Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Building a successful website takes time, effort and strategic thinking. It’s not easy, but it’s not extremely difficult. Like most people…
I would use a site’s traffic as a direct indicator of how successful it is. The more traffic you have, the more successful your site will be, right?
Well that’s generally how it works. The more eyeballs on your site, the more leads, sales and loyal customers you’ll generate.
Anyway, this isn’t websites 101 – I’m guessing you already know exactly how important traffic is. So here are several ways to generate traffic and get more people talking about your site:
1. Participate In Communities Where Your Target Audience Exists
If someone seriously asked me how they could build a highly successful website or blog, I’d say “build a community”. As honestly, there’s no better way to rapidly grow an online entity like a site other than building a community.
Now you can’t build a community from scratch. That would take forever, instead you can just steal established communities. How? By participating in communities where your target audience already exists! Duhh….
How do you find the communities? Simples; use Google Adplanner to find sites your target audience already visit. It works best if you find a popular site in your niche and put it into Google Adplanner. Adplanner will then display a long list of sites also visited:
Using Adplanner you can find out where your target audience are hanging out. You can then head over to the sites and start participating. How? Blog commenting, forum posting, guest blogging, Q&A answering, however you can!
2. Use Analytics
Google Analytics is a wonderful tool and it still shocks me that its free. You can use Analytics for a lot of stuff; mainly optimizing your site to get more traffic and improving user experience. A few things you want to pay attention to: avg. time on site, avg. page views/visit and bounce rate.
I would aim for a 50-60% bounce rate, any less and your just kidding yourself. I’d also aim for 2.5 page views/visit and a solid 3.5 minutes time on site. You can use all the info inside analytics to improve these metrics.
You should also be paying attention to your traffic sources. Inside Analytics you can see which sites and keywords are sending you the most traffic. Using that data you can focus on the sites and keywords sending you the most traffic to maximize promotional efforts.
3. Social Media
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Social Media but it’s essential for growing a successful website. When most webmasters jump on the social bandwagon; they end up joining and being active on 30 different social networks. Big mistake, first you shouldn’t be spending more than 10-20 minutes/week on social media. Most of it can be automated.
Second, you should only focus on 1-3 social networks. Me personally, I focus the majority of my time on Facebook. I like Facebook, it’s fun, cool and best of all; will soon have 1 billion members. The only other two social networks worth bothering with are Google Plus and Twitter (now x.com).
There is an exception with LinkedIn; LinkedIn can be fantastic for both traffic and lead generation, but it depends what kind of site you’re trying to build. Out of the 3 social networks you choose to focus on; pick 1 main network.
You need to focus on 1 social network. Most webmasters and bloggers tell their readers to friend/follow them on like six different social networks. In reality it’s stupid. You’d just be scattering your following between 6+ different networks making it look like you have no following.
Your main social network should be most prominent on your site. You need to promote it in your sidebar or wherever else will get lots of exposure. The idea is to get your website visitors to friend/follow you on your main social network.
Now because of the recent Google Plus My World update; I 100% recommend having Google Plus as your primary social network. Once you have your 3 social networks setup and positioned on your site/blog, start sharing your site’s content on them.
4. Build Links
Link building is by far the easiest way of generating website traffic. SEO is usually portrayed as this impossible thing that only professionals can do. The truth is you can learn enough SEO from reading 1 article to boost your site’s traffic and rankings.
Backlinks (links pointing to your site) boost your search engine rankings. The more links you build, the higher up in the search engines you’ll rank and the more traffic you’ll get. After all the recent algorithm updates and the shake down on spammy link building tactics; I advise people to lay off on aggressive link building.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →More than anything else, I recommend manual guest blogging and the use of blog networks.
5. Get An Amazing Design
There’s a lot to be said about website design. Some people say it’s not that important, others say it should be your first priority. I think as long as your design is attractive, clear, simple and user friendly; the rest doesn’t matter.
With that being said, if you want to generate a crap load of traffic and build a community of repeat visitors; you need a kick ass design. Honestly, you should spend thousands on your design if you can. At the very least, have a site logo designed and use a premium WordPress theme/template.
The better your design, the more time visitors will spend on your site and the more likely they are to return or recommend it to a friend.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more cool website traffic generation tips, tricks and secrets.
Comments
Nvwebmarketing, February 9 2012, 10:45
Hi David, I am interested in WP Syndicator. At the moment I use Onlywire – is that a similar service? Thanks! Nina
Brock Blohm, February 9 2012, 10:50
Lay off the aggressive link building? OK. Seriously considering seNuke. What’s your thoughts? Yes or no? The main site says that it is fully compatible with the latest Google updates of 2011… I was thinking of trying in the next day or two…
Shonda, February 9 2012, 10:55
I use Google AdPlanner for my other business, but I never consider using it to find places to engage with my target audience. How simple. Thank you Also, with regard to Google +… so are you switching from FB as your main social media platform to Google +?
Matt, February 9 2012, 11:00
David, Love the tip about Google Adplanner…I have used a lot of traffic generation methods, but had actually never heard of this particular one. Thanks for the tip! Off to check it out right now & see if I can start generating even more traffic!
Stephen, February 9 2012, 11:05
Hi Dave, I like the idea of community. I am going to Google Adplanner to check out how to get involved more with my target audience. I can see that getting involved with people can help build links. Your the Best- Stephen
Bbrian017, February 9 2012, 11:10
Hi Dave, great section of tips! What we have here is the key elements to an extremely successful blog. Working hard is always part of it, building links and social networking is also a huge element. One place I would like to see myself starting to use more ins the analytics area. I think I should start looking at where my traffic is coming from and what is converting. Thanks for the tips Bro!
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The ’50-60% bounce rate is good, aim for 2.5 page views and 3.5 minutes’ benchmarks are presented as universal targets with no segmentation by content type or traffic source. A single long-form post and a five-tool comparison page should have wildly different healthy bounce rates. Giving one number for every site erases exactly the variation that would make the number useful.
Yuki’s point about one number for every site type reminds me, oddly, of bike sizing charts, the height-only ones that ignore torso length and get half of customers onto the wrong frame. Same failure: a single number standing in for a distribution because a single number is easier to publish than the actual range. Be interesting to see what the real bounce rate spread looks like broken out by content type instead of one tidy average pretending to be a target.
Built a small script that pulls bounce rate, time on site and page views straight from Analytics daily and flags any page that’s more than one standard deviation off my own site’s rolling average, rather than chasing the post’s fixed numbers. Works better than a universal target because it catches my actual outliers, not some other site’s idea of normal.
Pick one network and go deep — we called this ‘don’t spread yourself thin’ back when the platform in question was a phone book listing.
Recommending Google Plus as your primary network has aged about as well as recommending a fax number.
Roy’s observation is worth sitting with longer than its humor suggests. An article confident enough to recommend one specific social network as ‘the’ primary destination for your following, written not so terribly long ago, is now pointing readers toward a platform that no longer exists in the form it describes at all. It does make me wonder, reading the rest of the list at sixty-one and trying to judge what still applies to a man rebuilding rather than starting fresh, how much of the design advice and the link-building advice further up the page will read exactly the same way once enough time has passed over them too. Nothing dates faster than certainty about which company will still matter.