Below, we’ve gather five tactics you can use to drive traffic to your website fast, while ensuring that your long-term strategies are put in place for the future.
Recommended reading: Authority: How Do You Get There?
Write guest posts
Guest posting is undoubtedly one of the simplest and fastest ways to bring targeted traffic to your website – and it’s certainly not ‘dead’, as some might have you believe. Guest posting not only boosts your backlinks; it strengthens the authority of your brand as well. It’s all about choosing reputable sites that are relevant to your niche and expertise.
The ideal combination of SEO and content marketing, guest posting connects you with industry leaders who have already built established audiences. Think twice before employing spammy tactics in your approach, as the consequences may have the opposite effect to the one intended. If you’re just starting out, you may find you have more success approaching smaller websites first. Generally speaking, the more influential the site, the harder it is to get a post published.
Use paid advertising – wisely
It’s worth looking at paid advertising as more of a short-term boost for your website, rather than relying on it for the foreseeable future. Paid search and social media advertising are both great ways of putting your brand out there and attracting visitors to your new website, but they’re very much ‘quick wins’. Take away that budget, and your traffic will soon dry up.
Some options to consider for fast, paid traffic include:
- Google AdWords
- Bing ads
- Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn ads
- StumbleUpon and Reddit
Where you spend your money also depends on where your audience is. When reaching out to new audiences on social platforms, leveraging influencers with an existing audience can offer higher long-term returns than paid ads, as we’ll discuss below. The key takeaway here: use paid ads to get going, but aim to build more sustainable growth strategies as you progress.
Optimize your website for search engines
We’d all love to rank for the high commercial intent keywords within our niche, naturally. Unfortunately, in most cases, this is difficult to achieve – especially with a new website. Unless you have a very high authority website, chances are that most of your traffic will come from long-tail keywords.
A good first step is to conduct some long-tail research using a tool like Keyword Planner, then see whether any of these keywords can be worked naturally into your existing content. These keywords are by nature more accessible and less competitive, so your chances of ranking for them is much higher.
For example, say you sell coffee. Long-tail keywords might include:
- black coffee health benefits
- what is coffee made out of
- coffee and blood pressure
Of course, you can’t just focus on your long-tail keywords if you want your website to be optimized for Google, Bing, and their chums. There’s a lot that goes into SEO and a quick way to boost it is to employ tools that will give you a helping hand with your optimization.
Plug in SEO is a tool that identifies problems with your website’s SEO so that you can spend your time on the areas that you know will help drive traffic to your website. It’s free to add to your website if you’ve built it using the ecommerce CMS, Shopify, and will send you an email alert whenever it spots an issue you need to fix.
If you’re part of the 30% of people who built their website on the open-source CMS, WordPress, then look no further than Yoast. It’s a fantastic SEO tool that helps you to write optimized content, see how your web pages look in search engine results, and tunes the engine of your website.
Connect with influencers
Influencer marketing is an exciting new field of advertising, based on making connections that will help to get your website in front of their active and engaged audiences. Successful influencers are committed to providing regular, valuable, creative content for their followers to keep them engaged and involved. It’s a great opportunity for enterprising brands to find a curated, attentive audience who may have an interest in their products.
Finding influencers in your industry can be as easy as searching on social media, or you may want to try a tailored service such as FameBit. Success with influencer marketing is all about working to build mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers, experts, journalists, and personal brands to tap into their online popularity. The right influencers have the power to bring a huge boost in traffic volume – provided you stay on their good side.
Run a contest or promotion
Finally, running a good old-fashioned giveaway is a time-tested way to quickly bring more traffic to your website in the early days. All you need is some sort of exciting prize or incentive to offer users in exchange for their participation. In the process of entering, chances are they will visit your website along the way.
Brands will often use social sharing as their preferred method of entry to spread the word as widely as possible. One of the best things about contests is that they can gain traction rapidly – after all, people love an opportunity to get something for nothing. Plus, in the long-term, you may well gain new followers who’ll continue to interact with your brand once the contest is over.
Tools like Woobox, Gleam and ViralSweep provide an easy way to embed giveaways directly onto your website landing pages and/or blog posts. Use them in tandem with strategic exit intent pop-ups, and you’re away. With contests, you have the potential to give your website traffic a huge boost – as long as you pitch a giveaway that’s exciting and relevant to your audience.
With these five tactics to hand, you stand a good chance of generating more web traffic to your newly purchased website, which in turn, means more opportunities to bring in revenue. Got questions about any of the above? Share them in the comments below!
Patrick Foster is a writer and ecommerce expert from Ecommerce Tips — an industry-leading ecommerce blog that offers practical marketing advice so that your website receives the exposure it deserves. Check out the latest posts on Twitter @myecommercetips
