Key takeaway. If you want to instantly drive higher engagement, more shares, and greater traffic to your website, maximize your impact by testing headlines that are focused on the impact to the reader.
Drive Traffic through Guest Blog Posts
A popular strategy for getting significant increases in website traffic is guest blogging. With this strategy, you identify influencers in your business, create relationships, and write high-value posts for their blogs.
For example, let’s say that you sell software that leverages the Internet of Things. Find influencers in that space who share your target market. These people may have large or small audiences, and both are good. Once you identify these individuals, you can start creating relationships, commenting on their content, and connecting through social media. You can pitch guest blog posts, which will allow you to get in front of their audience, present amazing content, and hopefully entice readers into learning more about your company ― usually through some type of lead magnet.
But let’s back up and first uncover how to pick the best influencers for your brand.
Finding the right influencers. Does your target market spend time on Twitter? If so, check out tools such as Followerwonk, which is an advanced Twitter analytics tool that allows you to search Twitter profiles and bios by keywords. You can also use tools such BuzzSumo, which can be used for finding the right content topics.
Pitch a guest blog post. Once you identify a list of the right influencers, check out their sites. Do they have blogs? If so, they may already have guidelines established for accepting blog posts, and they may be published on the website. If they don’t, send a quick email and ask. Once you find out, send a carefully crafted pitch.
Capturing maximum results through a lead magnet. Once your blog post is accepted, you will likely get a bio section, which highlights the author of the post. Don’t waste this space! Instead of linking to your site, set up a landing page with a lead magnet. This could be an eBook that addresses your target audience’s largest pain point, a great infographic, or some other high-value piece of content. The goal? Capture each piece of traffic that you get and start nurturing the visitor through the sales funnel. After all, once someone new arrives at your site, you don’t want that person to get away.
Similarly, you can also allow others to guest post on your website to drive greater traffic. When others create content, they share it with their audience, which helps you bring new people to your site.
Key takeaway. A guest-posting strategy can help provide large spikes of traffic to your website, but it’s also part of a long-term traffic-building strategy. The more content you post on related sites, the more traffic that will trickle into your site, even after that initial spike, which provides long-term results, leads, and sales.
Leverage the Power of Visual
Visual content is starting to get a lot of attention from marketers, and for good reason ― it provides a large impact. Check out these stats on using images, graphics, and videos in content:
- 37 percent of marketers said that visual marketing was the most important form of content for their businesses.
- Video content is expected to represent 74 percent of all Internet traffic in the near future.
- Four times as many consumers report they would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
The data is impressive, but how does it relate to images and driving more traffic to your brand? Humans are visual beings and can absorb that type of data much faster and easier than other types of information. As a result, they prefer it ― and share it. This translates into greater interest and more website traffic.
A great place to start with creating visual content is developing infographics to share via social media. If you’ve started to forge relationships with influencers, you can reach out and ask them about what they’re working on. Then see if you can contribute an infographic that would make their next blog post stronger. As a result, they would likely share that infographic, which would be credited and linked to your site, driving greater traffic. There are some really fun tools out there that make creating video a both a snap and affordable: GoAnimate, Moovly, VideoScribe. Tools like Canva or Vizualize can help you make engaging visual infographics as well, for little to no cost.
Key takeaway. Examine your existing strategy and ask the question “How can I make more content visual?” Take a look at your existing content an see if you can just repurpose it into a different, more visual format. Then look for different strategies and tools to help you create those types of content and increase your website traffic.
A Few Last Words
The above strategies will help you increase your website traffic while advantageously planting seeds to continue to nurture that traffic in the future. But it’s key to remember that creating traffic is not a sprint ― it’s a marathon. Some of these methods, such as guest posting, will give you initial large spurts of traffic, but the longer you work at these tactics, the greater long-term traffic you’ll build.
Plus, it’s critical to keep in mind that, while having lots of traffic is excellent, when you let that traffic slip through your fingers, it becomes pointless. Instead, entice readers to take that next step, such as exchanging their email for a high-value piece of content. That way you’ll convert more traffic into leads and ensure that your business will thrive in the future.