A lot of people start a website with high hopes but give up on the first six months. Why? Because their website does not generate traffic and revenue. Before you launch your website, you need to understand one basic thing.
It takes time to generate traffic and revenue
If you have patience and willing to wait for months, even years, here are some of the ways to generate sustainable traffic on your website:
There are three different kinds of traffic:
Organic Traffic
When visitors come to your website through Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, it is organic traffic. Organic traffic depends on search engine ranking of your website. If your website is on the first page, you can receive a lot of traffic, however, if your website is on the 10th page, you may not receive much traffic.
Referral Traffic
When visitors land on your website through social media, it is referral traffic. Referral traffic depends on social media promotion. You can get referral traffic in two ways, one, through a free promotion (for example sharing on your Facebook page/group/timeline, tweeting the post etc.); two, through paid promotion, you can boost your Facebook post or sponsor tweet.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is when visitors go to your website through your website link. Email marketing, blog comment, forum promotion, question and answer site etc. are the different sources of direct traffic.
Generating Sustainable Traffic
You can drive traffic through search engines, social media and other promotional campaigns (email marketing, forum promotion, question and answer sites etc.). However, how do you do it?
Search Engine Optimization
Your focus should always be on getting organic traffic. Organic traffic means people are voluntarily visiting your website. Since they check your website out of genuine interest, they are likely to engage in your ads, thus you make money. SEO can be a very complicated task, however, you can start with basic things, for example
Keyword
Do some keyword research and use moderately search keywords, avoid highly competitive keywords. Use keywords, key phrase and long tail search terms on the title, content body, site description, content description tags, and categories.
Backlinks
The easiest ways to generate backlinks for your site is through blog commenting, forum profile links, forum signatures, question and answer sites, and article sites. Join a lot of sites on your niche and share your links. You should generate backlinks not only to your home page but also to the internal pages.
Social Signals
Social signals are also searched engine ranking factor. If a website has 4k shares on facebook it will always rank higher than a website with 0 shares for the given keyword.
Social Media Promotion
Social media can make your content go viral if you publish on the topic that people are looking to read. Analyze what kind of contents are popular on social media and focus on publishing on the topic. In order to gain traction on social media, you need a lot of fan following, however, if you do not have a fan following, you can do some of these campaigns
Influencer Marketing
Social media influencers are the people who have a large fan following. If you hire someone who owns a Facebook page with 50K followers, you can easily get a lot of traffic. Try to find an influencer on your niche on various social sites and hire them to promote your site.
Paid Promotion
Influencer marketing can cost you a lot of money, a cheaper alternative is paid advertising on social sites. For example, on Facebook, you can advertise your site or boost your post. You can reach almost 8K people by boosting your post for $1 on Facebook.
You can also sponsor your tweet to reach a lot of Twitter users. In order to maximize your promotional campaign, target your ad to the people interested in your niche.
