6 Ways to Increase Website Traffic—Fast

7 minute read

Upland Admin

You’ve got a product or service and you think everyone should know about it. You have a website that tells your audience what you do, including a blog. But, there’s one problem: No one is visiting. People can’t benefit from what you sell if they’re not buying it—and they can’t buy it if they don’t know it exists.

There’s only one way to increase the amount of people who know who you are: You need them to get to your website. The question is, how?

As mentioned, this post assumes that you have a blog on your website. If you don’t have a blog, change that nowstart creating content catered to your audience and post it on a blog, and host it on your website. It gives people a reason to go to your website again and again, or a hundred different reasons to only visit once…and sometimes once is all it takes.

With a blog up and running, you’re ready to start promoting your content on social platforms. But remember that marketing takes time. Nothing will be done overnight, least of all building a massive audience for your product or service. But sometimes, we just need small bursts of activity to prove we’re doing something right.

For the rest of you who already have a blog to which they consistently contribute, or if you just now created one and are looking for next steps, here are a few ways to generate more traffic for your website in bursts:

Create content elsewhere.

Think about it. Your blog is getting views from, well, people who already know about your blog. This means it’s only being seen by your blog followers, and potentially your social media followers should you promote on your social platforms.

While you like the audience you have, you still need to build on it. The best way to do grow your audience is to go where other people already are and start talking there. Websites like Medium and Quora allow you to be the subject matter professional and create new content for a new audience.

Medium and Quora already have extremely large audiences that they’ve built on their own, so you can reach them with content that is relevant to your industry and your product. Publish a blog post on Medium. Answer a question in your wheelhouse on Quora. Or better yet, go to your LinkedIn profile, and publish content there! That content will be pushed out to your LinkedIn connections, creating a new audience for your business.

Anytime you publish or promote content elsewhere, remember to include links to your website, both in your content and at the end. Also, be sure to push your new content out to your social media platforms.

Pro-tip: On LinkedIn Publisher, recycle current blog content and only post the first 25% of the blog on Publisher, with a CTA to visit the link to your blog for the rest of the content!

Incorporate guest bloggers into your content strategy.

As long as we’re talking about reaching people where they’re at, why not consider asking someone else with a big audience to write some content for you? If Diane, at Super Company X, has an audience 5 times bigger than yours, see if she will write some content for you that relates to both of your areas of expertise.

When you get guest bloggers in, you solve two problems with one solution: content creation and distribution. Firstly, content gets created, saving you time, and secondly, your guest blogger will typically push out her guest blog to her audience for them to read. Now Diane’s followers are on your website!

Pro-tip: Make sure that when you are asking a guest blogger to help out, there is something in it for them as well–what value can she derive from guest blogging for your website?

Make sure your content is high-quality and optimized.

The number one rule for getting traffic to your website in the first place is to obey the laws of Google. For the last couple of years, Google has said that the only way your content will get picked up into prime time is to be interesting, relevant, authoritative, and/or entertaining.

Accordingly, your first step is to make sure that your content is compliant with what Google—and furthermore, your audience—is looking for. Then you’ll want to do a quick audit of your blog headlines and meta tags: Can the search engine pick up what you are putting out?

For instance, if you are writing a blog post on how to get the best deals and discounts at major stores in your area, your headline may look something like this:

5 Ways To Find Hidden Discounts At Your Favorite Stores

And your meta tag might look something like:

“Here are 5 different methods you can use to see if you can save money during your normal shopping visits to your regular stores!”

The point is that you want to optimize both your headline and meta tag to be relevant to a particular consumer problem. Using numbers in your headline make things more digestible and easier to peruse. Also, headlines that answer questions are generally picked up by Google (and your audience) as authoritative and solution-oriented, such as: “How to…”, “What you need for…”, “When should you…”, “Why you shouldn’t be…”, and the like.

Tap your email list.

Email marketing is not dead—we’ve cleared that up. So it’s time to dust off that email list and start a campaign to bring in more website traffic. This can be as simple as letting them know you have a website or that your website has been updated, and offering a CTA to click through the email to the website.

You can also send out a newsletter with product updates or blog posts that will link back to the website. Make sure to monitor your open and click-through rates to see what type of email content is working to generate more traffic for you!

Get involved in the digital community.

Increasingly, gaining attention for your product or service is coming down to a couple things—do people even know who you are? Why should they care? You need to give your desired audience a reason to care about you, and thus visit your website.

You can provide this reason by getting involved in your digital community in a different way: Follow other businesses you like on social media, and interact with them. his interaction will encourage other businesses to follow you back and hopefully share out your interesting content to their audience. For example:

  • Follow like-mined businesses on Facebook, and interact with their page
  • Target audience members on Twitter and participate in hashtag conversations
  • Follow others on Instagram or Pinterest and favorite, comment, or re-pin their material

The Internet community has quickly become a world of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine,” so if you want people to know you and help others know you, you better get to scratchin’.

Advertise.

This is the only suggestion that requires a budget, but it is going to be the most effective way to increase website traffic fast. Google AdWords and paid search are a great way to promote your website in search results, but it can also get a little pricey. For smaller budgets, try a targeted Facebook campaign. Facebook allows business pages to design their ads to achieve a specific objective: Claiming a coupon, liking a page, and of course, visiting a website. With a targeted Facebook campaign, you can generate traffic to your website quickly!

Remember that very little of great quality in marketing is done quickly. It can be a mostly slow and steady road, with peaks and valleys along the way. But if you’re looking for some bursts in traffic, try out these tips and tell us what you think!

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