I have a website that does not generate enough visitors yet. What strategy would you recommend for getting new visitors to the site?
There are 7 main ways to get visitors to the site.
- Organic Traffic
- Social Traffic
- Paid Traffic
- Direct Traffic
- Referral Traffic
- Email Traffic
- Other Traffic
Let’s start with organic traffic first. Organic traffic is the traffic that you get from people finding your site naturally. For example, someone that goes to the search engines, types something in, your site pops up on the first page of the search results, they click on your search listing and go to your site. This is called organic traffic because people are finding your site naturally.
The second type of traffic is social traffic. Social traffic is traffic that comes to your site from one of the social media sites such as FB, Twitter, LI, YouTube, and many other sites. Your customers are hanging out on the social media sites, sharing pictures, talking to their friends, sharing their thoughts, and see the things that you are posting on the sites, find it interesting, and then click through the links you share to go to your site. This is social traffic because it is traffic that goes to your site from social media sites.
The third type of traffic is paid traffic. Paid traffic is traffic that comes to your site as a result of a paid advertising campaign. Most of the online platforms have a way for you to run paid ads on their sites that allow you to target your ideal customer. The top two platforms used for advertising are Facebook and Google. Facebook is best for when you want to get your product or service in front of a group of people that are not necessarily searching for your product or service. Google advertising is best for when you have a large audience of people searching for your product or service in search engines.
The fourth type of traffic is direct traffic. Direct traffic is when someone has heard of your website and types the exact URL into the search engines to find your site. Maybe a friend told them about your site or they heard it on a podcast.
The fifth type of traffic is referral traffic. Referral traffic is what the name implies. Traffic that comes to your site from some type of referral. Sometimes if people like your content, they will link out to it from their websites or social media platforms. Other times you can set up a formal affiliate program so that people can get credit for any sales they send to your site. Other times you can do a joint venture project with someone to be on their podcast or teach something within someone else’s Facebook group or members area and in exchange, they link out to your site.
The sixth type of traffic is email traffic. This is traffic that comes to your site as a result of your email campaigns. This is normally traffic from your own email list. So for example, if you have a list of 20,000 emails inside of your email marketing platform such as Infusionsoft or Active Campaign, when you send an email to your list and link to your site and they click on the link, you are sending traffic from your email list.
The seventh type of traffic is “other” traffic. If you look at a traffic report for your site you will always see an “other” category. This is traffic that came to the site but the source could not be tracked or accounted for. Usually, it is the smallest traffic source because today, almost anything can be tracked.
Not all traffic is created equal.
Now that we’ve figured out that there are 7 types of traffic, the question is – which one should I focus on first?
The answer is… that depends!
I’ve ranked traffic in the order of how well it converts!
Email traffic is traffic that is already on your email list so this traffic will convert higher than any other traffic. This does not mean that if you have a large email list that you will have a lot of sales. You need to have an engaged email list that is actively opening and clicking on your emails. The way to do this is to always be sending awesome content to your list that will make them want to open the emails.
Next is direct traffic. Since people are coming to your site by typing in the exact URL of your site, they are looking not just for what you have to offer but specifically looking for YOU. They might have heard about you on a podcast, read a book, or just remembered that they found your site a long time ago and are now ready to do business with you.
Next is organic traffic. Even though this is 3rd on the list, organic traffic is usually the best source of traffic because it does not depend on if you have an email list or not and it is something that you can control. You can’t really control direct traffic because you can’t control when or how a person will type your web address into the search engine to find you! So organic traffic will convert the most, but it is also the hardest to get when first starting out. That’s why many people choose the next traffic source.
Paid traffic. Paid traffic is one of the easiest to acquire traffic sources – but potentially the hardest to get a return on investment on. It requires a lot of trial and error and testing to find a winning funnel – but once you do, you will be gold! In my ACTion Method training, I teach about the 3 funnels that you need to be able to get an ROI on your paid advertising campaigns.
Referral Traffic. Referral traffic is awesome because people are already pre-sold on your offer as they are coming from a source that they know, like or trust. Referral traffic can convert higher than paid traffic but it is also harder to come by which is why it is ranked after paid traffic.
Social Traffic works well if you have the right strategy. The challenge is that the best strategies involve a lot of time to have real conversations and develop real relationships. The days of mass publishing the same content to multiple platforms so people would see your awesome content, click on it, and go to your site – are numbered.
So what traffic strategy are you going to focus on first? Let me know by posting a comment below!