5 Tips for Growing Website Traffic
Growing website traffic is like growing your business, it’s not easy. BUT, you can do it with a little hard work, knowing your market and getting help with various online marketing tactics. So let’s cut to the chase! The top 5 tips I recommend to implement and test are listed below.
Top 5 Tips to Growing Your Website Traffic
1. You can only grow what you can measure! Get a good web analytics package on your website. You need to be measuring traffic, conversions, where your visitors and sales are coming from and lots of other metrics. Google Analytics is free, and it does a good job. There are other packages that do a better job and they cost you more than free. Yahoo just bought a company called Index Tools and I use this package with one of my customers and it has some very nice functionality. Most web analytic tools have similar functionality, just be sure to get one and use it.
2. Start testing various traffic generating methods and see what works for your market. Test, Measure, Tweak and Test again. It’s really a no brainer, it you are generating sales and it’s a positive ROI, go for it. OK, so I guess you want to hear what to test ;-). The first thing everyone with a website should work on is SEO. Say no more!
3. If you are selling products to consumers you want to check out affiliates and shopping sites. Think of these sites as being your resellers and helping you to sell your products for a fee/commission.
4. Search Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, like Google AdWords or Yahoo Search, is something you want to test. Not only will you find out which words people are searching on to find products like yours, you will find out which words people are more likely to buy on. There is also a wealth of information on what your competitors do with search. As in most businesses, it’s important to know your competitors extremely well. I give all my clients detailed information on which words their competitors are buying, which works their competitors are optimizing organically and what are their most popular words.
5. Last but not least, email campaigns to your house list. Your house list consists of your customers and people who have signed up to get your newsletters, information on discounts, sales, etc. Constant Contact is a great service to manage your list and email campaigns. Continue to grow this list, keep it updated and use this list to stay in contact. If you want to do direct mail or need business cards printed, Vista Print is good a low price option.