What is Traffic Generation?
Now that your website is already live online, the important thing is to generate traffic, and not just traffic, but organic and targeted traffic as much as possible. Without traffic generation, any attempt to market your website online will be futile. Further, when you attract and encourage people to buy from you, it will boost your revenues. How do you go about attracting users to visit your website?
Traffic is classified as quality and quantity traffic. Targeted traffic is quality traffic while click throughs are quantity traffic. Organically, the first set of visitors uses the search engines in finding websites of interest using specific key terms. If you are lucky, Google and other search engines will include your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Quality traffic, therefore, knows the contents to look for.
The second set of visitors clicks through a link on other websites or web pages and lands on your website. This is unintentional as the users are not looking for your contents in the first place, but also works for traffic generation purposes. They are only compelled to click a link of interest. Quantity traffic is considered as a cold market wherein a user learns about your website only because he or she landed on it.
Today, there are several ways of traffic generation, two of which are article marketing and social bookmarking. Article marketing is the process of writing high quality articles with relevant contents. The articles have to be submitted on various article directories online. Through this, indexing and re-indexing your website by using backlinks will be possible. This leads to higher search engine ranking, which we all know, initially depends on the volume of traffic that a website generates. The secret is submitting the articles on directory websites that rank high on Google and other search engines for higher traffic generation.
Some websites also publish their contents on corporate blogs. Search engines look for fresh, unique, relevant and regularly-updated contents. The links to these contents can be submitted to social bookmarking websites that usually yield high quality backlinks. Just like article submission, the links must be created on social bookmarking websites that rank higher compared to your website.
There are other traffic generation methods that are worth trying. First is email signature. Majority of the users has their own email addresses. Remember even Facebook requires an active email address. This is necessary if you are using email marketing purposefully. Imagine how much exposure and thereby traffic your website will generate if you are going to send 50 to 100 emails every day. All of the recipients who will read your email may notice your link. About 10 to 20% of them will click it, and 5% will share it. This is not a guarantee though and again this will depend on the contents.
You may also do this offline. You should include the website URL on all offline literature such as pamphlets, letterheads, business cards and in-store adverts. You may also include your link on adverts on different visual portals that you implement including billboards, airport pathways, train station walls, gymnasiums and shopping centers for better traffic generation.
Discussions of traffic generation are not complete without mentioning social media marketing. Be it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn or even on forums, you must create social media profiles. Just add your URL to the profiles and people will click it for sure. Also, you may blatantly ask other users to check your website. Just make sure that your link is directing properly.
Further, the social profiles are a perfect venue for traffic generation through engaging users. These are where most of the conversations about your business and product and service offerings occur. Specifically, engagement is amplified by putting up polls/surveys, asking questions, giving quizzes, creating contests and providing free tools. These are some of the things that compel visitors to explore the website and share it to others.
An unconventional traffic generation technique is installing plug-ins like a translator. Generally, if you want to capture non-English-speaking traffic, you may provide other language options on your website. If this is not feasible, you simply install a reliable plug-in. The translation may not be that accurate, but it will surely contribute in attracting visitors who are not fluent in speaking English.
Another traffic generation technique is word of mouth. Word of mouth may happen offline and online. Offline, whenever you meet someone, you can relate to him or her about it and the products and services. Since there is a ‘personal touch’ somehow, these people are more likely to visit your website, driving traffic in the process. However, you cannot do this method all the time. Anyhow, depending on the experience of the visitor in your website, he or she may tell others about your website. This is how word of mouth marketing works.
Online, the perfect traffic generation platforms to use in marketing your website are the social media. Perhaps, you have heard the word ‘viral’. While viral marketing is becoming an online marketing category of its own, it has the word of mouth marketing in its root. Viral memes, images and videos are not purposefully marketed by their creators. Words about these contents spread due to word of mouth.
There is a lesson to learn here: if you want your website to attract more visitors, you need to make it user-friendly. While content is still king, traffic generation also relies on other important factors including how usable the website design is and how long the website loads. A user will stay on your website for less than 5 seconds, so if your site will not load this fast, it is not fit for traffic generation.
Traffic generation, on the outset, is simply attracting users to visit the website. However, based on the discussions above, it’s more than simply attracting visitors. Generating traffic is the lifeblood of any online business. Thereby, if you want your business to thrive online, you must start knowing what traffic generation techniques will actually work for you. You may try all the techniques mentioned or you may come up with unique traffic generation techniques for higher exposure and ranking.