9 Proven Strategies to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Guest blog post by Tomasz Adamiec.

When you start your adventure with the Internet you slowly realize how the job should be done to drive traffic to your website.

A problem occurs when you implement techniques that are used by everyone else and then your efficiency drops.

For example, an ad in a search engine is still a great type of an advertisement, but developing competition has an impact on its positioning or on growing prices of AdWords.

What happens when you do not have an unlimited budget for advertisement?

You are left with less popular techniques and this is their advantage. They haven’t been widely used yet, they are effective and in addition free!

1. Expert Roundup Post – Hunt for Experts

Expert roundup post is a great solution for delivering high-quality content to your audience, gaining valuable traffic and reaching out to influencers.

They consists of experts’ advice and the article by Scott Gerber published on Mashable “12 Ways to Evaluate Your Community Manager” is a great example of such post.

You can create a similar entry, connecting with experts from your industry through e-mail. Here are the tree steps that you should follow:

I. Choose the right question

Think of a question that you want to ask a particular expert. Your query need to be both interesting and unconventional so as to make it also attractive to your guest.

II. Prepare a list

Open a new spreadsheet in Google Docs or Excel and draw up a list of people, whom you want to ask a question. The list may include influencers like bloggers, books’ authors, YouTubers and other personalities that are considered as experts in your industry.

Pick only those people who share audience with you. You need to take into consideration that not all of them will reply to your query, so your list should be longer than planned final number of guests.

III. Send an e-maill

Now it is time for you to send a message with a question. However, before you do it, you need to get e-mail addresses. Here are some techniques to achieve this:

• Sign up to newsletter of a blogger. It is very likely, that an address will appear when you click reply to newsletter.
• Ask for it, using Twitter.
• Employ the tool Rapportive, which is a Gmail plugin. If you enter a correct e-mail address in the recipient fields, the plugin will display his or her LinkedIn profile. In this way you can guess the right address.

After publishing a post, inform quoted authors about this fact. There is a good chance, that they will publish a link to a publication on their social media profiles. If those influencers have big bunch of followers, such entry will bring you much traffic.

2. Guest Posts

You need traffic, owners of blogs and expert platforms need publications of the highest quality. It creates wide space for cooperation.

When I decided that I would start writing guest posts for the first time, I was extremely scared, that no one would like to publish them. I was an anonymous person in the industry. I expected many refusals before my first publication.

With help of Google Docs I created the list of blogs that could be possibly interested in my publications.

On the first place I put the blog which hosted guest posts before. It was a sign for me that its owner is willing to cooperate with other authors.

To my surprise and delight, the author accepted my request to publish a post on his web site, what’s more the entry was not only published but became one of the most popular ones on the blog.

You will not get enormous traffic with this strategy, but the audience of guest entires would be of the highest quality. Thus if you do not run a blog, guest publications can bring you valuable engagement of an audience. If you offer products or services, such entries will attract new customers. In my case, it was a new job offer that I got.

Guest entries are not only a source for building your career online. You can find a great example of this in How to Catapult Yourself from Diddly Squat to a Booming Online Career, where Henneke Duistermaat describes her story.

3. Click To Tweet

Everyone hits on a great idea once in a while. The braver ones publish such thoughts on social media platforms and usually get plenty of likes, shares and comments.

You can also employ this mechanism to bring traffic to your website. You only need to put the most interesting sentences ready to tweet.

This strategy is creatively employed by authors of the Coschedule blog.

Coschedule is also an author of a wonderful free plugin, Click to tweet, which lets you create tweet boxes in your blog posts on WordPress.

4. Resources or List of Links

Tools or different resources which are available in the Internet, can incredibly make your job easier, increase productivity and help to save time. This is why we like such articles and we like lurking what tools others use.

Post by Courtney Seiter 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts, which has gained ground, is a very good example of such entries.

If you want to prepare this type of an article, you will need to spare some time for research and testing specific tools or different resources. However, it will bring you double benefit: you will improve your skills and competences and you will gain materials for a prime post.

5. Interact With Others in Social Media

Imagine that you are present at every conversation that concerns your industry. You do not obtrude, nor promote intrusively your blog, company, product or yourself. You just participate in each conversation about your area of interest and you try to add value. You can help, when a person struggle with a problem or just provide entertainment with a funny comment. It all depends on context of a conversation.

Such activity would attract positive attention of people who would like to know more about what you deal in.

For the moment, it is impossible to physically take part in every conversation, but thanks to Internet monitoring you can participate in a significant number of online discussions.

Pick the most popular keywords in your industry and then put them into a monitoring tool, which would search for mentions and inform your up-to-date about everything that is crucial to you.

6. Invite Others to a Guest Post

Epic post can deliver you tons of traffic, but no matter how much you try, you’re not able to give your audience an epic post in short time spans every time you publish something.

Good solution is to invite other authors to contribute.

You get high-quality content, which brings traffic to your page and you confirm your audience in their opinion that your blog is worth visiting and full of valuable information.

Guest author, on the other hand, has a chance to present his or her work in front of your audience. If your guest runs a blog, he or she can gain new readers, if offers services, can attract new clients.

None of the websites will benefit from such cooperation, if a text is of a low quality.

Thus, in order to attract potential authors and concurrently spare yourself reading poor articles, you can publish guidelines concerning guest posts.

It will mean that you accept such request, but the post must meet particular rules.

Jeff Bullas, one of the most influential bloggers, employ this technique on his blog.

7. Put On Distinct Content Formats

If you drive a car and live in a city, you probably spend much time in traffic jams. Arguably, you listen to radio, audiobooks or podcasts in that time. In the case of doing individual sports, you probably listen to music through earphones.

Audio format is the one, which in the very moment suits you best. Reading blogs while running might end up bad for both your and your smartphone.

When you plan your marketing strategy, take into consideration different formats of content. In this way you can easily distinguish yourself and reach out to people who prefer different types of content than text or video. Infographics, webinars and presentations are also good ideas.

8. Write an Egobait Article

Recently, a similar post was published on Brand24 blog: 13 Social Media Blogs That Are Worth Your Attention – Approved by Brand24.

It is basically a list of marketing blogs that are recommended by Brand24.

We love when people appreciate our efforts and achievements. This is why a significant part of authors included on such list will share an article on his or her social media profile.

You can also prepare similar post, for instance, including 10 most inspirational personalities. If you are familiar with graphics or you have some money at your disposal, you can also design a cool infographic.

After publication of such post, don’t forget to share this information with people who are included on the list.

9. Be transparent

It may come as surprise, but if you are transparent, share problems and own solutions to them on your blog, provide knowledge, data and numbers, you’ll not only win your audience’s trust, but also drive traffic to your website.

The best example of showing transparency is Pat Flynn. Pat publish a monthly report, in which he explains precisely what he worked on in the previous month and how and how much he earned. You can find loads of hints in his entries, all based on his experiences. This incredible transparency brings Pat lots of likes, shares and comments.

A company that offers a software for managing social media platforms, Buffer is another great example of similar activity.

On pages bufferapp.com/transparency and open.bufferapp.com you can find entries created by employees that share everything. Starting from corporate culture, through strategies to specific results in numbers that the Buffer reaches.

This technique both enhances people’s trust and brings particular profits. People links to these posts and it implicates a valuable traffic on Buffer site.

Conclusion

Few people know that writing a proper type of post can drive more traffic. Similar effect can be brought with changing the form of content or an unusual tool application.

Additionally, you can make the world a better place, that to being trasparency. Karma will get back to you in the form of traffic on your website.

With all these techniques you’re able to plan a strategy of getting traffic and achieve success.

About the author:

Tomasz Adamiec is a blogger who shares marketing strategies and easy ways to bring valuable traffic to a website.