I’m Being Followed So Much I’m Causing Traffic Jams

So you’ve spent countless hours designing your website and getting it “perfect”.

Now what?

Now comes the challenging task to get people to your website. That’s the goal, right? You need to get visitors to your site to read your content, sign up for your newsletter and/or make a purchase.

Well, let’s check out six ways to direct that traffic to your website:

SEO is all about increasing the visibility of your website in search engine organic search results. You can achieve this by optimizing your pages with keywords that your potential customers may use to search for your type of website or business online. Using keywords in your page titles, headers and content – along with adding alt text to your images will also help improve your search engine ranking. In addition, getting as many backlinks to your website as possible will help indicate how popular or important your website is to the search engines. This can take some time to set up in the beginning but it’s worth the effort.

Blogging and guest blogging is a great way to direct traffic to your website. It creates dynamic content that search engines love…so consistency is key. Writing great content that is informative, educational and entertaining will attract readers and keep people coming back for more. You can automate your blog articles to be posted to your social media profiles which will include a link back to your website.  And putting a link in your bio that’s displayed when guest blogging helps to promote and direct visitors to your website.

Posting engaging content on social media with links to your website will bring more visitors. Visual content works wonders in keeping people engaged and sharing your content. Create some intriguing photos and videos to post to Instagram and YouTube with links or mentions of your website address to encourage followers to go to your website. Using Facebook or Twitter ads are also helpful and can be done with minimal investment. Once you get them there, make sure your site is designed to make purchasing, sign-ups or becoming a member as easy as possible.

One of the best ways to let people know about your website is to tell them! Hello! Who or what could be better at promoting your website and letting people know what it’s all about than you. So get out there and tell people about it! Put in on business cards…mention it at networking events. You can even put it on your car or a T-shirt. Get creative and tell people what your website is about and get them excited to go check it out.

Email newsletters are great for sending out promotions, company or product updates or announcements, interesting facts, personal updates or fun facts about yourself or your pets, video updates and short educational video trainings…along with a host of other things. Send out your newsletter with a link as a call-to-action (CTA) to get visitors to your website to sign up for webinars, download ebooks or making purchases. Have a conversation with your subscribers by email and keep them engaged and coming back for whatever you have to offer. There are many email marketing providers out there that can get you started. Services such as Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact and Mailchimp just to name a few. And a few of them are free to get started – like Mailchimp – where you can create campaigns and send emails to up to 2000 subscribers per month for free.

You know those ads you see in the Google search results? Well, those are PPC ads. This is a good way to get potential customers to your website who are actively searching for your content or business using keywords. You do this by setting up an account with GoogleAdWords. You choose the keywords you want to “bid” on and create an ad. The search engine will then help get your ad in front of your target market. You can set this up with a small budget. You can choose to budget as low as five dollars per day – or – you can set a maximum amount you want to pay per click. Once viewers click on the ad, your website or landing page should be built to attempt to convert those visitors to customers so that you get the best ROI possible. It costs you a little to get them there, so now let’s convert that to a sale for a great return…and hopefully a longtime customer.

So there you go! I’ve given you a great headstart with some proven tactics to become the traffic cop for your website – most of which can be implemented with little time, effort or cost. So what are you waiting on! Go get started.

Which of these are you already doing? Which ones do you want to try next? Leave a comment below and let me know what’s working best for your business.