5 Fresh Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
The first thing you may want to know when moving your business online is how to drive traffic to your website. Obviously, without visitors, your marketing efforts will mean nothing.
In this article, we want to present some unusual (and, perhaps, more sophisticated) ideas that will help you get a constant flow of visitors interested in your product. What’s more, the channels below are either free or pretty cheap, in contrast to conventional website advertising.
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1. Drive traffic from messengers
According to Statista, over half of mobile users – both Android and iOS users – use messaging apps on a monthly basis. That’s 2.5 billion users.
Nowadays, messengers are much more than a channel of communication. They’re transforming into full-fledged platforms for interaction with brands. You wouldn’t like to lose such an opportunity for promotion!
Given that messengers are always at hand, it is one of the most effective ways to share current news and updates with your audience.
According to Flurry Analytics Blog, messenger apps are used 4.7 times more often than any other apps.
Thus, channels in messenger apps will supplement your SMM activities and drive traffic to your website.
Don’t neglect bots. These built-in applets in messengers automatically respond to general users’ queries, send greeting messages, and ask users to complete simple actions. The sphere of application is very broad: they can send updates about sales and special offers, new products, or anything else you can think of.
According to Neil Patel, messenger bot campaigns provide an astounding 88% open rate. People open such a message just to get rid of a distracting ‘unread’ badge on the app icon.
How to choose the right messenger for promotion?
The first thing you should consider is the audience it covers. Here are the current statistics showing the number of monthly active users in the most popular messenger apps:
Source: Most popular messaging apps 2017 – Statista
However, messenger apps aren’t equally effective for marketing purposes. In this context, Facebook Messenger definitely takes the lead. A well-organized marketing campaign there can create an entire sales funnel. Imagine bringing your visitors to the purchase in a single app without spending a fortune on it!
Important: Messengers are only appropriate for soft sales strategy, where you don’t push visitors to buy (unless it is a specifically designed bot for that purpose). Instead, offer them something valuable for free, nurture and communicate with them. This will gradually bring them to purchase.
Despite having a smaller audience, Viber and Telegram also offer a lot of marketing features. Meanwhile, WhatsApp, the most popular messenger app today, falls behind when it comes to promotion.
2. Repurpose content
When you feel that your archives are swarming with great content, consider reusing the most successful items in different formats.
Published a great article that has drawn a lot of traffic? Great, but it’s unreasonable to leave it there. Turn it into a video, an ebook or infographic. Try various formats to see what works best for you.
For example, organize a lead-generating webinar presenting main ideas in a convenient way. Or rewrite and expand a great piece of content and republish it on other platforms to drive extra traffic and reach new audiences.
How to select content for repurposing?
When selecting content for repurposing, mind that it should have the utmost quality and relevance. Also, consider topics where you have something to add. There’s no point in republishing the same old story without any changes.
There’s no denying that new and original content is the king. However, if you’re short of time and resources, repurposing might be a way out. To prove this point of view, see how Hubspot managed to distribute the same piece of content in 5 different formats and keep driving new traffic all the time.
As you can see, the benefits of repurposing cannot be underestimated. You can build up trust with your visitors, find new audiences, emphasize the message, and improve your SEO. The latter is especially relevant in case you repurpose content to other sources with backlinks to your site.
3. Approach influencers
Jean Luke Godard once said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
Your visitors trust third-party recommendations more than your brand’s self-promotion. An influencer is a reputable and trustworthy person that has a large number of followers and can act as an intermediary between your company and consumers.
What makes influencer marketing so appealing?
Influencers have already gained the loyalty of their audience. Thus, they can greatly enhance your presence in external resources as well as drive traffic to your website. However, it’s important to find the right influencer whose followers belong to your target audience.
The best thing about influencers is that they’re interested in innovations and new products that they can review. That’s why if you reach out to the right people, they might well promote your brand for free. Fish for influencers on popular platforms (e.g. Product Hunt, Medium, Blogger, or YouTube) by running over the most viewed profiles.
Another option is to allow guest posting on your website or ask opinion leaders to contribute. Not only will they deliver a quality piece of content, but they will also share it with their audience, thereby giving your website additional exposure.
4. Cross-promote with other companies
Campaign Monitor proves that email marketing is the most effective marketing channel, with 4400% ROI and $44 for every $1 spent.
Thus, building a substantive email list is the first thing you should work on. However, when you do that, you’ll face another issue – driving traffic from the same people over and over again.
To go beyond that, try to find a company with a similar target audience and cross-promote your content. This way, you’ll be able to mention each other in blog posts, email newsletters and articles, increasing brand awareness and driving more visitors to your websites. If you find a perfect “match”, it will definitely pay off.
At least, you’ll both drive more high-quality traffic to your website and enhance your SEO.
Before starting the collaboration, make sure that your potential partner:
- Has an active email list that is comparable to yours in the number of subscribers, open rate, click-through-rate, and so on
- Has a relevant target audience that will show interest in your product
- Doesn’t and won’t compete with you in any way
To be particularly effective, find out when your readers usually check their email to deliver real value to them in proper time. You’ll achieve even better results if your partner and you have complementary products that could be cross-sold to the same consumers.
5. Create great content for traffic-rich platforms
Driving traffic from such websites may seem a chore at first, but it’s definitely worth the candle. These platforms are popular among Internet-savvy people who are always open to something new. Moreover, thanks to the number of topics and communities there, you’ll be able to find the exact audience to reach.
Estimated traffic – 1,7 billion visits per month (SimilarWeb)
Reddit is great because it has groups (so-called subreddits) for literally any audience you can imagine. Having found the one for your target audience, you can enjoy a lot of benefits.
Despite its simple interface and tons of content available, direct promotion in Reddit is not welcome and sometimes even prohibited. So if you come only with that purpose in mind, chances are you’ll be banned. Yet, there’s a way out.
Your primary task is to share as much valuable information as possible, without mentioning the product to gain high karma.
Karma is a ranking you get from upvotes for your posts and comments.
So before posting anything promotional, read the subreddit’s guidelines and double-check your karma. Read this guide for starters to get maximum benefits from Reddit.
Quora
Estimated traffic – 516 million visits per month (SimilarWeb)
Quora is a question-and-answer platform for sharing knowledge. Publication guidelines there are not as strict as in Reddit but the number of visitors is also considerably smaller.
What makes it cool? First of all, you can drive traffic if you include links to your site in your posts and answers. Secondly, by sharing insightful content, you can create an expert image and get thousands of followers. Finally, you can find ideas for your own blog posts by looking through the most popular questions there. Here’s a useful guide that will help you get the most of Quora.
Medium
Estimated traffic – 172 million per month (SimilarWeb)
Medium is a great platform for blogging, at the heart of which lies quality content. Its benefits for business are huge. Medium doesn’t require you to post on a regular basis. What’s more, you don’t need to have a lot of followers to have your posts read. Just contribute a quality piece of content and it might get viral.
Nevertheless, you shouldn’t rest on laurels after you’ve published something. If you really want to get the most of promotion on Medium, there are a number of tips to follow. This material will help you to get started.
Other platforms that can drive traffic to your website
- Product Hunt is a platform for the promotion of new technological products
- Beta List provides overviews of new startups
- Hacker News is similar to Reddit but with a focus on tech content and news
- Digg is a handy platform for native advertising of different products
- StumbleUpon provides personalized content based on visitors’ interests
Wrap up
Our list of channels that drive traffic to your website is far from being full. However, thanks to their cost-efficiency and good performance, these ideas will suit both a large company and an aspiring startup. All the mentioned channels are content-based, meaning that quality information and real value should always come first. So hire a talented content writer to utilize all the benefits of content promotion.
But before driving traffic to your website, make sure that it’s well-designed and won’t make your visitors bounce as soon as they land on it.
