How to Drive Traffic To Your Site
Hey — Laurence here.
Here is a quick recap on all the ways you can drive traffic to your site, as well as measuring results.
Step One: Know Your Audience
Before you can create awesome content on your website (which will help drive visitors) — you have to understand your audience.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are you writing for?
- What are their goals?
- What are their interests?
- What are their general demographics?
For my tips and tools for finding your audience, read this recent post of mine where I talk about tools I use to measure my audience.
Step Two: Create Valuable Content For Your Audience
This doesn’t have to be writing. It can be videos, podcasts, infographics or guides. As long as it provides value, it’s fair game.
For those who argue they “can’t write”, check out my writing tips here. And for specific ways on how to create valuable content, look to my presentation.
Moreover, realize that creating good content for other people can bring great results, too. AKA guest posting. Guesting posting on websites, whether blogs or businesses, with a user base that is comparable to yours brings about engaged traffic to your website.
For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, guest post on a blog all about wedding cakes or dresses. This allows you to reach an audience clearly planning a wedding. And may be looking for a photographer. And guess what — after reading your awesome guest post, you may be the guy or gal!
Step Three: Promote Said Content
So you write an amazing article. But you still need people to read it.
This is where SEO, Social Media and email lists come in.
- SEO – The foundation of your site. Allows Google to better index your webpage. Not exactly promoting content, but SEO is crucial and should never be passed over.
- Social Media – A great way to promote your brand — make sure to spend time on social networks where your target audience hangs out (i.e. – for a wedding photographer, go to Pinterest and other sites where people planning a wedding are)
- Email List – Direct point of contact to your customers/readers.
After you publish a new post, video, infographic, guide, etc — make sure to share it across your relevant social networks and send out a blast to your email list.
Step Four: Measure Results
It’s important to know how certain posts are performing, and what’s working and what’s not. Here are a few of my favorite testing tools.
- Google Analytics
- Optimizely
- SumoMe Heat Maps and Content Analytics
- Peek by User Testing
- Facebook Page Insights
- User Surveys
Step Five: Learn from Results, Apply to Future
Like anything, building website traffic takes time. But the better your understand your users and what they’re trying to achieve, the easier it becomes.
When you notice a certain post or page is performing well, recognize why. And apply the same concept in the future.
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Thanks,
Laurence Bradford
To see my full presentation, click here.
(PS – Here is an article filled with my favorite blogging tools for you to check out.)