If you’ve already got a great business site but are wondering how to drive traffic to it, look no further. It would be wonderful if you could create a tremendous product, design a brilliant site and simply wait for the customers to come flooding to your domain with their credit cards in hand, but unfortunately the real world doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend innovating the kinds of products and services which will provide a genuine improvement to people’s lives, and how aesthetically pleasing or groundbreaking your site is – if you don’t spend as much (or more) time on the marketing and publicity side of things, all your creative talents and technical brilliance will count for nothing, since no one will be making purchases! Or your service would not be making the impact you wish to make on your target audience.
Fortunately with a bit of hard work, customer engagement and creative flair, your unique monthly visitors will continue to rise, which means your sales will also continue to rise (provided your products and services are as good as your marketing and publicity). Here are some ways to guarantee your site becomes a hub of activity, instead of a barren wasteland.
Blog regularly
Blogging has many benefits, some of which are not entirely quantifiable, such as establishing your company as a thought leader and raising awareness of your brand. In terms of site traffic however, there are precise metrics which can give a good indication of how many new visitors are coming to your site as a direct result of your blogging campaign. In addition to this, the Google ranking algorithm loves fresh, high-quality content, so posting regularly is one way to ensure the search engine ranking of your site continues to soar. Always remember to structure your blog posts appropriately, and include killer headlines and intelligible meta-information.
Stay active on social media
Social media is a great way to spread your blog content far and wide, allowing you to pick up new fans (and hopefully customers or clients) in the process. While sharing blog posts is a great way to drive traffic to your site, engaging in discussions regarding your products and using your expert knowledge to answer industry questions is also particularly fruitful for encouraging people to delve further into your company and check you out online. As a word of warning, being active on social media is a good thing, but spam-tweeting about your products and services with flagrant disregard for your customer’s needs is not! Aim to provide (instead of take) value on social media and it will be returned ten-fold with site traffic and customer loyalty.
Run competitions
Who doesn’t love a competition? We’re all kids at heart and the thought of winning something for free is always going to be an appealing prospect, particularly if the competition is fun and creatively stimulating. In addition to this, by posting winning entries on the site, competitors will have the opportunity to link their friends, family and work colleagues to their achievement, which coincidentally happens to be on your site where they are free to explore the other wonderful services you provide to paying customers!
Send out a brilliant newsletter
Provided your newsletter is distributed with regularity, well-designed and packed full of exciting content (instead of being contrived hard-selling attempts or shamelessly promotional), this pretty much guarantees an increase in site traffic. In fact, it’s common for companies to notice a spike in traffic precisely corresponding with the time of the month when the newsletter is distributed. Feel free to use your newsletter to promote your fantastic new product, complete with hyperlinks to the product page on your site, but remember to balance it out with plenty of non-commercial content which answers industry concerns and keeps people entertained or creatively engaged.
(Photo: Dreamstime)
Tags: blogs, competitions, newsletter, search engine optimisation, SEO, social engagement
