Table of Contents
When you start a business, whether it’s online or offline, you know you need a website, and you also know that you need website traffic. It can be tempting to use any and all tactics to get more traffic, but the truth is, the quality of the traffic matters exponentially.
Consider the fact that if you have tons of un-converting traffic, it can make the numbers for your website look unattractive to investors, influencers, and advertisers.
If your conversion rate is only 1 percent, or worse, that looks horrible. It doesn’t matter if it only takes 1 percent for you to earn the money you want (which isn’t likely), it looks bad for investors to have a conversion rate that low.
This can happen in high traffic sites that encourage people who aren’t an audience fit to go to the page. The formula for figuring out conversion rate is conversion divided by visitors.
So, if you had 1000 people visit your site and 100 converted, your conversion rate is: 100/1000 = 0.1. That’s a 1 percent conversion rate, which is rather low.
So now imagine that you list your product for affiliates to sell for you. You tell them your conversion rate is only 1 percent.
That’s horrible, and they’re not going to be as likely to want to spend the time and effort promoting your product.
You want to improve your conversion rate for many reasons. It costs money to build a site to have high traffic. You will experience increased server costs, and if you provide a freebie people want even though they will never buy from you, they might even be on your email list – which is an additional cost.
But when you lower your traffic to ideal clients only, your conversion rate could go up to 50 percent or more. You will need to look at your industry to find out what a good conversion rate is based on your product and industry.
As you build your traffic strategy, it’s imperative to understand your product and what brings you money online.
That way, you’re sending the traffic to the right places and not just to your home page.
Getting traffic to your offers is both a science and an art. It requires knowledge of your audience, the technology needed to create and publish content online, and a product to promote.
Once you have the product, you can then create sales pages, blog posts, social media posts, and more to get the attention of your audience.
In this article, you’re going to learn:
- The Type of Traffic Most Important for Success
- Why You Need to Find Out Where Your Audience Is
- The Costs Associated with Traffic Generation
- Free and Paid Ways to Get in Front of Your Audience
- How To Download Your Workbook for Free!
- And so much more!
When you’re done, you’re going to understand what it takes to drive traffic to your offers that really works and gets results.
Let’s start with understanding what type of traffic you need to truly generate traffic that provides a generous return on investment.
Not All Traffic is Created Equal
On your quest for traffic, it’s imperative that you remember that the quality of your traffic is just as important as getting more traffic. Sending qualified targeted visitors to your sales pages is going to be much more effective than trying to just get any type of traffic from anyplace.
Getting traffic from the right sources provides a higher return on investment (ROI) than trying to get a flood of traffic from everywhere. After all, it costs money to have inactive people on your email list.
Having a higher rate of conversion means that the people on your list are worth the cost because a higher percentage of them are accepting your offers.
If you get a lot of traffic but have low conversion rates, this is a sign that you need to narrow down your freebies, content, and offers to a very specific audience in order to receive a higher quality of traffic that wants what you’re offering.
If you currently aren’t getting enough traffic, you may also want to look at your offers to find out if you can target them better so that you can get in front of your audience.
Regardless of your situation, niching down your offers to something only your audience wants will increase conversions.
To get a clear idea of the direction you need to go, use your Google Analytics account to study your situation.
Look at the facts that you can learn from analytical data:
- Bounce Rate: How often do people come to the site or page and then leave fast? This is your bounce rate. The math is Bounces/Number of Visitors = Bounce Rate. But GA (Google Analytics) figures this out for you and provides this info directly.
- Visit Duration: How long do people stick around on the page or your entire site before leaving. You can see this via your GA account. It will figure out the math for you.
- Page Visits: How many people visit each page and your site in general? Do these visitors come back? Do they share anything? What do they read?
- Traffic Sources: Where is the traffic coming from? Knowing this is important because you want multiple sources of traffic sending your ideal customer to your site. Knowing the sources that are paying off best can help you find more.
- Busiest Page: Which page gets the most traffic? A blog post that you wrote? A product sales page? Why? Is that page producing results or just traffic? The answer can help you move forward.
- Audience Behavior: Where did they come from, where did they go, and what did they do when they got there? You can use heat maps as well as in-content upgrades to help you figure out audience behavior along with the data generated.
Understanding these facts can help you design a strategy to improve the type of traffic you bring to your site so that you can have a much higher return on investment based on a higher number of visitors converting to buyers.
Remember that the quality of traffic is the most important factor when you use any type of tactic to bring more traffic to your site. Therefore, you’ll want to learn all you can about your audience so that you can provide targeted reasons for people to come to your site and buy your offers.
Figure Out Who Your Target Audience Is and Where They Hang Out Online
Once you’ve studied where you are right now, it’s important to narrow down your target audience even more. You want to know where they get their information and where they hang out online.
In short, you must fully understand customer behavior.
If you’ve already started your business and have your website out there bringing traffic, you can use your Google Analytics account to determine how you’re doing bringing in targeted traffic as described above.
But, if you’re just starting out, or you have discovered that you’re not doing a good job bringing in traffic that converts, you can also start over right here with this information.
Know Your Audience
Who is your ideal audience? Who is the person who wants and needs to own what you are offering?
When you know who they are, you can find out where they hang out, what information they read and where they get it, what TV shows they like, and what their personal values are.
It takes some time, and it never ends. You’re not going to study your audience this week, and you’re done. Your audience, even if their demographics stay the same, the audience might change due to technology, financial situations, and more. If you stay aware of these things, you can present offers to your audience that open their eyes.
To get started, you want to know:
Where They Hang Out?
Where does your audience go to commiserate with others like them? For example, are there groups on Facebook or another social media page that your audience likes to frequent?
What events do they attend, online and offline?
If you know this, you can join too and become part of the community. You can also run advertisements that show up on that page or contact the owner and ask them to become an affiliate.
You can go to live events. You can apply to speak at the live events. You can put your information right in their path.
Where They Get Their Information?
Do they read certain magazines online or even offline? Books? Blogs?
What places do they get their information from?
That’s where you want to ensure that they also find your information.
You might guest blog post if they get their info from a certain blog. You can also contact the blog owner and offer your products to them to try and promote for a percentage of sales.
Offer to conduct a webinar with them and give them half the profits just for showing up and bringing their audience. Make it easy for them.
What Words Do They Use?
Knowing the words (jargon) your audience uses to find the information you provide will also help them find you. Search engine optimization (SEO) works by searching the net for the terms (words) that you have on your pages compared to the words their customer searched.
If you determine that your audience uses particular words, phrases, and wants to find information about the problems you solve, you’ll want to ensure that you use plenty of those terms in your content.
Keep in mind that you should not try to use the same keyword or keyword phrase on more than one page of your site as the main keyword or keyword phrase.
What Values Do They Hold?
One thing you want to know for sure about your audience is what their values are. What is important to them in their life? Is it family and God, or is it luxury vacations and spa products?
These values don’t mean someone is good or bad. But rather informs you how they might spend their extra money and how to phrase your sales copy.
For example, if your ideal audience consists of dentists because you sell marketing solutions to them, the values may be that they want to offer good customer service, painless service, and so forth.
You want to provide marketing services, so you will need to demonstrate to your dentist audience how you can present to their audience information that spreads their values and bring them more customers.
What Keeps Them Up at Night?
When you research your audience, find out what keeps them up at night. If your audience is dentists, as mentioned above, what are the things that worry them?
Then, out of those worrisome things, what can you help them solve?
- Can you run all their customer service?
- Does your software help cut down on missed appointments?
- Do you have a new way to provide coverage for calls during lunch?
Once you have that information, you will need to determine how you want to attract them. There are a couple of ways to ensure that you are successful:
- One Problem at a Time – Focus on just one problem (at a time) that you can solve when you create the content that you’ll use to market your product or solution. Don’t mention other problems – make this one the most important by focusing on it in a way that your audience understands.
- Create an Audience Persona (or two) – When you really know exactly who your most ideal audience is, you can create an audience persona. Some people call this an audience avatar. The point in doing the exercise and determining who your audience is enough that you can create a persona is so that you know for whom you’re doing everything.
Don’t worry about everyone else. Knowing the details about the audience member who wants your stuff is going to help to create or to find products that your audience wants so much easier. You’ll make more sales – not fewer – by doing this. You can also create other personas.
For example, how does the persona change due to where your audience is in their buying cycle? A customer who has purchased from you needs different information than someone who has not purchased from you yet.
Know Your Offers
The other thing that’s important to truly understand is your products. Whether you promote someone else’s or your own, you need to know how they solve a problem for your audience.
What does this product do? Why? How? When?
Anything you can know and express to your audience about the product is important.
If it’s someone else’s product that you are promoting as an affiliate, you should buy at least one product from the creator, so you know the quality.
Plus, if you’ve built a community, even though they can and should go to the company who sold the product for customer service, they’re also going to come to you due to that product being your recommendation.
If you know for sure how the creator responds to customer service as well as how to use the product correctly yourself, you’ll be able to help your audience more.
Plus, a good product creator will offer a lot of training and help as well.
Knowing that they do will help you confidently promote proudly and loudly.
Develop Information (Content) That Your Audience Needs
Once you know your audience, and your product as well as of course, the voice of your brand, and how you want to appear to your audience, you’ll want to create information for your audience. You’ll want to publish a lot of different types of content.
Some content will be free, such as YouTube content, Facebook Live content, blog content, and more.
You may want to develop paid information products that solve problems for them. Perhaps courses, maybe a membership site, perhaps a community on Facebook.
If it’s information that your audience needs, the sales pages, blog pages, and so forth will attract your audience when you share on social media.
If you ensure that you use good SEO practices on the content, and even pay to promote your content throughout the net, you’ll get even more ideal traffic.
If the content is ideal, the audience will be, too.
That’s true whether it’s free or paid content.
Reformat, Reuse, and Repurpose
Remember that every bit of content you create, and use, can be recreated and reused in a new way. For example, an eBook can become a course, and a course can become a webinar.
You can also reuse all the content you’ve purchased or created by simply putting it in a new format.
A blog post can become a webinar or a series of YouTube videos.
When you know your audience, you can give them just what they want, when they want it, in the format they want it. Multiple ways will cover your audiences’ preferences for information.
Details Matter
When you create products and even pages on your website, you will want to pay attention to certain details about everything you do.
Your website and each page need the right SEO, the right words, and correct content that attracts your audience to your pages.
At first, get things done and published.
Then you can perfect it as you go based on the data from Google Analytics.
You don’t want to get so bogged down that you never finish the content or information you’re trying to make available to your ideal audience.
When you take the time to define who your target audience is, and who among them are your customers, where and how to find them, you’re going to succeed a lot faster because more of what you do will lead to conversions.
Start with finding out where they hang out, that way when you do create the right content for them.
Whether it’s free or paid, you’ll know where to go to promote it. This means you’ll get a much higher return on investment.
All Traffic Generation Has a Cost Associated with It – Do You Want to Spend Time or Money?
While there are countless programs you can find that claim to help you generate traffic “for free,” the truth is there is always going to be a cost. It just depends on what cost you want to – or what cost you can – pay.
Even I may sometimes use the term “free” for something that is not free because it still takes time and effort.
So, in short, it’s not actually free!
Sweat Equity or Money?
You’re either going to pay in sweat equity, or you’re going to pay with money.
You can also, of course, do both. It’s up to you and depends on your situation. Maybe right now you have a zero-money budget.
If that’s the case, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time sweating to get the word out so that you get enough traffic to earn money via your offers.
Optimized for SEO
Either way, you want to focus on creating quality content that is optimized for SEO.
This means using the right keywords, developing a cohesive backlight and internal linking strategy, and taking the time to be focused and act appropriately on social media.
Even if you can’t afford to pay for advertising, or to pay an influencer, or hire someone to help, you can do all the above alone. Remember, this is going to take more time, but it’s not impossible.
About SEO
It’s really all about SEO. Let’s have a quick SEO lesson.
First, there are on-page SEO practices and off-page SEO practices that will help you get more of the right traffic.
The thing most people don’t understand is what SEO really encompasses. They think it’s all about keywords.
But it’s not.
It’s about keywords used in the right way, earning links back from an authority site to yours, proper internal linking, a proper website set up in terms of security, coding, navigation, and how the site works. SEO experts refer to this as optimizing your site structure.
If you know what you’re doing or can learn (and you can), you can do all of it without paying anyone money.
All of this must be done eventually, it’s just a matter of what type of resources you want to use to do it and how fast you want to see success.
Free Ways to Get in Front of Your Ideal Audience
You need ways to ensure you’re doing all you can to get in front of your ideal audience. If you do, you’ll get more traffic. Not only will you drive more traffic to your site, but the traffic that comes will also be a lot more enthusiastic and more likely to convert, since it’s exactly what they want.
- Guest Blog Post – When you decide to guest blog, it’s imperative that you choose where to guest post properly. They need to offer something in exchange for the free content, such as having a bio at the end of your post that offers at least one link to whatever it is that you want to promote. Then, create a blog post directed to their audience. You can alter other posts you’ve published or create it from scratch.
- Speak at Events – Whether in person or online, events are a great way to get in front of your audience. Speaking at events can really push traffic toward your page because it feels so much more personal to the audience. Speaking helps you be known as an expert in your niche and causes a buzz around you, which helps you get more traffic.
- Go Live – Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube (or a live webinar), going live with an online event is a great way to bring traffic to your site. You can use your phone to go live any time of the day on Facebook to talk about your audience’s problems and your solutions.
- Social Media – Whenever you have anything to report, after you’ve written a blog post, and an email, go to social media. Share the post, share the email, and ask others to help you get the word out because it’s so wonderful, exciting, and a real problem solver.
- Email Marketing – Even though you are creating content to attract people to move them to your list, you can still send all the content you’re creating to current list members. If you use tagging on your email autoresponder account or other methods, you can use this to further segment your audience and bring people back to your site, ready to purchase your next product.
- Create Better Headlines – No matter who is sharing your content, or whether it’s being found on Google, or searched for on YouTube – it doesn’t matter – you need to create amazing headlines that get the attention of your ideal audience member. Try to create a process such as keywords first and straightforward descriptions, or asking a question, or poking the bear – it will depend on your style and what works best for your audience.
- Ask for Referrals – Ask people to share your content. Ask people to tell others. But incentivize them to share by offering points, coupons, or something in exchange for doing it. The more people you have linking to your sales pages, the more traffic you’ll get – obviously. That’s the reason affiliate programs work so well. How you do it depends on if you have a digital product, a physical product, or a service.
- Republish Content – You can also take content you’ve already published on your blog, clean it up, update it, and add it to sites like LinkedIn under your profile. You can also syndicate your content if you publish regularly via a syndicated service.
- Link Internally More – One SEO trick that people don’t do enough is internal linking. Yes, you’ve already brought them to your site, so you may be wondering how this increases traffic. The satisfaction the content visitors find will encourage them to come back – and also tell others. The more content they read on your site, the longer they stay, the more they’re going to get out of it. Linking to content based on what they are reading now will help.
- Talk to Experts – You can also do it as Oprah did it, start an interview series with experts you know your audience follows. If you keep regularly bringing in people who can help with their problems, you can earn affiliate income from your guests’ promotions on your “show” and the expertise will rub off if you ask smart questions and listen.
Getting traffic is something that you must work on every single day. If you develop a system that you use each time you publish something new, paid, or free, you’ll do a lot better. For example, let’s say you have created an eBook you want to promote.
Start by educating your audience on your blog, social platforms, and an email about their problem. Offer a free checklist to get them on your list.
Email the people already on your list about the new blogs and the checklist, too. Send everyone on the new list for the new eBook information about their problem and why it’s important to solve it. Then, finally, offer the solution.
Paid Ways to Get in Front of Your Audience
Using free ways to get traffic is awesome. As you know, though, they’re not really “free.” They are monetarily free if you don’t, of course, pay for something – but they are not free in terms of the energy and time you will spend.
Thankfully, there are some ways to make it easier that have a high return on investment.
These cost money, but you can do it relatively inexpensively or even “free” if you start making money because all these paid methods to get in front of your audience are investments.
However, before you choose to spend money promoting to your audience, you need to be sure that you have a clear point of view on your website, social media platforms, and that you have a product to promote.
Here are the 10 most effective ways to build your audience and your traffic on a budget. They’re paid methods, but you don’t have to pay much, if you do that correctly!
- Affiliates – Build your affiliate program starting from day one if you’re promoting digital products. You must remember, it doesn’t cost you more money per item when the product is digital. Therefore, paying someone half to promote is not going to break the bank. In fact, you’re going to explode your income with a well-run affiliate program.
- Advertising – Whether you use Google Ads or social media advertising, it’s important to learn all you can about it before you try it. If you can, hire someone who already knows what they’re doing to handle this for you. In general, spending five or ten bucks on Facebook Ads isn’t going to be enough, so don’t skip the learning curve. There are courses on Udemy about this, but you can also hire an expert.
- Influencers – One fun way to get the word out and bring traffic to your offers is to hire influencers via the social media platforms your audience uses most. If you know of particular influencers your audience likes to follow, contact them with information about your offers and how it can benefit them to promote your products. And remember, you don’t need a massive budget for influencer marketing, you can always start by courting micro-influencers!
- Outsource – Remember, you can outsource everything mentioned. You can hire people to create content for you, whether it’s finding and repurposing PLR or writing content from scratch. You can also hire people to run Google Ads or social media campaign, too.
- Syndication – You can use services to syndicate your content and get paid for it via advertising. Look into syndication companies online and pay to get your content in front of your audience based on where they go online.
- Sponsored Content – You can also create content and pay to have it published. Many people will publish your content with your links on their blog, website, in newsletters, in certain magazines, and more if you pay them for it. Some people call these advertorials.
- Create More Content – You can pay people to create more content for you as well as take the content that you have and organize it, update it, and reimagine it while republishing it to get more from it. You can also buy PLR.
- SEO – You can pay an SEO expert. If you go this route, be sure that the person has a lot of experience and truly understands SEO, including on-page and off-page SEO. So many people see SEO as passive and as if it’s part of the code, but it’s so much more.
- Competitions – One fun way to generate traffic that is paid is to host competitions. If you have a competition, understand how it will generate traffic before doing it. For example, giving prizes to your affiliates over and above sales will encourage them.
- Free Swag – Depending on your niche, you might want to offer free swag. If you go to live events, make sure everyone you meet gets something free from you that has your information on it.
These paid ways to get more traffic to your site work wonders if you know what you’re doing.
For this reason, it’s imperative that you truly study and learn how to use these methods appropriately to get the most out of your expenditure.
If you don’t get a positive ROI, it’s wasted money, and you don’t want to do that.
Thankfully, by hiring an expert to help, you can avoid those types of problems.
Creating Leverage to Increase Traffic
There is no one perfect traffic generation strategy. There is no one-size-fits-all plan that you can follow step-by-step because each business model is slightly different and calls for a different plan due to the product and the audience.
There are a lot of small things you can do daily that build on each one to create traffic flow to your offers. As you learn what works, and what topics get more interest, you’ll be able to adjust your efforts on the fly.
That’s why online marketing is so much fun. Each thing you do builds on the other.
If you change a landing page to be more targeted, and it increases your conversion rate by just a few percentage points, that will be worth it.
But you would not have figured that out without sending traffic to your site and then studying the data, so you know how to improve. Online marketing is so useful because you can change on the fly.
Think about it. If you run an advertisement on TV, and it’s not producing results, you’re just out of luck. If you are doing things online, you can adjust as you go based on the results. This is going to save you so much time, effort, and money.
If you produced an advertisement for any social media platform, you could cancel it midstream if it’s not producing results. You can’t do that with a TV or Radio spot.
You know what’s working or not with online efforts because you have data that you can study.
Remember early on we discussed page views, conversion rate, and so forth?
Use that information to discover what’s working and what’s not. Then double down on what works and let go of what is not working.
Use the data to find out:
More Info About Your Ideal Customer
Everything is ultimately about your customer.
What blog post have they read most, commented on most, shared most, or converted most?
You can find out using Google Analytics. Use that information and leverage that knowledge by creating more content about that topic.
Come at the content from a different angle, create it in a different form, or tweak it to improve your call to action. Use that information to perfect your actions so that you can get even more traffic.
Price Your Offers Better
By checking out the data and testing using Google Analytics, you can learn the best price for your offers.
This is a great way to leverage what you already have and know to make more money and to get more traffic.
Because if your price is right, and you share it via an advert and the audience sees it, they’re going to be more likely to click through and buy.
You may pull a price out of thin air, but once it’s live, test other prices to see what happens.
Recognize Trends
When you pay attention to your data based on your actions, you will start to notice trends.
Does your audience stop buying during certain times of the year? Why?
Can you figure out how to mitigate that? Maybe you’re producing less content and that’s the real reason there is a sales slump?
You can find out from the data. Once you know a trend, you can get ahead of it.
Beat Your Competition
You can use data from your sites but also from theirs to find a way to beat your competitors.
Use software like Ispionage.com (https://www.ispionage.com) to spy on your competition so that you can do whatever it is they do better or just differently.
Sometimes an audience, if they know about you, will prefer you for any number of reasons over a competitor. It’s up to you to use the data to figure out why, so it’s something that can be repeated.
Adjust Advertising Campaigns
When you pay for ads, you can use the data to discover what is working and what is not working.
Is the advertisement converting? Is it getting clicks? Are those clicks converting? How many people are seeing the ad versus who clicks versus who buys? If you get tons of clicks but little or no purchasing, why?
You can repair the advertisement on the fly by rewording the ad, changing the picture, or fixing the landing page based on the information you’ve gleaned from the data.
When you get started with studying analytics and data to find out more about your audience, your competition, and how the tactics you’re using are working (or not working), this is an exciting time. Data can make all the difference in the actions you take going forward that bring traffic to your offers.
Conclusion
Driving traffic to your site is a huge topic. This has barely touched the surface in a lot of ways. Each traffic generation method can become an entire book getting into the ins and outs of each method to find out what works best.
But the thing is, what will work best for one might not work best for the other. For this reason, it’s a good idea for you to go through and figure out the ones you want to try and stick to one or two methods at first so that you can learn how to do it right.
We’ve gone over so much. You probably are a little overwhelmed, but don’t worry. It’s not hard. It’s just time-consuming and ongoing. Getting traffic is not a mystery at all and is rather scientific.
Just follow the data.
When working on building traffic, it’s imperative that you rely on the data that you discover via analytics such as Google Analytics or platform analytics in the dashboard to learn about what is working, what is not working, and what you should do more.
In this article, you should have learned:
- Not All Traffic is Equal – You want targeted content; the more targeted, the better. You will not reduce your audience size by reducing the people you reach out to because your ideal audience size stays the same.
- The Importance of Audience Knowledge – Knowing where your audience hangs out, why, and what they like to read – as well as their values and not just their demographics - is imperative to success when creating content to target them.
- Traffic Generation Has a Cost – That cost may be money, time, or effort. You can pay for it with sweat equity, or you can pay people money to do things for you - or you can do both. Both are probably the best choice.
- Ways to Drive Traffic – You’ve also learned a few free and paid ways to generate more traffic to your offers. Not only that, but you’ve also learned why targeted traffic is more important than just any traffic. You can have a million hits a day, but if they’re not your audience, it isn’t going to pay off for you.
Now that you know what to do to drive traffic to your offers, what are you waiting for?
What is one thing you can do right now to make a huge difference?
If you already have an audience, go find your most popular blog post and find out, via the analytics you have, who is reading it, what they’re doing after they read it, and whether they’re converting.
If they are converting, find a way to create more content like that and start using some of the tactics mentioned.
If you don’t have an audience yet, your first task is to figure out who your audience is so that you can target them best, so your first task should be to create an audience avatar and then use that information to update any existing content, buy more content, or create more content from scratch.
You must start someplace, so put one foot in front of the other and get started.
But essentially, the majority of getting traffic has to do with knowing your audience, your product, and the methods you want to use with SEO and content marketing to succeed.
