You Have A Website, Now You Need Visitors!
It is natural to assume that if you have a well designed website that you will automatically receive website visitors as soon as it is live. You may even have high hopes that your site will be at the top of the search results as you are an expert in your field…and someday, that may happen for you…but not straight away.
There is a lot of work to be done before this happens. You have to plan and work out your strategy and build your reputation, so you become a person who is trusted with the right target audience.
So let’s go over five basic, free starter steps that get the ball rolling with traffic coming to your new domain. From there, you can work on converting your visitors into buyers with sales funnels or product launches.
Adding Content To Your Website
If you have been around for a while you would have heard of the comment, “Content Is King”. At the moment there are some people saying it used to be, but now it’s social signals that are king. However, the web is a content eating machine and a source of information, so it makes sense that your new site needs content.
Content marketing is where you publish content regular and then share to your social media platforms in the pursuit of obtaining new website visitors and potential customers.
There are two types of visitors you have to please – human visitors and search engine spiders, also known as “bots.” If you’ve installed a WordPress blog on your domain, it will be easier to get search bots to your site – it happens due to the setup of and functionality of WordPress.
Your content has to be kept fresh by adding new content to your blog. This keeps your site appearing in the rotation to be indexed for the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
- If you update it regularly, the search bots will keep coming back to your site to see if you have updated it! If you haven’t or you stop…they’ll stop coming.
- If you update your website regularly, ‘real people’ will also visit your website because the search engines will reward you for being ‘newsy’ and fresh. You can’t expect it to happen overnight, but content and consistency is the key!
- The more often you post, the better it looks in the eyes of Google – because fresh, new content is something they know their own search engine users will be looking for…and these users are your potential customers.
Keywords
If you have setup your site correctly and determined your target market and the keywords people use to find your market, you could begin getting search engine traffic the very first week of posting on your site. It helps to use strategic keywords and phrases, like long-tail keywords that have fewer competitors.
- A longtail keyword phrase is one that has more than one or two words in it. For example, a broad keyword might be “website designs” whereas a longtail keyword phrase might be, “affordable website designs”.
You may find it difficult to rank for your main keyword. I have had a number of clients want to rank number one in Google for “weight loss”. That is one keyword I never promise anyone to be on the front page for! For starters only 10 positions are available. How many people do you think want that position? Yes, thousands! It would be a very profitable keyword to rank for, but virtually impossible for new websites.
- You might find it easier to rank high for many longtail keyword phrases because fewer sites use that exact phrase in their online written content.
Forums and Your Signature File
A signature file in a forum can also help drive traffic to your new website. A well constructed signature file will have a link back to your website. Make sure it’s something that makes people want to click through, like a free offer or teaser line to tempt them.
Not all forums allow sig files, but you may find some in your niche that do. Some have zero restrictions, while others have a short list of things you are allowed to do or not allowed to do in your sig file. Follow all rules correctly or your time will be wasted if you are removed from the forum due to breaking the rules.
Participation is key with driving traffic via a sig file. You have to get out in the forum and be helpful – answer questions, post helpful threads and be an active member so that people want to follow the link and see what else you have to offer. If you just join a forum to create a sig file and that’s all you do…there will be no traffic.
Social Media
Word of mouth is some of the very best traffic you’re ever going to get. Don’t worry that your website is new – people love quality – and they love to be in on the ground floor of things, including websites.
So how do you start getting people to talk about you? You create genuine, great content that people can’t believe you’re giving away for free and that they want to share! To do that you also need to make sure people have a way to share your great content to their favourite social media sites.
- There are many sharing WordPress plugins to use in your blog. This allows people to share your posts on all the top social media sites.
- The ones I mainly like to use are Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. I also like LinkedIn for business group connections.
Facebook traffic is a source of traffic not to be overlooked. You may love or hate Facebook…but it is where the crowds are and also thousands of potential customers.
Just about everybody (except my mother) has a Facebook account, and if you can create a fan page or group, you can get plenty of traffic to your site to get things started. Things have changed a little to what they used to be…as setting up a page required very little promotional effort…however you have to spend a little or a lot to get traction.
I see people say buy likes on Fivver and get fans…wrong. Don’t do that please…unless you just don’t want it to look like there are zero fans on your page. Fans you buy are fake fans! You will be marketing to ghosts!
However, the great thing about Facebook is that you can easily share content, so if someone sees your entry and knows others who may like it, they can share it on their wall, making it go viral for you. Going viral is great! It is like hitting the jackpot when that happens.
You can also pay to “boost” a post that you create, although I prefer to set up a campaign and really target my audience. It actually gives far better results in my opinion. This exposes your Facebook post to thousands of other people who might be in your target audience.
This sounds simple, but you can waste a lot of money on Facebook advertising if you don’t know what you are doing.
It’s just 140 characters total, but a Tweet on Twitter can yield some nice traffic results. The best way to work Twitter is to use it for a mix of business and personal posts. If you just promote your product or service day in and day out you won’t have anyone take any notice.
- Once you build a relationship with other Twitter users they will eventually want to ReTweet your links for you.
- Each time you make a new post, Tweet it and use hash tags if applicable so that others searching the site for the same topics will find your Tweet and follow your links.
Start following people interested in your niche. You can use the search function to find people who have Tweeted about it. Then they will most likely follow you back, allowing you to expose your site links to them over the course of time.
Blog Commenting
This is a strategy that you have to be very careful with. It is one of those areas where you have to “think before you speak” or write. If you go about it all wrong and just comment to get traffic your comments will be deleted.
First, find blogs in your niche by going to Google and searching for your keywords and choosing ‘Blogs’. You want blogs that have an active community, so look for fresh content and plenty of comments on the blog posts.
You also want a blog that lets you place a hyperlink when you post a comment. It should ask you for your name and website. If it uses another form of posting, such as forcing you to be connected to Facebook profiles or Disqus, then this won’t benefit you.
You don’t want to post random comments or lackluster comments on other people’s blogs. You truly want to be engaged with the blogger about their content, so make sure you read the blog post from beginning to end and offer some true insight.
If your comment is interesting, people will see your name hyperlinked in the comment – and if your comment is of value, they’ll want to follow that link and see what your own site or blog has to offer.
So now you have a few simple steps to get traffic to your brand new website.
Start creating top quality content that people want to share and you’ll start getting targeted traffic very soon. Once you do make sure you have a strategy in place to turn your visitors into customers. After all isn’t that the goal for building your business website?
Now talk to me in the comments below and please share if you think my content has been helpful to you. After all it’s good practice! 😉
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