6 Easy Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website

You’ve put a lot of effort into building a great looking website and populated it with a lot of useful and interesting content. Now, you want get people to actually read your content, and visit your website. How? For starters, here are a few tips to help you increasing your traffic:

1. A Tweet A Day…

Every time you update or add new content to your website, post it as a tweet (with a link back to the content, obviously). Pick an interesting snippet from your content to include in your tweet, and remember the character limit. Believe it or not, 140 characters are more than enough to act as a teaser, and this constraint forces you to be catchy or creative to stand out.

Whether you’re making a major announcement or providing a quick update, make sure you entice the reader, and answer the question, “Why would I want to read more?” Even better, “Why would I want to share this?” And if you really want to engage your users, host a Tweet Chat and directly field their questions.

2. Send an Email or Two…

Social media gets all the hype these days, but email newsletters are still a great and effective way of communicating with your audience. Like social, you can use email to announce both major announcements (like new products) and minor updates (like a new sales promotion), without the same word constraints you get in social.

But be careful — you need to be consistent once you start sending out emails, so you also need to determine an ideal email schedule. Whether your decide on a monthly newsletter or a weekly one, stick to your schedule, as your audience will expect the newsletter to arrive on time. You can also have different newsletters, on different schedules: for example, a weekly newsletter summarizing your new content, and a monthly one with company updates.

And yes, the newsletter must contain links to your website.

3. Post on Facebook

Social media delivers when you want to get content shared and re-distributed to a larger audience, and Facebook is no exception. Once you post something on Facebook, if your audience finds it interesting enough, it will get shared many times. If you’ve linked back to your website on the post, then you can expect an increase in traffic. For more interesting updates (like if you’ve just launched a new product or an exciting contest), Facebook is the way to go.

4. Drop a Pin

Here’s a little-known secret: there’s more social media besides Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram! Be creative, and go beyond the “big” social networks. If your content is heavy on visuals (photos, illustrations, and infographics), then check out Pinterest.

This is especially useful if you work in an industry that caters to Pinterest’s highly engaged audience. If your company deals with home and interior decoration, food, health, fashion, beauty, or design, you’d be better off creating “pins” instead of tweets.

5. Collaborate!

Get your website listed or mentioned in as many relevant forums as possible. For example, if you’re a restaurant, then you need to be on all the relevant food/cuisine related websites in your area (this includes location-based social networks like Yelp and Foursquare). Same goes for review websites, and even business directories.

You also want to cultivate relationships with local bloggers who cover your industry. Ask for links back to your website. Invite them to write a guest post on your blog, and offer to do the same on theirs. This not only gives you more traffic in the form of links, but it also expands your potential audience (as your guest blogger promotes their posts to their audience) and builds up your credibility.

6. Add an Email Signature

This is so simple, but often overlooked. Posting your URL in your email signature is a great practice; you don’t always remember a website, but you more easily remember a name. And when clicked on, your signature can directly lead people to your website.

And don’t forget to go beyond email. Include your website in all your online and social media platforms, as well as physical collateral — including business cards, product packaging, print brochures, leaflets… anything that goes out as “official communications.”

Always Remember This…

There are many other ways in which you can start promoting your website, but regardless of what you choose, always remember that you need to put in the effort over a period of time to see results. Keep up these activities, consistently, over a period of weeks and even months, and surely enough, you’ll see your website’s traffic go up.

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