You’ve Built Your Website And Put It Out There For The World To See
Now what?
Websites that get traffic, attract more traffic. But sites that don’t have traffic have a much more difficult time getting it.
It is the age-old problem: now you’ve put time and sweat into building your site, how do you convince people to get as excited about it as you are? The problem is we are a fickle species, and we tend to go where the hoard goes.
So what to do?
Derek Halpern states that successful bloggers need to put 20% of their time into creating a blog post, and then put the other 80% of their time into promoting it. That is quite a the disparity!
And if you are not the type of person that promotion comes naturally to, then this may seem like a monumental task.
Having an online presence, whether it is for writing a blog, promoting your business, or whatever your goal, requires effort. But building a website is just the beginning. Promoting it is an ongoing process.
Let’s look at where you get your traffic from.
Traffic you own
Traffic you own is organic traffic. You don’t buy it; you don’t have to ask others for it. It is yours.
So where do you get it from?
Search Engines
When someone searches for a word or phrase on Google, and then they click on a result that leads to your website, this is free traffic for you. This is why search engine optimization is so important.
As long as you are not attempting to game the system, Search Engine Optimization is pretty straight-forward and only requires a small number of tasks. It’s not the dark-art that some make it out to be. Follow a few simple steps and you are good to go.
Email Lists
Hopefully you have set up a form on your website to collect emails and you have it integrated with one of the many email subscription services available. Then, when people visit your website they have the ability to sign up for your list. You can email those people whenever you want, and that adds to your free traffic.
Email traffic is pretty crucial because if people have opted in to your list, then they are already committed. Treat them well and they will return. Treat them really well and they will bring their friends to visit.
Traffic you buy
Traffic you buy comes from places like Google Adwords, banner ads, Facebook ads etc. You are paying someone else to bring visitors to your website.
Buying traffic can have a significant positive effect on your business. If you do Google Adwords well, or if you take the time and promote your website on Facebook you can have high-quality, targeted traffic. The more money you spend, the more traffic you get. But, of course, it comes at a price.
If and when you go the route of paid traffic be sure to keep an eye on your numbers. If you are spending $1 a day on Facebook ads and, after you’ve done your analysis, you calculate you are earning only 97 cents, then you are losing money. If however you determine you are earning $1.09, then you are making money and you should be spending a lot more than a dollar a day…
Traffic you earn
Traffic you earn comes from others via your involvement in the community. This is where your social skills come in. You need to put effort into reaching out and making connections in the community. This is an ongoing task.
A few ways you can get involved in the community include:
- Submitting your writing to Blog submission sites
- Writing Guest Posts for other websites
- Posting to Authority Sites
- Building relationships with complementary websites, and exchanging links
- Participating on Social Media websites
What to do with your traffic?
Now the big question – do you really need more traffic? The answer depends on what the goal of your website is.
If your goal is to make money by selling banner ads on your website, then the more traffic you get, the more money you’ll make.
However, if you are selling a product or a service, then maybe what is more important is getting the most out of the traffic you already have.
Remember, you might be stressing over having only 10 visitors to your website. But if your visitors are converting at 20% then you are much better off with those 10 visitors than with 100 visitors that are only converting at 1.5%.
In other words, you may be better off putting the time into converting your current visitors, as opposed to spending all your time trying to attract new ones.
Conclusion
Getting people to visit your website takes time and effort. But the more time and effort you put in, the greater the reward.
It helps to understand where you are getting your website visitors from. But don’t forget, at the end of the day you have to ensure that you take advantage of the traffic you are already getting.
What about you? What do you think is the best traffic source for your website?
