How To Drive Traffic To Your Site

Without traffic, your bank account won’t see a cent. Neither a phone call. Driving traffic to your site isn’t an easy job. It takes lots of efforts and it requires a few months to see first results.

However, it’s not impossible. In this blog post, I’ll show you 17 ways that you can use today for increasing the traffic of your website.

Depending on how big your team, it might be hard to practice all these ways, so I recommend you to test different solutions and see what brings the best results.

Let’s explore them.

#1 Facebook Ads

It’s possible that because of your business model, Facebook is not the first solution.

Advertising on Facebook is definitely better for B2C companies than B2B, but if you are B2B, you can try LinkedIn Ads.

Now, this is just a general rule of thumb and it doesn’t mean Facebook Ads won’t work for your B2B company. What I want to say is that you can spend $250 and check if it’s worth further investing.

If you’re wondering how much does it cost to advertise on Facebook, I’d strongly recommend a blog post I wrote recently. When you create Facebook ads, you have to pick a marketing objective.

As this blog post is all about driving traffic to your site, then your objective might be Send people to a destination on or off Facebook.

Why do I say might be and not your objective is?

It’s because your landing page has its purpose. For example, if want to increase the number of sales, then your objective is Increase conversions on your website.

However, in this case, you have to implement Facebook Pixel to measure your marketing campaigns.

#2 Google Ads

When I say advertising on Google, I mean:

• Search Network
• Display Network

Search Network is everything related to Google search.

Here at Jellymetrics, when we decide to advertise on Google search, we’ll definitely consider bidding for the following keywords:

• Email marketing software
• Email marketing app
• Bulk email marketing software
• Best email marketing for small business

As for me, Google AdWords is good both for B2B and B2C.

Still, it depends on a lot of your Customer Lifetime Value.

For example, email marketing software has a suggested bid of $15.68. If we decide to pay that amount per click, every 100 clicks will cost us $1,568 and it might be expensive if we wouldn’t know our CLV.

Check out how many ads are there for this term.

If we get 3 customers in every 100 clicks and CLV of one customer is $2,000, it means that making $6,000 revenues will cost up to $1,568.

These numbers just came from my head, but the principle is the same- know your CLV and calculate ROI. On the other hand, Display Network displays your ads on sites that have implemented Google AdSense.

I think it’s definitely a great solution for:

• Remarketing
• Increasing brand awareness

For example, if someone adds a product in the cart, but doesn’t finish the order, you can bring them back by remarketing.

Remarketing will follow that visitor across the Internet because there are literally million of sites with Google Adsense implemented.

#3 Quora

This is the most popular Q&A site in the world. According to SimilarWeb, it has more than 270 visits every month.

This means that there are a lot of questions that are waiting for the answers. Why wouldn’t you be one of these guys who answer and help other people?

Well, if you answer on other questions, and include the link to your blog, you will definitely see traffic increase.

Now, the real question is How to find unanswered questions related to my business? Easy. Firstly, let’s assume that you work in the travel industry.

Now, let’s enter travel in the search box.

So, here you have a few topics such as Visiting and Travel, International Travel, etc. I’ll pick the first topic. Here I can see four links:

• Read
• Answer
• Topic FAQ
• Most Viewed Writers

Since my goal is to answer questions, I’ll click on Answer, wait for the page to be loaded and scroll down.

Here are a few questions:

• How can I start my own traveling?
• My husband and I are planning to visit Thailand. Where is the best place to stay?
• Next month, what is the best way to travel from Shanghai to Beijing considering it's the spring festival? Plane or high-speed train?
• Can a 17-year-old stay at a hotel with other minors?
• Can I end an email with "Safe travels" as a salutation if the individual is traveling?

Furthermore, if you have enough money, you can always check who are the most viewed writers, and hire them to answer for you. They can also write blog posts for you.

#4 SEO

The purpose of SEO is to increase the organic visibility of your site. It sounds simple, but it’s not! Most sites will never reach high metrics as HubSpot, Moz, and a few others do.

However, there’s something that you can do today. I think you should start with a 15 minutes SEO audit. This will tell you how well your site is optimized.

Anyway, let’s say that there are more than 200 Google ranking factors, and basically, we divide them into two groups:

• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO

On Page-SEO is everything that’s related to your code. It’s something you can probably fix, even today. I’m talking about:

• Website speed
• SSL
• Responsivity
• H1, H2, H3.. tags
• Readability
• Page Title

So, if your site isn’t On-Page optimized, you have to talk to your developer. Although On-Page factors are important, the most important factor is a number of backlinks (Off-Page factor).

This excludes visiting other sites and sharing spammy links. Instead, you can create a wonderful content and attract quality backlinks.

There are dozens of tactics for an increasing number of backlinks. Email outreach is one of the best, but it requires sending lots of emails, and that’s not an easy job.

Next, you can try with broken link building tactic which is also very simple. The idea is to find authoritative pages who link on pages that don’t exist anymore.

After you find them, just shoot them a message and ask for the link. It’s a win-win situation.

Finally, track your results and increase of PA, DA, UR, DR, etc.

#5 Content Marketing

Instead of pushing out traditional advertising messages that consumers want to ignore, content marketing focuses on creating and distributing content that is truly valuable, says Michele Linn, VP of Content and Content Marketing Institute.

Some people think that content marketing is equal to SEO, but that’s not true. Content marketing is all about adding new value through blogs, social media networks, and other few channels.

On the other side, SEO is a set of rules that you apply in order to increase organic visibility. Rules such as UX, UI, link building, and so on.

Content marketing is not an easy job. I say this because you can’t expect to see some results after, let’s say two or three weeks (in Google AdWords you can) of blogging.

But, if you keep being consistent and publish new content for two years, the results will be there. I always suggest you create a writing plan. You can even use a simple Google Calendar app.

It works for me perfectly. When I see all these blog posts I need to write this month, it puts me under the pressure and keeps me writing.

There are days when I’m too lazy to write anything, but when I see these yellow rectangles, everything changes.

#6 Twitter

More than 300 million active users make this social network one of the most important.

Driving traffic to your site requires a high number of followers and tons of time, just as content marketing.

To speed up the process, you should use hashtags, because they increase engagement rate. It doesn’t mean you should add as much as possible hashtags. I

n fact, the best would be only two. Tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement rate.

Source: MarketingProofs

I recommend reading a text about comparing Facebook and Twitter. Speaking of that, Facebook has a better engagement rate, although their organic reach constantly decrease.

However, keep in mind that not every type of business is suitable for Twitter or Facebook. If you’re running a business in the food industry, then Facebook is probably a better choice.

But, running a business in marketing or technology field means Twitter may be a better solution.

#7 Referral Traffic

SEO isn’t the only reason why you should acquire new backlinks because there is also a referral traffic. For me, SimilarWeb is the best tool to check competitor’s metrics.

These stats above are Hubspot’s whose second best channel is referral traffic.

Why do I say second best channel when there’s Direct channel?

This experiment shows that up to 60% of Direct traffic is actually Organic, that’s why. So, once you start building backlinks, you can count on referral traffic too.

However, the trick is that when you build backlinks using broken link building tactic, it’s very doubtful how much traffic you’ll get.

The article might be two years old and maybe it doesn’t get too much traffic as the newly published one. If you’re wondering how to get backlinks on new articles, keep reading because I’ll explain you tricks with HARO.

#8 LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn isn’t only good for prospecting customers, it’s also good for increasing the number of visits to your site. Personally, I see two approaches:

• Joining a group
• Creating a group

A first approach is definitely easier because you only have to do a few things.

Firstly, let’s find an appropriate group. In the search box, enter a keyword related to your business. For instance, I’ll enter marketing and after that choose a third option - Groups about Marketing.

Now I can see the whole bunch of groups related to marketing. There are even 40,791 groups.

On the right side, I can filter by languages. Of course, I’d always display only groups in English. Once you join a few groups, you should read the rules, and start posting links to your blog.

Please keep in mind that if you don’t follow the rules, you might be banned. A second approach is creating your own group.

This is very good because here you can’t be banned since you’re the one who creates the rules unless you share spam because LinkedIn will ban you.

However, you can’t share links to your blog posts too offensively because other group members may leave the group.

#9 Interview Influencers

Creating an interview will always work since it’s a classical ego building strategy.

Honestly, I haven’t interviewed anyone for this blog, but I wrote a text about creating an interview with influencers.

In that article, I was writing about Jeff Bullas, and guess what, he tweeted the article.

Once you find an influencer for the interview, I guarantee that he or she will tweet about it.

Surely, you won’t send an email to Elon Musk because you will never get an answer, but you can find influencers your in your space without so many efforts.

For example, Followerwonk is a great tool where you can see who has a high social authority, and a high number of followers as well. T

his is a crucial thing because influencer without followers isn’t interesting very much. Your goal is to provide a tweet from him.

#10 Email Marketing

Just as content marketing, email marketing also takes some time because of collecting new subscribers.

Generally, you should collect up to 5% emails of total unique visitors. Please keep in mind that you won’t see 5% subscription rate in the beginning because that comes after a few A/B tests.

There are lots of lead generation ways:

• Content upgrades
• Quizzes
• Modal dialogs
• eBooks
• Top/bottom bars

In additional, you should collect as much as possible information such as first name, last name, gender and so on. This is because personalized emails have better metrics.

In fact, the promotional open rate with personalized email is 19.5% and non-personalized is only 15.1%. This is a 4.4% difference. For every 10,000 emails, you send, you’ll see a difference of 440.

However, more data you ask leads to less subscription rate. I’d suggest you collect email firstly, and later you can offer some discounts if they update their profile (e.g.). I mentioned content upgrades reasonably - they got the best subscription rate.

Here’s our example.

If you scroll down, you’ll see another content upgrade offer.

One content upgrade is not enough. You should add as much as possible. I’d suggest you follow Pareto’s principle. According to Pareto principle, 20% blog posts will bring 80% of total traffic.

This way, you’ll focus on the best landing pages and test how it works for you, but I’m pretty sure that content upgrades will work for you as well.

#11 Pitch on HARO

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out and as it sounds, HARO is the place where journalists and source providers are being connected.

Do you know how many people are able to get mentioned on USA Today or Forbes? Not many. But, when you send a pitch, and if it gets chosen, you’ll definitely see a huge traffic increase.

Once you sign up at HARO, you’ll receive a few emails every day. A few emails where journalists are looking for entrepreneurs to share their experiences, scientists, CEOs, CMOs, and almost every other role.

Now, I’m gonna show you how one email looks alike.

This morning, I received an email where journalists from Entrepreneur.com and Forbes are seeking for tech startup founders.

In fact, here are +35,000 journalists there, so why wouldn’t you accept such an offer? I tried, but with a partial success.

My name appeared on USA Today article, which has more than 117M visits per month, but unfortunately, they haven’t linked me back.

No worries if you don’t run a tech company, you can subscribe to other categories as well.

Here’s the list of them.

Unfortunately, not every industry is so active, but you can give it a try.

#12 YouTube

YouTube is a second biggest search engine and Google is the first, of course. How to make an American pie will return your videos in Google SERP.

Google doesn’t display videos in every search query. It shows only videos, mostly from YouTube, in searches that are actually:

• How-to videos
• Review videos
• Tutorial videos

So, how to increase your traffic using YouTube?

Firstly, find a keyword that has a solid search volume. Personally, I use Keywords Everywhere extension that pulls data from Google Ads.

When you search for How to make a bbq sauce, you can easily see:

• Search volume
• CPC
• Competition

Without opening Google Ads. You can also check search volumes if you scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Once you find an attractive keyword, your job is to create a video. Here are a few bits of advice.

Firstly, your file name should be like how-to-make-a-bbq-sauce.mp4. When you include the query into the file name, your ranking goes up.

Next, you should add tags, video name, and create a unique description. The unique description should explain what your video is about. Also, please don’t forget to link to your blog.

Finally, you need to promote the uploaded video. For example, you can embed it in your most visited blog posts, or you can promote it through social networks, or even you can promote it on Quora.

There’s no such thing as Domain Authority (DA) here. YouTube has a DA of 100 and for every video, it’s the same. The only thing that really can make a difference are factors such as:

• File name
• Video title
• Video description
• Number of views

YouTube is definitely an amazing opportunity for everyone.

#13 Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is always a good source of traffic because you’ll probably insert somewhere in the blog post a backlink to your site.

Guest blogging is useful because it increases your organic traffic, but it also gives you referral traffic.

However, some people claim that there’s nothing good with guest blogging because it spreads spam, but what does Matt Cutts, a former head of webspam team at Google, say?

Well, he says that there are a couple ways to interpret - should you do guest blogging or not. For example, if you can provide high authoritative bloggers on your site, or if you’re one if them, then everything is fine.

On the other side, if you offer the same blog posts multiple times, or you offer low-quality articles, then it’s not so fine.

As for me, I would definitely suggest everyone to try to publish a guest blog post on authoritative sites (+50 Domain Authority).

#14 Quiz

Creating a quiz can make your site going viral if you create something interesting.

For example, I just took a quiz on digital marketing and realized just how good is this SHARE YOUR RESULTS call to action.

People enjoy sharing their success. A lot of quiz takers will share a proof of their knowledge with their Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

This is both good for B2B and B2C companies. For example, B2B companies can ask you questions related to digital marketing (e.g.), and B2C companies can ask you something like Which Game of Thrones Character Are you?

Here are my results.

I’m one of those who hasn't watched Game of Thrones, so I just randomly answered.

However, a step forward would always be asking for the email.

No email address, no results. A brilliant way of increasing newsletter subscribers.

#15 Build an Infographic

Kissmetrics, the analytics software company, has generated 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains by only 47 infographics.

One infographic costs them about $600. But, with a simple math, you’ll see that one backlink has cost only $0.68.

How to create an infographic?

If you don’t have designing skills, you can always hire a pro to create it for you. But what if you’re without any designing skills and without a money? Fortunately, there’s always a solution.

Here are some templates at Piktochart which has a free plan too.

There are also an alternative app like infogr.am

and easel.ly.

If you don’t want to play with these tools, then I suggest checking at Fiverr and UpWork for affordable designers.

Conclusion

You can’t leverage all these ways unless you have a huge team in your company, but you can focus on 2 or 3 ways and make most of them.

For example, I’d always recommend you content marketing because it’s something that creates benefits in the long term.

You won’t see big benefits when you publish 20 or 30 blog posts, but once you publish 250 or 300 blog posts, you’ll definitely see a huge traffic increase.

When your blog becomes a very popular and visited, your office phone won’t stop ringing. Also, never and never forget to measure. Do some A/B tests, check what works well, and what doesn’t work at all.

Finally, promote your blog posts in a smart way. If you can, invest some money in link building, it may speed up the process. If not, no problem. Creating unique and valuable content will always find a path to the potential customers.