As a business owner, marketer, or content creator, there are few things more frustrating than spending time and creative energy publishing a new piece of content, creating a new landing page, or developing a new website offer, only to have it met by the sound of crickets. Yet that’s often what happens.
If you’re serious about building a successful online business, your website needs traffic. And the only way to generate traffic at scale is to be intentional about the strategies you’re using. In this article, we’re going to give you three specific tips you can use to improve your numbers.
How to Turn on Your Traffic Faucet
The following tips won’t take you from zero to one million visitors overnight, but they’ll generate a steady flow of traffic over time. If you’re willing to play the long game, please read on.
- Claim or Update Your Google Business Listing
If you don’t already have a Google Business profile set up, you need one! And if yours is currently bare-boned, it’s time to spruce it up. Research shows that optimized Google business listings get an astonishing 700 percent more visits than incomplete ones.
Whether you run a service business or you sell information products online, a Google My Business page is a must. It’s free and easy to set up, yet it gives you valuable real estate in the search engines and has the potential to drive qualified traffic to your site. It’s a no-brainer.
- Build Backlinks to Your Site
If you’re serious about driving large volumes of traffic to your website, you have to feed the beast. In this case, Google is the beast – and it’s hungry for content and links.
Backlinks are believed to be the second-most important ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. And if you want to rank well for your most important pages, you need as many links as possible pointing from other websites back to your own. This is done through strategic link building.
Link building is a very technical process that requires skill, expertise, and connections. While it’s possible to do it on your own, we recommend hiring a link building company in order to do it at scale. This speeds up the process and ensures you don’t inadvertently make mistakes that could do more harm than good.
- Syndicate Content on Medium
If you aren’t already familiar with Medium.com, you need to be! It’s basically an online magazine where anyone – including journalists, bloggers, entrepreneurs, business owners, etc. – can publish their own content in a sleek and easy-to-share format. And in doing so, you instantly gain direct access to the Medium readership, as well as all of the built-in SEO advantages that the domain has with the search engines. (The average brand is much more likely to have a post rank with a Medium article than one published to their own website.)
But you don’t even know the best part yet: You don’t have to develop any new content! Medium allows you to repost your content in a word-for-word fashion and you’ll never get a duplicate content penalty. This means you can take every post on your blog and copy and paste them into medium. People can then search for and find your content based on the categories it’s placed in. Amazing!
You can do this with LinkedIn as well, by the way. You can take the same post that you’ve published on your blog and on Medium, paste it into a new LinkedIn article, and publish it. That’s three-times the value for every post.
Okay, great, you’re thinking – but how does this help generate traffic for your website? Well, there’s a trick.
Rather than just copying and pasting the full blog post content into new Medium and LinkedIn articles, publish just 30 to 50 percent of the content. (You want enough to hook the reader in, but not give them everything.) Then include a link back to the post on your website and say something like: This article was originally published on MyWebsite.com. To read the remainder of this article and find out the seven ways to clean your car, click the link below.”
Never Stop Iterating
One of the most challenging (and exciting) parts of building online businesses is that the rules are always changing. The internet is a dynamic place and you have to be ready and willing to adapt.
If you want to be successful, never stop iterating. Learn the rules of the game and then keep your finger on the pulse so that you know when they change and how you can adapt. That’s the key to being successful with every aspect of your business (whether it’s generating traffic or converting traffic into sales).
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