Once you’ve got your website up and running the next step is ‘how can you generate more traffic?’ There is no one easy answer to that question however there are a few things you can do that will increase the number of visitors to your site.
We found an interesting (and useful) blog post on the addthis.com website titled “10 Tips to Get More Fans for Your Site” and thought we’d recap a few of them and throw in a few of our own. (You can read the entire post here.)
The number one tip is one you probably already know (and perhaps wrestle with on a daily basis) – publish lots of content. The more fresh content you publish on your site the better your chances of being picked up by search engines. You’ll also encourage your customers to return to the site over and over and that helps build loyalty. We’d like to add a qualifier to that – publish lots of quality content.
Your content should be fresh, useful, and clean. If you haven’t updated your blogs in over a year they probably aren’t useful anymore. Of course if your old blogs are still generating traffic then obviously people are still interested in what you have to say and that probably means they will be even more interested if you publish something new. You also need to make sure that your content is useful for your intended audience. If the content isn’t useful people won’t read it. Finally, carefully check all content for spelling and grammatical errors. People judge you by the content on your site and if the articles, blogs, or anything else for that matter is littered with mistakes people will think your products or services might also be shoddy.
The next point is also fairly obvious – promote the content on your site. There are many tools out there to promote your content (and yourself) so get the word out there.
Providing links to social media sites is also something you should be doing. As the article states, “Share buttons placed strategically around your content will motivate your visitors to share it on their preferred networks. And this really works. With great content, simple follow and share buttons can boost sharing up to 22%.” Make it easy for your readers to like, share, follow, retweet, and + you.
And while we’re on the topic of social media, don’t forget to promote your site on your own social media sites.
Optimizing your site can also help drive traffic. Analyze your analytics to see what’s happening when people get to your site. Are they missing important pages? Are they only reading the top story? Is it easy for them to find the content you want to promote? If they aren’t seeing the things you’d like them to see then you might want to tweak those layouts and navigation options.
We’d also add check your analytics to see where your visitors are coming from and how they are accessing your site. If it turns out that most of your visitors are searching for information about ‘bops’ and not ‘boops’ then you might want to focus more on ‘bops’ (unless, of course, you only sell ‘boops’ and people are finding your site by mistake). If most of your visitors are coming to your site on a mobile device then you might want to make sure your site is mobile friendly.
There are a number of other tips listed in the article and it’s worth giving it a read (and don’t forget to read the comments on this one – there are probably a dozen more, equally valuable tips there).
