How do you increase your website traffic? Some businesses focus solely on SEO or advertisement and wonder why they aren’t getting significant bumps in traffic.
The simple answer is that a few isolated efforts aren’t enough to cause major changes, you need to support SEO and ads with strong organic initiatives that include social media posting, community outreach, press releases, webinars, etc that drive traffic back to your webpages.
When it comes to social media marketing, niche communities on networks like LinkedIn and Reddit can drive you a significant amount of traffic, as sworn by these professionals who market on LinkedIn. To increase your overall referral traffic, you can use one or all of these surefire ways.
1. Guest post
People who claim that guest posting doesn’t work anymore are either not doing it themselves, or are not doing it the right way. For the right results, you have to target the right blogs. For your guest posting to work, you have to write to help your readers. If the intent is only to benefit your website, the effort will fail.
Remember these rules when guest posting –
- You should stay well within your niche
- You should write under your name so it can grow into a personal brand over time
Recommended reading: How to position yourself as a thought leader on social media
- You should link out to expert authors and influencers
You can find the right blogs by searching for guest post pages using keywords like “add a post”, “submit post”, “guest post guidelines” or “write for us” along with the keywords in your industry.
2. Initiate partnerships
As a content marketer, you can create content partnerships with interesting personalities and companies in the industry. This can help the partners gain access to each others audience. Not only do both parties benefit from the practise, but your audience gets a more well-rounded view in the content that you create.
You can partner with a business over an event. This effort can be extended offline, to give you extra exposure. You can sponsor or speak at local events. Stay updated on the events happening close to you and make a debut at the next one. You can also use the event to network with people interested in your niche, i.e, your target audience. It can help you begin building your brand as the go-to expert in your industry.
3. Engage advocates
You have inactivated advocates in the form of happy consumers or employees. You can build a smart referral program around them. The easiest one to build is a social media employee advocacy program, where your resources are both accessible and easy to motivate. According to research, employee advocates increase your reach on social media and improve your social media engagement by as much as 8X.
When engaging advocates to improve your referrals, ensure that you follow three rules –
- Make content sharing easy
Advocacy tools like DrumUp Employee Advocacy Platform or NewzSocial let your employees share directly from the common stream that you add your content to.
- Always include a link back to your website
- Enable them to add their own voice
Marketers today struggle to add the human element to their communication. Advocacy could behave as an efficient solution to that issue.
4. Comment on posts
Neil Patel has generated over 3,000 website visits from 240 odd strategically placed comments. Some of the visits turned into important leads. You could do the same for your business by identifying the right blogs to comment on.
One way to qualify a blog for commenting is by observing the authority of the blog and the response rate on its comments. If readers are engaged and enthusiastic, you can safely assume that the blog has the potential to act as a serious referral driver. Again, when writing comments, follow the same rules discussed in the previous sections.
- Add real value in your comments
- Understand the blog’s community and rules before you post anything
Most blogs don’t let you include links in the comments section. But if you consistently make yourself visible and provide interesting and uncommon insights, people will want to know who you are. Leave comments bearing that in mind, and practise this tactic for a few weeks before you expect results.
5. Write great headlines
You probably market your blog content on social media pages and communities. To catch attention and get referrals from there, you need to have sharp headlines. After all, social media is noisier than ever and an average user’s attention span has fallen to an all-time low.
You can use the following recipe to write great headlines quickly –
- Identify posts that went viral
- Model their headline format
Another alternative is using one of the many available headline crafting and suggestion tools to inspire ideas for your headline, like TweakYourBiz Title Generator. You could also create an article that demands a compelling headline – like an interview series featuring the best in your industry or an ultimate list of something important to your audience.
Feature image credits: Freepik.com