Today I want to talk to you about getting more traffic to your website. Sorry I don’t have any fancy presentations – it’s just me and the camera, but it’s a topic that comes up a lot.
Everyone wants to get traffic to their website and I just wanted to share a little insight that I’ve had working in digital marketing for the last few years.
Actually one of the best ways that I heard it summed up was from a former employer of mine who basically said that the key to getting traffic online is, if you think about it sort of like a party okay?
So, your website is like your house. (This gets a little long – here’s the video version if you’d rather listen instead of read about it).
You want to have this really cool house party and have all the cool people over. So what you need to do is to get people to come to your house, you have to go to other house parties and hang out and be cool. Build up the Know, Like and Trust factor so that people are willing to come with you back to your house and hangout at your house (which is your website).
That’s sort of the secret to getting traffic, it’s not really a secret – it’s go where your audience is right now and invite them back to your house or your website. And then of course once they get there you have to have a plan for what are they going to do once they’re there.
- Do you want them to sign up to your email list?
- Do you want them to purchase something?
- Do you want them to fill out a contact form – depending on whether you’re a business or whether you do some sort of service provider.
So that’s sort of the easy way to think about getting traffic to your website – think of it as going to these other house parties and bringing them back to your party.
Every so often I’ll see something where…I’ll see an ad that says something like, “steal your competition’s followers” or “steal somebody’s email list” or something like that. I guess it’s supposed to be sensational – it’s supposed to sound interesting and enticing. To me I just don’t like the word “steal”.
I think it depends on what you’re offering and how you go about it. You could kind of look at it as you’re infiltrating these other groups or these other websites or these other communities and you’re trying to steal people from them… …or you can kind of look at it as, which (is probably the most effective way) is to actually partner with the person that’s in charge there. Offer them something, be helpful. Be genuine. Give before you attempt to take anything at all.
Because I ask you, what’s more effective?
- Trying to steal one person at a time over to your website?
- Or have the actual person who runs the site or who is you know, in charge of that “house party” for this example – personally kind of recommend you or recommend your website? Now you have that entire tribe willing to come over to your website because the person who’s in charge is giving you the ‘thumbs up’ of approval.
So to me, that’s the smarter way to go – you know, to network, to build up relationships, to be helpful. And then, as a natural side-effect or consequence of being helpful, of being cool and giving before you’re trying to receive anything…you can have these people working with you and sending their traffic gladly…gladly sending their traffic over to you and you don’t have to “steal” anything at all!
So, that’s what it takes to do traffic and it doesn’t matter whether you’re on Facebook or Twitter or a forum or a community – you have to give something.
You have to be cool…you have to give something of value, otherwise why is anyone going to want to come over and check out your website?
The other thing is which is really important is – what happens when they get there?
If they come to your …(to keep running with the analogy) if they come to your house and it’s run down and there’s no electricity and there’s no food and the toilet’s backed up – no one’s going to want to stay and hangout.
You want to make sure you have something to offer them. So that always comes back to content.
You have to have a reason …you know you can use every trick in the book to get someone to come to your website. But to get them to stay, to get them to want to come back, to get them to actually convert into either a subscriber or a customer – you gotta have content.
You have to have something there that they want; something that’s going to be beneficial for them. Otherwise, why are they going to waste their time?
There’s a billion-and-one websites and there’s a couple hundred TV channels and movies that they can be watching at any given point in time…so why would they waste their time on your site if it’s not providing any value?
Anyway, I just hope that this helps. I just wanted to shoot this quick video just to talk about how you can get more traffic to your website and you just gotta you know:
- Be cool (offer value – give first)
- Go where your audience hangs out
- Offer great content that they’re going to find useful.
So you do those things and then it’s just a matter of consistently doing it.
There’s no easy magic button – there’s no… you’re not going to do one little tweet or one little Facebook update and suddenly have throngs of people coming to your website. If that was the case, everybody would be doing it.
Anyway, thanks for checking this out and talk to you soon.
Image Credit (cropped with text added)