How do you drive traffic to your website?
In this week's collaborative post, we have tackled the ever-imposing question: How do you drive traffic to your website? This is a question that boggles the mind of every person who attempts to embrace Social Media marketing. In the following we have gathered the Omnibeat team and two experts from the field to give their personal advice.
#1: Create Something Valuable
Nate Trimmer is a Co-Founder of Omnibeat. As a social media enthusiast with a background in organizational development and computer technology, he strives to help businesses understand and embrace social media.
Have you launched a beautiful, functional, sharable website with useable content that provides value? Do you post new content regularly?
How can you get more eyeballs viewing your content? The easy answer is Create something valuable and interesting, upload it and then tell your audience about it. Figuring out what your audience will enjoy and persuading them to check it out is the difficult part.
Tactics to Drive Website Traffic:
The content is ready and has been created for your audience. Here are some techniques for driving new traffic to your site.
Encourage your Audience to Share – you must be clear and direct with your audience. People often need a nudge. Provide them with the tools and training. Ask them questions and discuss your online content with them offline.
Join Online Communities – follow prominent writers in your field of work and listen/learn from them. Get involved in the conversation and add value where you can. Promote your site only after you add value.
Funnel Traffic from Other Websites – funneling traffic from websites that are popular and full of visitors such as: reddit, youTube, Wikipedia… Leveraging this pool of visitors can be done by adding something of value and luring them to your website. Don’t SPAM!
Remember to have fun when creating content and linking to it. Your audience wants to learn from you, but they want to have fun while doing it. Be human. Build relationships.
#2: Blog your way to more business
Sookie Shuen is the community manager at Tomorrow People, a leading UK inbound marketing consultancy. She manages all the online and digital community activities based around the Zoober Inbound Marketing philosophy. You can also find her on Google+ and Twitter.
What is a blog?
- You could define a blog as an online diary which allows you to reach many people.
- Your blog enables you to share any message or information you want – from thoughts and ideas, to lists of other useful sites and everything in between.
- Blogs provide a very fast and very convenient way to diversify your site and enhance search engine optimisation. Each post, with individual tags, links, and URL, will actively boost your online presence, with the added advantage of giving new web visitors exactly what they want when they arrive on your site.
- Most blog services also have their own ‘hub’, i.e all their blogs are catalogued under one site, with links to and from thousands of blogs on a similar subject. Being linked to the other blogs builds the presence of your own blog and its potential audience.
- Before you start blogging there are some key points to keep in mind:
Four things every new blogger should know
- The decision you make about what to put in your blog is fundamental to the success of your digital marketing strategy. Focus on the particular area you want to get known for – then blog anything and everything you can on it. As long as it’s relevant to you and your business, every post is a brand new advert and your readership will grow with everyone.
- Don’t approach your blog like an advert, but as a way to showcase yourself as a helpful source of useful, relevant information.
- Add a list of useful links occasionally to build good mutual links with those people you list.
- Post a set of ‘top tips’ once in a while – very useful and very easy to spread via word of mouth. On average, companies that blog enjoy 55% more web traffic than those that don’t!
#3: Understanding the World Wide Web
John Zahn is a Co-Founder of Omnibeat. As a long-time business owner with an interest in technology, he strives to help businesses embrace new technology while sharing their unique story online. John loves helping business owners catch the wave.
Fact - When spiders moved from the water to the land in the Early Devonian period, they started making silk to protect their bodies and their eggs. Spiders gradually started using silk for hunting purposes, first as guide lines and signal lines, then as ground or bush webs, and eventually as the aerial webs which are so famous today.
Fact -The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, commonly known as the Web or the "Information Superhighway"), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.
Fact – Spiders and their webs have evolved gradually over millions of years to produce the best possible effect for their situation. The World Wide Web has evolved at a boggling fast rate over the last decade or two. Both are extremely sophisticated in their complexity, yet simple in their incredible effectiveness.
Gaining traction and driving traffic to your website and spider webs have many practical similarities as well. The more complete and well-structured your web is the better it will be at catching the right prey. There is a strategy that every spider employs to build the better web, not have holes, heavy enough to hold its prize yet light enough to not be seen.
These are the exact same techniques for being successful on the internet web. Develop a strong strategy of marketing and social media and implement all of the right tools to create a perfect web for the internet browser to be intrigued. Put out great content to create genuine interest. Monitor your efforts to make the needed adjustments and repairs. If you are consistently successful at doing this you will have the greatest likelihood of gaining traction and driving traffic to your website.
Can you even imagine the future evolution of this WWW in ten years, fifty years or thousands of years, what’s your guess???
#4: The Power of Keywords
Nelson Ta is the Content Editor and lead blogger for Omnibeat. As a social media enthusiast with an extensive background in writing, he strives to help businesses and people understand the latest trends in social media, technology, and marketing.
If you have been around Social Media marketing long enough, you might have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO essentially dictates how well, easily, and organically people are able to find your web listings. One way to improve your web rankings is the use of keywords.
When choosing keywords, it is important to understand that the world wide web is competitive There are already thousands of companies, large and miniscule, vying for consumer attention by optimizing their site.
Thus, targetting indiviual keywords itself is a losing battle. You want to target key phrases. If you own a local burger joint, you won't necessarily run to the top of the ranks simply by focusing on the word "burger." Industry giants, such as Burger King, Mcdonalds, and so on, will obviously dominate the top of search results. (However, the introduction of semantic search results have opened the door for localized businesses to have a fighting chance).
The first thing you should ask yourself is: What product or service do I provide? From here, you will start to decide which words to infuse into your pages and Social Media. Instead going after "vanity kewords" that are simply root words such as "burger" or "car," you should focus on more specific words and phrases. Targeting specifc products or services may limit your reach in terms of varying demographic, but it may effectively boost your search engine rankings for that specific product.
Keywords are vital for any content strategy. A website is useless without the pull of specific keywords. If you think about it, almost all searches start with search engines. No matter what, your friend Google has the answer to your dilemmas. Therefore, you should create the right leads using the right words.
#5: Focus On User Experience
Rudy Chou is a passionate web evangelist with 15 years of combined experience in design development, digital marketing, and business strategy.
When it comes to the web, there is no foolproof guaranteed way to build traction for your website. However, there needs to be a starting point. As a user experience strategist, I feel the best way to gain traction to a website is to have focus.
Focus on what your message is, what is it you’re providing, and a value proposition. Place the emphasis on your visitor and what experience they'll engage in.
Producing quality content allows you to put your focus on full display. The time you spend on research and providing thoughtful analysis or assessment is the best type of original content. This content is much more meaningful to a visitor this helps because the effort you put in will show.
Since you have invested your time to produce the content, you'll need to track and measure your progress. By taking advantage of Google Analytics to measure whether your content is engaging will help you become more proficient at producing the right content over time to engage your visitors.
This adds value and engages your visitors because if they are coming to your website from a search engine results page, an email, retweet, or any other share, they have an expectation.
Without staying focused, it'll be difficult to offer any value and so visitors are less inclined to be engaged.
