One of the advantages of helping a few dozen companies on their digital marketing and websites is that we see a lot of numbers.
We see the main website traffic sources, the dynamics of who are key influencers and the reality behind the effectiveness of just about everything from emails to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And let’s not forget Pinterest, Linked-in and Snapchat. Or physical events.
I recently posted that as businesses we need to use our websites effectively as we have no ownership of Facebook or any other social media site.
Even the ownership of your website, or more particularly its traffic, is tenuous as we are reliant on mostly Google search for sending us traffic.
What we need is diversity in drivers of traffic to websites and then to do something with those people who visit your website.
Diversification from search engines
For many, search engine traffic is the main source of website visits (unless you are a very new website). You can grow this traffic a lot by regularly blogging. I’ve seen 1,000 and 2,000% increases in traffic simply by posting something interesting.
Social media sites
Sharing a blog post is a huge booster to traffic. Share it not just once but several time across different sites. Yes, you need to change pictures and headlines but each time you post less than 10% of your followers or likers see a post. Many business owners find this difficult because they fear that they will annoy their followers. What they don’t realise is that they are already annoying them by posting mainly sales messages rather than engaging stories or entering into engaging conversations. I write this having been flooded by Mothers Day messages that are irrelevant to me.
Using advertising to drive website traffic
Smart marketers are advertising on Facebook to send traffic to their websites. You can do this for $2-3 dollars a day.
Once that traffic has visited your site you can have an ad follow them back on Facebook. How cool is that? Anyone interested in your business can be followed around the web.
Until recently it has been possible to capture only a small percentage of this audience, which is worth doing because these individuals have shown an interest in your business by making the effort to visit you online.
Right now I’m a big fan of the targeting abilities of Facebook and the options to build an audience using this technique.
There are many ad strategies you can use on Facebook to send people to your website with some attractive offer or download at the end of the trail. For food or drink businesses you may want to put forward an attractive offer – like a discounted cocktail.
Some of you may have already seen this technique used where in exchange for an email address you can download an ebook, or watch a video, or receive a special offer.
The intention of this form of advertising is build an email list. They want to turn email subscribers to Facebook likes and Facebook likes to email subscribers and eventually into customers.
Email lists
Don’t forget the power of email to drive traffic to your website. Every time an email goes out it should include links to your site. You can also take this email list – or mobile numbers – and advertise to it on Facebook and Twitter. Then you can create an audience that looks like this to find more potential website visitors.
Other websites, blogs and groups
Simply being part of various discussion groups on Facebook, Linkedin and other sites is a great booster to traffic. Think about offering guest blog posts too if they are appropriate to your business.
Check your numbers
Always check your statistics to see what people like that you post online. Check how many people read blog posts on Google analytics. Check which Facebook posts and Tweets are most popular. Repeat what is popular. Stop doing what isn’t.
Happy traffic building.