You can build the most beautiful and functional website in the world… and still bring no more than a small trickle of visitors in from month to month. Hundreds of articles, an amazing layout, and dozens of unique and helpful features unfortunately don’t always translate into traffic. And when most people spend anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars on a website, realizing that almost nobody uses it can feel like a crushing blow.
Thousands of website owners, from entrepreneurs to bloggers, all run into this problem on a regular basis. And while there are many different reasons for this phenomenon, the most significant one is the fact that the attention of internet users runs at a premium. Just as you must market a product to individuals if you’re wanting to get them to buy it, you must market a website if you want individuals to visit it.
These amazing tricks to help build website traffic moving into 2016 aren’t guaranteed to turn a website into a major hub for thousands of visitors overnight; but they will help you build the habits which grow your traffic steadily over time.
Guest Blogging
One of the most reliable ways to begin building up your audience is by guest blogging; or writing blogs for other websites, with similar audiences to your own website, and offer a link or two to take those readers to your own website. By guest blogging, you’re providing valuable content to the other website in turn for your link. While just one guest blog won’t yield a lot of traffic, if you do it consistently over time and also produce great articles, you can guarantee yourself a small fraction of the other website’s traffic. Another perk to this is that every new in-content link to your website you build can translate to better SEO.
Optimize Your Content
If you’re producing at least one blog a day, after three months you should be getting a few visits to your website a day. But if you have a lot of content which isn’t gaining any traffic, the problem is likely that it’s not optimized. Do a thorough accounting of your website, and make certain that each blog has its own set of keywords which can be found in the title, url, image alt text, and h tags. Every page should have a minimum of 300 words of content, and ideally one or two photos.
Giveaways and Contests
Another time-tested way to gain more traffic is to hold giveaways or contests relatively regularly in return for newsletter subscriptions or social shares. Often, you can get away with holding a small raffle for a prize like a Visa card or a piece of interesting tech in return for social shares of your website or subscriptions. Having social shares broadens the number of people who see a mention of your website, increasing your total pool of possible visitors, whereas having email subscriptions allows you to re-market to website visitors, ensuring you have a larger pool of potential people who come back to visit your website regularly.
Another interesting use of giveaways and contests is to solicit reviews of your website or business on third-party websites, which can be a great way to build SEO and brand awareness. Especially with a young site, this sort of reputation management can help build a positive impression in the online community and strengthen all future marketing efforts.
Summary
Building streams of traffic to your website is usually a long-term effort; so don’t expect big changes overnight! But these tried-and-true tricks can absolutely begin increasing the count of visitors which head to your website; and if you use them consistently, can even improve the signals your website is sending to search engines for ranking.