The Secret to Building Website Traffic
There are a lot of blogs out there that talk about how to build website traffic but most of them are pitching an ebook or trying to get you to buy some elaborate Search Engine Optimization strategy that relies on complex (often underhanded) strategies to accomplish something that is fundamentally easy, yet time consuming.
That’s right … building an online presence is actually one of the easiest things a person will ever do in the lifetime of business, much easier than building a website or opening a retail location so why do so many people do it so badly? Fear, ignorance, uncertainty and shame.
Fear of the unknown, being ignorant of the unknown and being uncertain of where to start learning. It’s exactly the same reason I didn’t learn to cook until I was in my thirties or why I still don’t know how to change the gasket in my car. In fact, I don’t even know what a gasket is or which part of the car it might be found in but what separates me from most is that I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t know anything about my car.
The Secret
A very complex UML diagram of the process.
So what is the secret to building web traffic? It’s radically simply, building web traffic is as simple as telling people about your business. Building quality web traffic is about telling the right people about your business and building sustainable web traffic is about telling the right people about your business and treating them with respect once they’ve taken the time to visit your business. It is the easiest thing you will ever do. Let’s break it down again in a more conventional lesson plan format:
- Tell people whom you believe will benefit by your business about your business.
- Ensure people are richer for having visited your business.
- Repeat.
Telling People About Your Website
If you’re proud of your website (and you should be), telling people about it should be a pleasure for you. It should reflect your personality and be an extension of your business so why not tell the world?
If you tell people about your website, they’ll come visit your website, it’s honestly that simple. So the art of building your online web presence is about telling as many appropriate people as you can about your website and help them easily find your website.
Telling the Right People About Your Website
The problem with telling people about your website is that many of the people you tell are simply not the right people and this is where SEO practices often fail. People tend to measure success by how many clicks their website gets but that’s a pointless statistic since you don’t really care about how many visitors you get … you care (or at least you should care) about the amount of money you get from that traffic.
In order to get the right traffic to your website, you first need to know who your traffic is. Many people start websites assuming the ‘right people’ are everywhere in the world but the simple truth is that most websites would be better off using the Internet as a method for their traditional market (local or regional) to access information faster so the first step in attracting website traffic is to determine if your business is better off appealing to:
- a neighborhood,
- a city,
- a region,
- a state,
- the entire country,
- local counties or
- the entire world
Once you know that, ask yourself if your website appeals to men or women more. If it’s equal that’s great but you should be able to honestly determine it (for example, my website appeals to ~60% men but why?). Is your website for consumer or business traffic, people living in the suburbs or businesses in the heart of the city? Do you appeal to a specific industry or ethnic group? By narrowing these categories many might feel they’re limiting their market but it’s actually a process called niche marketing and allows your business to spend more money per prospective client while lowering the overall cost of a marketing campaign.
Now that you know who your market is, your goal is to Increasing Website Traffic for Free by participating in communities and building your relationships with others. Take part in forums, leave valid compliments on blogs and build traffic by helping others, this leads to a tremendous influx of quality traffic but more importantly it leads to an influx of legitimate business.
Giving the Right People a Reason to Tell People About Your Website
The biggest secret in building website traffic? Let others do it for you. Produce high quality content designed to help people and watch your website statistics sore as people tell their friends about your great tutorials, free downloads and useful tips.
That was a great post Chris. You just went straight to the point. You made it very simple so newbies like me can surely benefit. Will get right on with the simple steps you gave. Hope this works for me. thanks
Great insight!!!!
Word of mouth is the best marketing available. I really prefere it over viral marketing, I just wrote an article comparing the two, might be interesting for you, too.
Offline marketing is something that, depending on your product, is really undervalued by a lot of us. In case you have a project you can really support, just promote it within your area. The biggest potential are people who want to learn from scratch, most people online already have a basic knowledge of the web and need less guidance.
Excellent info Chrisopher. Btw, we still need to talk about the blog project! ;)
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“Giving the Right People a Reason to Tell People About Your Website” I think that is a fantastic point! I found that sometimes, I tell my friends about my new website, expecting them to want to show their friends too, it just doesnt work like that.
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Hello christopher,
I think we are meet after many days, you have many knowledge to increase traffic on your site, I think you want to maintain traffic then your site’s content have quality and novelty.
I like the fact that your so direct and to the point Chris, A great read. I just finished a basic article targeted at new site and blog owners on building traffic to their site and would love for you to comment on it. I know your opinion will be true and factual.
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@Bart (and all) thanks for the comment, I have a pretty simple belief when it comes to the web … it’s not nearly as scary as technies try to make it out to be and it’s great to see a lot of real world people reading my blog here and taking a few things away here and there.
Great post! Nicely broken down in small pieces. Webmasters must rely on inbound marketing to get new people visiting their website. No one likes to get spam emails, click on banners etc. They will rely on the feedback your website is getting from other people. So the most critical thing, as Chris has mentioned is to add value to people’s life through your website and they will come!
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I like this post. Many new bloggers are begging the wrong people for link exchanges and comment exchanges. There is no reason for someone to tell others about your site if that person has no interest in your niche in the first place.
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I hope you’re right Chris as I use this approach for building my website devoted on the free resourses and techniques about website building. Have a look at Make a site and I’ll be glad to hear your oppinion about it. It’s in Bulgarian but there is an automated translation feature available.
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Really excellent info Chrisopher.i totally agree with you.Great tips about increase website traffic.surely i will use all the tips.thanks
I think incorporating both the viral aspects and SEO aspects to your content will get you much further ahead in the long run… even if it isn’t working for you now.
It’s amazing how a year later a post will get a ton of traffic from stumbleupon or something because someone finally gave it a thumbs up.
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I like the simple flow chart/cycle. Very basic yet the truth and the real effective way of traffic promotion.
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Once again an short post to tell us straight how easy it can be doing what so many of us are having problems with. But sure is simple: have content people wants, and just be yourself. Most of the people I have done business, marketing, joint ventures and so on have been normal simple and kind people. Just being themselves made me trust them that much more and the partneships has been great. Just have patience and go out there and meet people. The internet is there, use it!
The method that you suggested,participate in forum is the most effective away caused can leave signature with your blog url.
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Christopher, You don’t have to publish this comment. I enjoyed your post and would like to thank you by pointing out a couple of spelling mistakes. I’m just trying to help.
In the 3rd paragraph, it would be better to say “In the lifetime of their business.” You should end the sentence at “location. “So why do people…” should be a new sentence. Under “The Secret” you say “they’re” when I think you mean “they’ve” or “they have”.
Under Telling people about your website, “It should reflect…” should start a new sentence.
You have “as possible” twice in a sentence. In the last sentence of the post you say “sore” when you mean “soar” like a bird or airplane. Just trying to help. You don’t have to publish this. Good luck.
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@John – Thanks for pointed that out. I really appreciate it, as I’ve pointed out a few times over the past year I’m not a very good writer so it’s wonderfully helpful when people help improve it. Chris