Ok, so you’ve built your website and now have an understanding of many things you didn’t have when you started:
This is all good and well, you’ve got a cool looking website you’re proud of, you’ve shown your family and friends, but that really isn’t many visitors is it? I know when I started, traffic was something you encountered when you drove your car in rush hour!
What Is Website Traffic
This can be answered very simply! Website traffic is the amount of people that comes to visit your website, the number of pages the visitors click, and the amount of time the visitor views a page.
Sounds simple doesn’t it and in some ways it is, the trick is, getting traffic to your website. There are different ways you can do this, but the most important thing to remember is you want “targeted” traffic. This means people who are interested in what your website is about.
If you’re selling an affiliate product, say knitting needles, and someone visits your site who is a motorbike fanatic, you think they will make a purchase? Unlikely, unless they have an interest in knitting too, or looking for a gift for someone!
It’s important to identify who your target market is, who you are trying to help/promote products to. For example, this website is for people who want to build a website and/or have an online business, but are nervous with all the geek speak. This tends to be people over 50 who weren’t bought up in a technological age. Of course, this is a generalization but you get my drift.
Free Traffic Methods
SEO (search engine optimization) – this can get complicated, but I’ll keep it simple! This is where you optimize your site for search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is done using keywords effectively and using a plugin like Yoast keeps it simple. Your keyword should be in your post title and the first paragraph and wherever it can occur naturally within your post.
There are over 200 different factors Google takes into account when ranking a website and this is what I meant when I said it can get complicated! If you’re writing good, readable posts with a word count of over 500 (more is better), using keywords, using internal linking (more on this later), this is enough to start with.
The Yoast plugin gives you a green light when you have fulfilled the above criteria and lists what you need to do to improve things.
It can take a while to gain Google’s trust and getting organic traffic through SEO can take a while to build up.
You can check out our post “What Google Likes” for more detailed information.
What I will say, SEO is NOT our preferred method for traffic, it’s slow and Google changes it’s mind (algorithm) about what it wants frequently. You can use it yes, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket, use other sources of traffic too!
Forums Within Your Niche
Join forums within your niche, start interacting, asking and answering questions and joining in discussions. Some forums will let you put your website link within the signature area straight away, others you have to be a member for a certain length of time.
An effective way to use a forum can be to write a short negative review on a product. Be honest so people see you as being trustworthy and want to visit your website.
This can take a bit of time to start with, but once you’re established, 10/15mns each day should be enough to keep things ticking over.
Social Media
This is one of the most effective ways to get free traffic and perhaps one of the scariest if you’ve never used social media before. (We’ll be writing a post shortly on how to set up social media accounts).
The best way to get started is to focus on one social media platform, trying to do them all at once will just give you brain freeze (ask me how I know this!) Which one you use can depend on your niche, for example, Pinterest is very visual and suited to hobby type niches. For others, Facebook has proven to be the most effective as you can write long intros that lead to a link to your site (Twitter has a word count limit which I don’t like!).
G+ is popular with Internet marketers and because it is one of Google’s babies can be an effective way to get traffic. This is an article that explains how to use G+effectively and why.
Using social media is very like using a forum in as much as you need to interact. Start following and “friending” people in your niche. Join in discussions and get yourself known. There are many good articles on how to use the different social media platforms, a Google search will find them!
Sarah Staar covers free traffic in more detail and delves into the world of paid traffic. She gives this information away for FREE!
You can access her free 5 part video course “How to Sell Affiliate Products” here.
Later on we’ll go into paid traffic in more detail, follow us on FB to get all the latest posts!
If you’ve any specific questions regarding free traffic please drop a comment below, contact us or leave a message on our FB page.