Having a website or a blog is not hard, but it is hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. With over 100 million blogs and growing how do you attract visitors? Follow these simple tips to drive traffic to your website or your blog.
1) Target Your Customers or Readers
When strategizing about what audience you’re writing for, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular the communities, topics, writing styles and content relevancy play a better role in spreading the word on the web.
The purpose is to identify groups that have high concentrations of what is called “content distributors” and “heavy content sharers.” Content distributors are people with accounts on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ who might share links about your business or blog topic. Heavy content sharers are extremely active social users who run their own blogs and sites. The other group, which is most important, is called “potential consumers of your website or blog content.” These people are interested in your topic and receptive to your point of view. Identifying this group will dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers.
2) Interact with existing Communities
Online communities can be greatly effective if you have value to offer and in return your potential community members also have value. But getting to the critical mass tipping point is not always simple. Many sites about online communities are full of suggestions about which tool or software package to use. You can have the best software package ever created, but if you don’t initiate interaction, your online community will not grow. Once you have determined the communities, you need to start interaction. Create an account, read what others have written and don’t jump in the conversation until you’ve have a good feel for what’s appropriate and what’s not.
Three things you need to think about:
- Tell Stories, try to make it simple and “personal.”
- Empathize with whatever market or audience you’re after.
- Engage and recognize. Find ways to ask your readers, subscribers, fans, friends and followers to interact and participate directly on your business blog as well as other social media and networking channels used to grow communities and promote useful content.
3) Use Social Media Networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+
Twitter just topped 465 million registered accounts. Facebook has over 850 million active users. Facebook pages are one of the most powerful tools for attracting potential clients or readers and involving your regular customers/readers in a constant collaboration. About 51% of Facebook users say they are more likely to buy from the brands they follow. Google+ has nearly 100 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the “content distributors” description above, meaning they’re likely to help spread the word about your blog.
Leveraging these networks to attract traffic requires patience, skill and keeping up with changes and trends by the social sites. Also, it’s important to keep a clear understanding of what content to share and how.
Always add content like pictures, descriptions of your Facebook, and Twitter accounts to keep it updated and as full of information as possible. Once you have a packed site, start connecting and sharing with your customers or fans.
The goal is to get “viral content.” Using hashtags on Twitter and jumping in on interesting conversations are great ways to keep up with the latest on your social media. And don’t forget to share exclusive content!
By following these methods, your followers and fans will increase and your ability to bring traffic back to your blog by will be tremendous.
4) Make your Blog on top of Search Engines pages, SEO!
SEO or search engine optimization has become an indispensable part of online marketing. When this tool is used properly it can actually boost your business. What web business owners should understand is having a website with great content and a perfect appearance is not everything and can sometimes mean nothing. Something that has become extremely popular in search engines is the page ranking. This is an important part of promoting your website and attracting targeted traffic towards your business. Over 3 billion online searches are performed everyday on the Internet and that number continues to grow. More than never before, your business needs to be readily available to the online community.
20% of the effort and tactics to make your content optimized for search engines will yield 80% of the value possible. This means that it is easier than you think to bring in thousands of visitors to your online domain.
Don’t hesitate to contact a specialized SEO agency that can help you figure out what you should do and how you can boost your business and your sales.
5) Get an appealing design and use Photos and Graphics
If you’re someone who can produce graphics, take photos, create illustrations, then you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service like Flickr to embed your images), you create another traffic source for yourself via image search, which will improve the engagement and entertainment of your visitors.
Adding photos or graphics on your website or blog not only helps break up the text, but it also can make your article more interesting, friendly and easier to understand. If you are writing a blog post about a specific product, take a picture of that product and include it in your blog post. That’s an easy quick way to improve your website.
Facebook and Twitter are not platforms for creating a sale. They can, however, increase awareness of your product and get people talking about it. It is at this point that your job as a marketer is to become an active part of this discussion.Answer questions customers have, send out interesting tidbits of information you find, do anything you can to be a resource to your subscribers. When it comes to social media, be preemptive about your product but also appropriately responsive.