There’s more to traffic strategy than traffic generation
What the heck do you mean? Isn’t increasing the amount of visitors to my site one of the key factors to my website’s success and its ability to generate revenues for me?
Sorry, purely increasing site visitors is far from enough. Yes, you do want to increase the number of visitors to your site, but of even more importance is that they spend time on your site. If you increase your site visitors by 1000 a month yet only 1 out of those 1000 spends more than a few seconds examining your site and its content, what have you accomplished? Honestly, nothing.
There are lots of different ways to increase traffic that do work as far as bringing users to your site. Some will generate what I like to refer to you as “real” visitors while others are just “vanity”. I once tried a service called Entrecard.com to drive traffic to my blog. This is a free service that delivered what it advertised, I got plenty of visitors. But users just visited in order to boost their program stats and to increase their inbound traffic. It was an entire network of “vanity” traffic.
My Bounce Rate was through the roof (bad). So I put that service to rest and decided to focus on more tried a true methods. They are proven to work:
1. Fresh new content (limit re-posting someone elses content). Keep your site, whether its a blog or a business site, dynamic. Users will keep coming if you feed them new content.
2. Make sure your site is user friendly, that the content your visitors are looking for is easily found and easy to navigate through. Avoid over using graphics, flash, or other visual elements that can hamper the speed of your site.
3. Make sure your Meta and Title tags are relevanat to your site’s content. These tags are not necessarily static, your site will develop over time. Keep it up to date to ensure optimal SEO.
4. Exchange links with other like-minded sites. Inbound links to you reflect well on you by visitors and by search engines.
5. Be active in your industry. No matter your industry their are bound to be “social” sites you can participate in, submit articles or post comments to. Get yourself and your brand out their.
6. Invest in Pay-Per-Click programs. For just a few dollars you can get targeted traffic to your website. These are users who saw your ad, have interest in what you have to offer, and clicked through to see your entire message. I have used Yahoo! SEM, Google Adwords, and Facebook Advertising. But there are also others.
7. Patience. Patience. Patience. Even those who preach, myself included, struggle with this one. Just keep working, don’t let yourself get too down or to high with your successes or failures, your site will continue to grow and take on a life of its own.
