes in order for this to be productive and profitable for you.  If you’re not careful, you can lose your shirt attempting to drive traffic profitably with online advertising.

Using Direct Mail to Drive Traffic to Your Website

The dirty little secret that you won’t hear talked about is that direct mail is a great way to cost-effectively drive interested prospects to your website.  Google for example spends millions annually on direct mail.  Why?  Because it is profitable.  One of the ways to boost the response rate of your direct mail piece is to use something called personalized urls (PURLs).  A PURL looks like www.johndoe.yourdomain.com.  Setting up PURLs is a bit technical, so this is something that you’d want to have your Internet partner take care of for you.  The result is a direct mail piece that has a significantly higher response rate.  For best results, this should be part of a much bigger marketing strategy of driving traffic to your website and generating leads.

The Best Traffic for Your Website

The best traffic for your website is traffic that is highly relevant to your business.  When it comes to website traffic, quality is much more important than quantity.  In other words the people coming to your website are interested in what you do or provide.  In order for your website to be effective, you’ve got to have a steady stream of traffic.  For maximum effectiveness, that traffic should be coming from a variety of different places.  Don’t pursue traffic for traffic’s sake – pursue traffic for the sake of engaging with people and converting interested prospects into valued long-term clients.  The best way to increase traffic is to pursue a multi-faceted approach where you’re using a variety of different sources and methods to increase highly targeted traffic to your website.