50 Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website The hardest part of marketing is coming up with the ideas.
Edited by Dan Bova
More website traffic is always a good thing. And most online marketing strategies do revolve around building traffic to your site. Yet it's sometimes challenging to come up with new ideas to boost your site's traffic. That's why I've come up with this list of 50 easy strategies to try, to increase your website traffic so you'll never run out of ideas.
Related: 5 Harsh Truths About the Internet Marketing World
1. Display ads.
Display ads are a simple form of advertising that rely on banners or other clickable assets on another site. Look for opportunities on high-traffic authority sites. OutBrain and Taboola are popular services that help with this.
2. Try paid search ads.
Google AdWords and Bing Ads are the best choices here. You'll pay per click (PPC) to drive traffic to your site based on certain keyword searches.
Read This: Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising by Richard Stokes | Amazon | eBooks.com | Barnes & Noble
3. Try social media ads.
Social media ads work much in the same way except you have more options to target your audience specifically. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube all provide good options for paid ads.
4. Link to your website from your social media profiles.
Make sure to fill out your social media profiles completely, so when people visit your profiles, they can easily click through to your website.
5. Promote your content on your social media channels.
Take your onsite content, and push it out to your social media channels so it can be found and clicked on more easily. If your website is on WordPress, I recommend the Social Warfare plugin to make content easily shareable.
6. Host contests on social media.
Use social media to host contests to draw more attention to your brand, and entice people to come to your site.
7. Use calls-to-action (CTAs) in your social media posts.
Give people a reason to click through to your site on social media, such as advertising a new product.
8. Post in social media groups.
Get involved in groups on Facebook or LinkedIn to increase your visibility and reputation. On Twitter, you can use hashtags to the same effect.
Read This: Tweet Naked: A Bare-All Social Media Strategy for Boosting Your Brand and Your Business by Scott Levy | Amazon | eBooks.com | Barnes & Noble
9. Work with influencers.
Engage with influencers in your industry to increase your reputation, by proxy.
10. Offer discounts via email or social media.
Give users a good reason to visit your site by promoting discounts, sales and special offers.
11. Optimize your headlines.
A recent study concluded that 59 percent of all links shared on social networks aren't actually clicked on at all, implying that the majority of article shares aren't based on actual reading. One insight we can draw from this is clear -- headlines matter a lot. Refine your headlines to make them shorter, catchier and more compelling.
12. Optimize your site for search.
Deploy effective SEO strategies with proper coding, structuring and meta data.
13. Improve your site's performance.
Make sure your content loads properly on all devices, and optimize your site speed as much as possible.
Read This: Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website by Jon Rognerud | Amazon | eBooks.com | Barnes & Noble
14. Target better keywords.
Target highly specific keywords for your content marketing strategy. This will reduce competition in the search rankings, and drive more qualified visitors.
15. Create a community.
Create an online forum for your customers to engage with one other and your brand. They'll come back again and again, fostering brand loyalty and word-of-mouth sales. Just be aware that this is a time-consuming, difficult and long-term endeavor. Fellow Entrepreneur contributor Neil Patel attempted this, and ultimately gave up on the idea after a year. You can read his story here, and put the lessons he learned to use.
16. Participate in relevant industry forums.
If you'd rather become a part of another industry forum than create your own, find and participate in a community forum. To find one, go to Google, and search for "[your industry] forum."
17. Join a blogging community.
Use a site like Problogger or Copyblogger to get more attention for your work.
18. Join a Slack community.
Slack is basically a big chat room. Join a chat room comprised of professionals in your industry -- or your target market -- and participate. Here's a list of some Slack communities you can consider.
19. Offer guest post opportunities on your blog.
Offer major influencers a guest spot on your blog. They'll earn visibility with your audience as well as a link to their website, and in return, you'll gain a share of their audience.
20. Build inbound links.
Build links pointing back to your site. Links help with SEO, referral traffic and branding. For help, see SEO Link Building: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide.
21. Remove questionable inbound links.
Use a service like Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer to find and eliminate bad links, which could be holding your search rankings down.
22. Guest post on industry blogs.
Get yourself featured as a guest contributor on other industry blogs. For help, see The Ultimate, Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Business by Guest Blogging.
23. Seek ongoing contributor status.
If you can become a regular contributor on a publication, you'll build your brand with that publication's audience much more quickly than if you just did a one-off guest post.
24. Create viral content.
Try to create content that's surprising, unique, entertaining and informative so it can circulate the web.
25. Add images to your content.
Content with visuals simply perform better.
26. Start a YouTube channel.
YouTube is a social platform on its own, but its videos are also commonly featured directly in Google search results.
Read This: Ultimate Guide to YouTube for Business by Jason R. Rich | Amazon | eBooks.com | Barnes & Noble
27. Start a podcast.
Podcasts are hot these days. Strike a chord with listeners, and you could build a consistent and loyal audience.
28. Host a webinar.
Host a webinar to educate your audience.
29. Start an email newsletter.
Build an email list, and use it to promote your website's content. Give readers a teaser of your content, and offer a link to the page on your site where they can read more. MailChimp is a popular email newsletter provider that I use and recommend.
30. Submit your content to StumbleUpon.
Content discovery engine StumbleUpon is a quick and easy place to submit your content. Sometimes, if it gets enough upvotes from users, it can prompt hundreds or thousands of visits to your site. StumbleUpon also offers a paid advertising option worth considering.
31. Get your content shared on Reddit.
Reddit doesn't allow self-promotion, so you'll have to get someone else to submit your content for you -- perhaps a friend, colleague or even someone on Fiverr. Just be sure to submit ony high-quality content, and pick the most relevant subreddit to submit it to. Reddit also offers paid ads.
32. Sign up for Help a Reporter Out (HARO).
HARO subscribes you to an email list, which notifies you of journalists looking for sources for their stories. Peruse the list of needed sources, and apply to the ones that are relevant to your business. If you're accepted, you'll have a chance to earn visibility and links on major news outlets.
33. Use AllTop.
Getting featured on AllTop could send you tons of traffic.
34. Respond to commenters.
Show you care about your audience, and you'll build your brand; earn repeat visitors; and build a community.
35. Answer questions on Q&A sites.
Find questions on sites, like Quora or Yahoo! Answers, and provide the best possible answers to relevant questions. Include links back to your main site as citations.
36. Write a response post.
Respond to an extremely popular article with an article of your own, to get some visibility by proxy.
37. Conduct interviews.
Interview influencers. They'll almost certainly share it with their own audiences, driving a share of their audience to your website.
38. Network in person.
Go to networking events, conventions and other in-person events, so you can tell people about your website and business in person.
Read This: Business Networking and Sex: Not What You Think by Ivan Misner, Hazel M. Walker, Frank J. De Raffelle Jr. | Amazon | eBooks.com | Barnes & Noble
39. Get a speaking gig.
Attend major events as a speaker, and you'll instantly increase your exposure, brand, followers and website traffic.
40. Implement microformatting.
Use Schema.org to properly format your site's data, and increase your chances of getting featured in Google's Knowledge Graph.
41. Offer in-store motivations.
Don't forget your foot traffic. Give your physical customers a reason to visit your website, with such features as signage that encourages online check-ins.
42. Ride a trending topic.
You can newsjack a popular news article, or leverage a trending hashtag to cash in on the visibility of a new trend or major story in your industry.
43. Publish a press release.
Use a service like PR Newswire or PRWeb to submit a press release about a newsworthy event in your business.
44. Submit a product for review.
Give a review blogger in your niche a free sample of your latest product in exchange for an honest review.
45. Mimic your competition.
Figure out what strategies your competitors are using, and see if you can use them better.
46. Differentiate from your competition.
Find a way to stand out from the competition by doing something none of them have ever tried.
47. Publish, and circulate an ebook.
Create an ebook to encourage more visits, and use it to build your email list by requiring an email address to receive it.
48. Publish an infographic.
Infographics are inherently shareable, and good ones can result in not only referral traffic, but also inbound links that help with SEO.
49. Start a content marketing strategy.
If you aren't publishing high-quality content on your website, start doing so. To use a fishing metaphor, every new piece of content you publish is like dropping another hook in the water. For help, see The All-in-One Guide to Planning and Launching a Content Marketing Strategy.
50. Repurpose your content.
If you have a long blog post, try creating a PDF version of it, converting it into a live webinar, discussing it on a podcast or converting it into a video. Repurposing your content on different mediums will help it gain exposure to different audiences.
Related: 50 Online Marketing Influencers to Watch in 2016
You don't need to use all these ideas in your online marketing strategy, but I recommended experimenting with each of them at least once so you can find out which ones work the best for you.
