After you set up your new website, you need to get people to come and visit your website. One thing to know is that attracting people to your website is not only related to building an online audience or customer base and get on-time visits. You should aim to have a following and repeat visitors – keep them coming back to your website. And this is what will actually make up your website traffic.
The importance of website traffic:
No matter if you are building a new brand or selling a product, the success of your website depends on the number of visitors you get and the quality of those interactions. In simple terms, more traffic means more sales. Or, if you have a blog, reaching more people can help you inspire and impact more lives. Another reason why website traffic is so important is that with more visitors, you can create great opportunities for different sponsorships and as revenue. Essentially, bringing more traffic to your online business is the way to grow and thrive online.
Where to start:
Choosing the right way to drive traffic and build your online traffic is based on 2 main factors; your budget and your goals. Below you will find examples of both paid and free of cost ways to promote your site.
1.Online advertising
You can use Google’s online advertising platform to get your website in front of customers that are interesting for businesses like yours. These customers are already searching for businesses like yours on Google Search and other Google products. If you want to get started with Google Ads, know that you only have to pay for results including clicks to your website or calls to your business.
2.Social media
A great way to build an organic following is to create a strong social media presence. For that, you need to consider platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., that will help you promote various photos, content, and updates related to your website. Whereas platform like Pinterest and Snapchat are most likely to a specific category of people, respectively Pinterest is popular among women, whereas Snapchat will help you reach a younger audience.
What makes social media even greater is that it is a free of cost and significantly effective way to connect with a large audience.
Note: The main goal on social media is to build a real and strong connection with your audience and build a community. Here is some advice:
– Be authentic
– Create and post useful, relevant content
– Use relevant hashtags
You can also consider different successful and effective strategies such as influencer marketing and collaborations with other businesses.
3.SEO
SEO refers to all the actions you need to take in order to make your website more visible on Google or other search engines. You need to know that the majority of website traffic comes from people clicking on the first few unpaid search results that appear in a specific search. That’s why it is important to work in order to improve your search engine optimization (SEO).
4.Content marketing
Creating unique, relevant, and useful content that your target audience is interested in is another way to attract and engage an online community. Content marketing is a form of marketing that includes blog posts, email newsletters, podcasts, magazines, how-to guides, infographics, lists, etc.
5.In-person promotion
WOM (word of mouth) is another effective marketing strategy, especially valuable for connecting your website with the offline world. This strategy is also called word of mouth advertising and it is a process where marketers launch their campaigns through daily dialogues. A great way to start this marketing strategy is by talking to your friends in your network and then encouraging people to talk about your brand, products and services in dialogue with other people. Some other ways to implement WOM strategy are:
- volunteer in your community
- host and/or sponsor events
- do speaking engagements
- seize other opportunities to connect with your audience face-to-face.
How to track your website?
One of the main benefits of being online is that all of the metrics you need for your website can be tracked. It is very important to get feedback on how your visitors are growing, so here are 2 ways to handle on how your website is doing:
- Google Analytics
Fortunately, Google offers a wide range of tools that can help you measure your site data and get more insights about your audience. In Google Analytics, you can find solutions from basic tools to more sophisticated enterprise analytics.
- Social media metrics
What you need to know about social media platforms is that most of them offer basic data measurement. They can help indicate your website’s progress by tracking your number of followers, their growth over time, and their engagement on your posts (usually 1-5% engagement is considered good).
Next steps…
After you start building your online audience, it is time to look for other indicators that will help you optimize your efforts and get your website to the next level.
- Conversion
If you are a website owner, it may happen to you (at least once) to get a lot of website traffic but not many sales or subscribers. That means that people are just bouncing from your website prematurely and not taking any action or making any purchase. If this is happening to your site, you need to focus your work on retaining visitors and inspire them to make any purchase. You also need to be aware of the type of visitors you are targeting, maybe you are targeting the wrong ones.
- Testing
Another great way to get valuable feedback on your site is to do some usability testing. Saying this means letting real people try your website and then monitoring their reactions.
- Distribution
Sometimes you may get a lot of traffic on one of your social media platforms, but that won’t be reflected on your website. In this case, you need to work more on strengthening the connection between your website and your social media accounts. Once you create and post content in one place, you need to share it and cross-promote across all of your platforms to maintain your audience in both your social media platforms and your website as well.
You also need to make sure to:
- include links to your most relevant web pages on your website in your social media posts
- include links to your social media accounts on your website
In this way, your audience can easily like & follow you on social media, right from your website. A very good possibility is also the use of personalized profiles or as it is called bio link. A very good platform to get this service is smarttr.ee
Now that is all said and done, you are ready to start building an online audience for your website.
