Wondering how to get traffic to a new website? There’s good news and bad. The bad news is that there aren’t any shortcuts in this post. There are no magic bullets.
The good news is that with hard work, patience, and by sticking to basics, you can get traffic to a new website indeed.
Each of the points below is pure hustle — it’s all sweat, blood, tears, and “God-only-knows-how-long-and-hard-you-have-to-type”
Each of these ways mentioned below is true for absolutely every website and are evergreen methods — which means that you could be using any of these methods or a combination of few — to generate traffic to your new website.
The specific methods you’d choose to generate traffic to your new website and how you execute these on a regular basis is really up to you (or you could get help to actually get this done.
There are no shortcuts. If you are looking for quick and dirty ways to generate traffic, this isn’t even the blog you should be reading. If you have stuck with me until this point, we are good to go:
Note: I won’t mention growing your email list as a tactic here since that needs traffic to generate traffic (a classic chicken and egg situation). Also, social media traction is a going to be a hit and miss for you if you haven’t got an audience already — you’d have to first build the audience.
Launch paid campaigns
Paying for traffic is the fastest way to get traffic to your new website but you’d have to:
Prepare to invest cash to get traffic (which is hard for many folks) and know what you are doing
Contrary to popular belief, you are not done the moment your campaigns go live. You’d still have to tweak your campaigns, do A/B testing, optimize your campaigns — all upto the point you breakeven or profit from your campaigns, and then some more.
There’s no stopping, and I don’t know what you were thinking if you aren’t on the same page.
I just happen to know that paid campaigns are the only way to get some sales while we’ll still do blogging and try to get some social presence up for it on top of trying to build a list from scratch.
Post blog posts, on schedule
I know that you know this one. You’ve read about it a thousand times, haven’t you?
Guess what? Many businesses still don’t blog. Surprisingly, freelancers and agencies that call themselves whatever also don’t blog.
Blogging doesn’t fetch you traffic immediately but it brings in tons of traffic in due course of time.
For the fetchprofits blog, I started with zero visitors by the end of 2015. It took me a year and a half (up to this point) to reach steady stream of around 3000 visitors per month (and this is far below my potential and I am missing out on so many other ways to do better).
Just by blogging alone, you could make traffic flow.
You need consistency, the speed of execution, quality, and to remember that consistent trumps everything else on this list.
Social amplification
As you keep publishing your blog posts, share your content on social media. Follow the 50:30:20 rule while you are on social:
— Share others’ content about 50% of the updates you post per day.
— Share and amplify reach for your own content about 30% of the total updates per day.
— Retweet, share, communicate, maintain small talk, engage in conversations for the rest of the updates. Don’t develop a system around this. You can’t systemize human interactions and relationships.
Engage in Social groups and communities
This is still social, but it requires a point all on its own. Over time, online groups and communities have grown in importance. In fact, I believe that Quora, Facebook groups, specific Google communities, and LinkedIn groups will grow in importance for a multitude of benefits for your business.
Share your expertise in groups that are relevant to your business, engage with people, answer queries, make friends, provide feedback, share your knowledge.
A large part of groups and communities online is the need to “give” before you “ask”.
That last part of “giving” before taking? It applies for digital marketing in general and for “social media” in particular.
How powerful is this you ask? I am a part of a few groups on Facebook such as the Shopify experts group, 7-day startup group by Dan Norris, Sumo group, and the adespresso group — a single post in each of those groups 2 days ago and that already brings in 15 visitors a day.
Not bad for work that took me 3 minutes in total.
Blog commenting without expectations
You know you have to do this, but you don’t. Do you?
Ryan Is a pro when it comes to using blog comments to generate not just traffic but to also develop a tight group of friends as he goes about commenting on blogs that he likes and those that he associates with. Many others such as Ravi Chahar and Donna do just that (and more).
In fact there’s an entire list of bloggers who can shame big name companies when it comes to the very “guerilla” nature of generating traffic, especially when your website or blog is new.
Also read: Blogging For Business? What Businesses Can Learn From Bloggers
The key to doing this well is to comment on blogs regularly, provide value to each of the conversations you are adding your comments to, and to do all this without expectations.