Need Traffic? 40 Proven & Effective Ways To Increase Website Traffic
In today’s modern world, everybody wants traffic. Well, in fact, everyone needs traffic in order to grow their website or blog and grow their identity. Traffic, in some cases, has become a measure of success in some instances. So if you have a website, how can you raise traffic? Do you have average website traffic? Is there anything that you could to increase traffic and improve it on ongoing basis? Well, you sure can. In this article, I am going to share Proven & Effective ways to build website traffic and/or increase blog traffic.
Need Traffic? 40 Proven & Effective Ways To Increase Website Traffic
Here’s what to do If you need traffic and/or want to increase website traffic
If you want to increase traffic to your site for free, the following are the things that you need to consider.
1. Write Unique, Great, Relevant, Quality Content
I could never over emphasize the importance of Unique and Great quality content. For some of you, it might seem like you have heard this before, but for the ones who never did, know that this is a true fact. So if you are really serious and would really want to know how to increase traffic to website, there, you know it now. Work on your website/blog and add content that can help your visitors and make sure that the content that you write is relevant for what you want your article to be found for. So if you really need traffic, Unique, Great, Relevant, Quality Content is a great way to increase traffic from search engines.
2. Write Catchy Headlines
This is one another area that generally gets overlooked. You can easily increase site traffic if you pay little more attention to article Headlines. If you are writing articles for a coding related article, a catchy title may not be as required. But if the article is about a product or an offer that users can immediately use/buy, you definitely want to write a catchy headline. This is a really easy way to improve traffic to website, so you can start working on it right away.
Let me give you a simple example on how to make a headline more interesting and catchy. For example, say you are offering tips to save on semester fees 20 year olds who are in college and you want them to read your article. How would you go about that? Try something on the lines of “Are you 20? Here’s how you can save $300 on your semester fees!”
Think about the above title for a second. It’s just going to grab the attention of 20 years olds the very second they glance at it. And you are offering them a benefit in the very next following sentences. It’s more likely that they will be interested in such a saving and you are more likely to get more of 20 year olds to visit your website. So that’s one great way of raising your website traffic.
3. Post As Frequently As Possible
As the title suggests, post as frequently as possible to increase web traffic. At the same time, make sure that you don’t ruin the quality of your articles just for the sake of posting. If you are sure you can post quality articles every day, by all means go ahead. If you are really sure that you can handle posting 3 articles every day without sacrificing quality of the content, then try that. And once you get a hang of it, stick to it. Don’t make a post now and make your next post a month after. That’s inconsistency and it will not help you increase traffic to your website.
4. Optimize Your Content For Target Audience
This is one key are that generally most of us tend to forget and if you need traffic, then pay attention to this. If you offering something for children, make sure that you are adding something to your content that will make it more relevant and appealing to them. If you are writing articles for adults, then make sure that you optimize it for their benefit. Do this and you will feel the web traffic increase eventually.
5. Make A Schedule For Generating Traffic And Work On Them
Try to make a schedule or a time-table for generating traffic. That could include but not limited to article posting days, posting duration, target audience, posting frequency, etc. You may want to distribute the things that you need to do, such as write 3 articles before noon. Post those articles after lunch and promote them in evening.
Try something that is more likely to fit your timings. Don’t just try to remember it. Note it down on a piece of paper or a Word document and refer to it, when you are lost. Chances are high that you will get back on track, fast! Following the schedule can help you get targeted free traffic to website.
6. Make Your Website An Encyclopedia Of Information In Your Nice
If you need traffic & if you can really do this, you will be formidable in your niche. If all you post is nothing but quality and helpful articles to your visitors and it helps them, then you can’t be replaced. If you post tons of articles & each of those articles help your visitors in one way or the another, chances are really bright that you will stay in top list of search results. This is one more way you can use to get website traffic for free.
7. Use Social Media
With the introduction of the Social Media sharing such as Facebook Like, Twitter Tweets, Google Plus One, Pinterest, etc. you can expect nothing but more traffic if your content is well woven and helpful to others. Just make sure that you implement the social sharing tabs/icons and make sure that they are visible. Don’t try to bury them somewhere where your visitors are bound to overlook them. Some good choices of placements are in the Header, just beneath the Article Title, After the content and in the Sidebar. Additionally, placing social sharing icons in the footer of the website can also help increase traffic to your website.
Website traffic visitors need not be from search engines. They can also come to you through various other sources. For example, try to have meaningful conversations over social sharing websites like Twitter. Try not to get too personal with conversations. People would be least bothered about it unless you are a celebrity. So try to converse on a topic that even an unknown user can make use of. Be creative, be valuable! This is one of the best ways to increase traffic!
8. Use SEO Tools
If you really want to know how to increase web site traffic, then consider using SEO Tools. If you think that you don’t need SEO tools to drive more traffic to your website, then you are wrong! I need them, you need them, we all need them. We might be thinking that whatever we are writing is bound to attract visitors but once you start using the SEO tools, you might be actually surprised to see your findings.
If you are trying to increase traffic to your WordPress blog, I suggest you use WordPress SEO by Yoast. That’s the one and only tool I use to increase traffic to my blog. You will definitely see improvements once you start using it. This is one excellent way to increase traffic to web site.
9. Request The Big Guys To Share Their Views
Know of any established people in your niche? Invite them to review your blog and ask them to leave their comments. Did you recently publish an article that either agrees with them or disagrees with them? Well, now you have one more reason to invite them so that they can share their voice on the subject. Communicating with reputed people and sharing your thoughts & opinions with them and letting your users participate is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your website.
People would love to hear what the reputed guy has to say and what your response would be and vice versa. This kind of makes things really exciting and the subject of the conversation is more likely to be shared and linked back to. This can drive huge amounts of traffic and create additional back links, both for you and for the expert. So this is one another excellent way to increase your website traffic.
10. Enable Comments
Driving website traffic in a targeted and controlled way can have a great impact. And one of the key resources to drive traffic to website, especially when it already exists on your website, is the comment section.
I have personally seen some blogs where there is no comment section at all. This means that either the website owner is sure that this articles won’t generate comments or is not inclined towards participating in conversations. Comments are great way for users to leave their feedback and/or to ask any related questions. It is your chance to reply back to them and build your own user base. So if you haven’t enabled comments on your blog previously, do it now!
11. Speak Your Voice Frankly
This is one more thing related to comments. When someone says something, you don’t have to BLINDLY agree with them. Neither do you have to BLINDLY disagree with them. Comments are a means of providing your thoughts, your feedback on the issue. Don’t try to agree with someone just to gain their favor or don’t disagree with someone with others to gain favors from others.
Just be genuine and be yourself. Remember, they are both your visitors. Trying to take the wrong sides for wrong reasons may not seem wrong to you, but there are others who are reading your conversations and they will understand what’s going on. So don’t think you are alone. Whatever you say, do it frankly. This is one great way to get traffic to your website.
12. Stay In Touch With Your Commentators
When someone leaves a comment on it, try to reply to it as soon as you get a chance. Give this a top priority if the comment is more of a question. If it’s a casual comment or a praise from a visitor it may not need an immediate response, but there could be other users commenting who are stuck with some issue or a problem. They really need your time, so make sure you respond to questions first and to compliments later. This is another excellent way to get traffic for your website.
13. Visit Other’s Websites And Comment
Once you are done commenting on your website, take some time off to visit your commentators’ websites and comment on what you think about their articles. Comment on the usefulness of their articles and give them suggestions, advice on what you think will help them build their article in a better way. That will not only improve your relationship with your commentator but it will also give you more visibility on their website. New readers to their website, will see your comments and will be more likely to visit your website if your comments are constructive.
Constructive criticism is a part of the comments, so don’t leave it behind. At the same time, don’t overdo it as you might end up hurting others unnecessarily. Try to find the balance between constructive criticism and offensiveness and try to stay within their limits. You learn this by experience and it could take you some time to get used to it. But once you get the hang of it, there’s nothing else like it. This will help in increasing website traffic.
14. Gossip
People like to Gossip! Who doesn’t? Well, there might be few among us who are reserved. But except for them, there are lots of people who really like gossips. So if your website is about celebrities and their lifestyles, then a gossip will definitely increase your website traffic. Celebrities are always a hot topic for gossip, so go ahead & start it today, if you really run a website on topics involving celebrities. This will bring more traffic to website.
15. Publish Contests
Contests add life to an article. If you are starting a contest, make sure that you also mention the benefits of participating in the contest. There is no point if you are not disclosing the outcomes of such contests. Give people a good reason to participate in the contents and make them feel wanted. Just make them understand that their voice matters and you are willing to compensate them for such participation and you are bound to increase your website traffic.
16. Give Credit To Others
If you need traffic, this is one important area that you must never leave behind. Remember to give proper credit and/or add references to other websites or people if you are showing an excerpt from their website/speech. Otherwise it counts to Plagiarism. Always give proper credit back to the original source. This will increase your credibility. This will add up to a positive score and will help in increasing website traffic.
17. Consider Local Marketing Options
One of the great ways to build website traffic is to make use of local marketing options. If you don’t mind spending little amount of money, consider advertising about your website locally. This could include your website Ad in a Sunday newspaper, or local radio station or a TV channel. All these methods can get expensive as per the choice you make but also gets you instant traffic!
18. Website Advertising
Advertising = Undeniable source of traffic! People are bound to visit your website as it does not cost them anything to do so. So consider advertising online, in other websites, forums, related niche websites. Try to advertise on YouTube. YouTube is the 2nd most popular website on the planet. So this will also give you instant traffic and will help build website traffic very quickly.
19. Website Promotion
You can increase traffic for your blog or for website by considering the following website promotion methods:
1. Local Promotion
2. Promote on YouTube
3. Webinars
4. Podcasting
Promote your website. Include your website URL in business cards, on a sticker at the back your car, on your window sill, etc. If you have a good rapport with your car mechanic, take his permission and leave your business cards/flyers with him. Do this with any other people that you usually receive service from. Usually people are willing to accept such offers because of two reasons. First, you are their customer and you pay them for their services. Second, it doesn’t cost them anything to promote you/your business. So if you have few extra business cards or flyers to spare, then you have good chances of increasing traffic to your website.
Second good way to increase your website traffic is to make videos on different topics and post them on websites like YouTube and other such video sharing websites. Try to keep the videos short and make sure that viewers will actually find use for it. Or there are high chances that the video might be disliked and that can kill traffic. So you don’t want that to happen. The length of the video is not that important, but try to make it as short as possible. The quality of your message in the video is of utmost important. So try to focus on that.
You can increase traffic on your website by conducting Webinars. That’s a great way to connect with your audience directly. Don’t drag the webinar unnecessarily. Keep it short, yet make sure you get enough time to convey the helpful information.
Podcasting is one another way to increase traffic for website.
20. Guest Blogging
You can easily get traffic to blog by considering Guest Blogging. Offer to blog on other websites as a guest blogger. By doing this, you will have a chance to show off your expertise in your niche and you will also get more exposure to your website as guest bloggers are often allowed to leave their website/blog URL in their post. So this improves visibility to your brand, gets you acquainted with new visitors and gives you back links. And as you may have known by now, quality back links are a great way to build additional website traffic.
Also make sure you allow others to guest blog on your website. When you take, make sure you give it back! This will help you get more visitors and will help drive traffic to your website.
21. Buy Website Traffic
This is a good instant way to increase traffic to your website. Although it cannot be guaranteed that the traffic generated out of this method will stick with you for a long time, it is a very good way of increasing traffic instantly as it helps you get more traffic to website within a very short period of time. Expect few interested visitors to stick around and even become permanent visitors/users of your website. This method involves Website Advertising and Website Promotion, so it could cost you money depending upon the method you choose.
22. Explore Different Niches
To get more traffic to website, don’t just stick with a specific niche. Try to explore the neighboring niche & try to actively take part in the conversations. Don’t do it just for the sake of building traffic to your website. Rather, do it because you are interested in that topic. If you are uninterested in a specific topic or a specific niche, then don’t even think of exploring it. Or you will simply end up wasting a lot of time.
23. Try Giveaways and Freebies
Who doesn’t like Freebies? I do! ( Hehheheh.. 🙂 ) You can attract a lot of traffic if you are well known for giveaways and freebies. Especially if you are running a blog about gaming, then you could give away something like a Mouse or a Keyboard etc. for the most hot submission, the most creative & useful comments, etc. Try to get creative with it. Just know that it might need you to spend money for giveaways, but hey, it’s worth it and it’s for a good cause ( and that is to increase your website traffic ).
24. Market Your Posts
You have enabled social sharing on your website? Great! Let visitors do the sharing for you. But what about yourself? If you have some free time on your hands, then consider marketing your posts yourself. That way, you will learn about online marketing and also save money. So add this to the list to get traffic to your website.
25. Create Mashup Of Top Articles
If you have articles that are a subject of Hot Topic, then take few articles and create a meaningful mashup of them. Don’t try to do this with unrelated topics or that will end up in total disaster. And you really don’t want this to happen if you want to increase traffic to your website.
26. Optimize Posts With Low Traffic
Low Traffic to an article can basically mean three things. First, boring article. Second, useless article. Third, article that is not at all optimized for good traffic. I hope it’s not the second case because whatever you want to write about, I believe you would be doing it from the perspective of making it profitable for your visitor, at least after reading my articles. So if your article is boring, you can spice it up. Consider adding images, illustrations to spice up the visual effect. You may have great content but if your visitors are bored, that won’t cut it!
As far as the third option is concerned, it’s invaluable to have SEO optimized content. Use your main keywords in the Title, Headings and the article body. Repeat the keyword few times (4-5) in article body. That should give the search bots enough reason to at least “find” your article for the chosen keywords, the next time. This will drive traffic to website very well, once you have optimized it correctly & the optimized version gets indexed in the search engines.
27. Get Backlinks From High PR Websites
Back links are great way to get traffic. So if you are trying to get backlinks, then don’t waste time trying to multiple back links from hundreds of websites with low Page Rank (PR). Instead a couple of links from websites with high PR can really help boost traffic to your website.
28. Email Marketing
If you need traffic, consider email marketing to raise website traffic. Include signature and links to your website/blog in all emails that you send out. That’s easy way to promote your website and drive more traffic to it.
29. Viral Marketing
Traffic to your site can be increased by making use of Viral Marketing. “What is Viral Marketing?”, you may ask. Viral marketing is marketing in the form of E-books, Video clips, mini Flash games, images, text messages, email messages, or web pages. This involves a lot of social media. So if your knowledge is rusty on this one, I suggest you do some searches and get to know how this works and this can benefit your website a lot.
30. Provide RSS Feed For Your Blog
This may sound strange, but it’s true! When you provide RSS feed to your blog/website, you are making things easy for your visitors to become regular visitors. Whenever you publish an article, the article, along with its URL is published and delivered to the subscribers via the feeds. You can read more about RSS Feeds here. In other words, you are just making sure that you are driving traffic to your website.
So if you make it convenient for users, you are giving them one more reason to prefer your blog and stay in touch with it. And they can simply click on the article URL within the feed to visit your blog, whenever they want. This is a great way to keep your existing traffic and can lead to increase in your reader base and contribute to increase website traffic.
31. Promote Top Content And Link To Less Popular Content
Traffic for your site can vary largely depending upon your content and its popularity. If you have Top Content that you know, receives lots of hits and lots of traffic, then include a link to the less popular content towards the bottom of this article. That way, you will improve the chances that your less popular content will be visited by more users. This can do wonders if your less popular article is related to the Popular article.
32. Write Tutorials
Getting website traffic is easy when you consider writing tutorials. There are many people out there who are starting out fresh in your niche and need help getting started. So if you are running a Web Design based blog or you see a scope for offering help in the form of tutorials, do it. That will help by increasing your website traffic, if your visitors find your tutorials helpful.
33. Offer Voluntary Help
You can bring more traffic to website by offering personal help. If anyone needs help, especially your visitors, try to help them voluntarily. This could include checking their website and commenting on it, or solving any problem they might have got stuck with, etc. Such kind of help usually gets rewarded in the long run.
34. Publish XML Sitemap
The less widely known, yet an important factor for increasing traffic to your website. Yes, a XML sitemap contains a list of all the URLs of your website. When you submit such a sitemap to the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. it helps the search bots crawl your website faster reliably and index your website even better. The much content gets indexed from your website, the more are the chances that someone searching for information will “find” your website via these searches.
If you are using WordPress blog, then you can use plugins like Google XML Sitemap, WordPress SEO by Yoast to generate XML sitemaps and submit to search engines automatically. If you would rather submit to the search engines manually, then you can do it by visiting Google Webmaster tools (for submitting in Google). This will help you get site traffic to your blog/website.
35. Schedule Your Posts
You can easily gain additional website traffic by choosing to split your posts and scheduling to publish them on a regular basis in the future, instead of posting them all on the same day. So if you have written multiple articles on the same day and you are unsure if you would be able to post any articles in the following days, then instead of posting articles on the same day, schedule your posts to be published on different days.
In WordPress blog, there is an option to schedule publishing of posts, instead of posting them on the same day. Try to see if your website or blog has such a feature. If it does, then use it. It’s better to post 7 articles in a week (1 article per day) instead of 7 articles on the same day, if you wish to increase traffic.
36. Avoid Illegal/Bad Ways Of Promotions
To get more website traffic, avoid bad ways of promotions. Some of them include promoting your website in cheap sites or website that sell drugs, pills, etc. even if you are paying for it. Search engines, especially Google sees it as way of spamming, so you want to keep away from such procedures if you want to drive more traffic to your website.
37. Collect Ideas
If you need traffic, ask people and collect ideas. Ask them for their input on something that you don’t know about. Collect such ideas, try to work on them and implement them to make it better for yourself. This will eventually help you increase traffic to website.
38. Offer Email Subscription
You can get more traffic by offering email subscription. This will help your users to stay in touch with the most updated & latest information on your website. This will get you additional website traffic.
39. Write List Posts
If your niche allows it, then try to write list posts. The headlines for List posts are on the lines of “10 Tips that can… “, “20 Ways to …. and to …. “. People generally like to read such lists. So try to see if you can write articles in the form of list posts and convey the proper meaning. This will help to boost website traffic.
40. Learn From Competitors
Competitors! They are your best teachers! Maybe you got busy with something on your end, but your competitors could be working on something else. Try paying them occasional visits and if you find something interesting, learn something from them. Note, I didn’t say “copy something from them”. I said “learn”.
So try to learn a lesson from them. Maybe they worked on a new design that is more appealing or maybe they changed their writing style that is evoking more interest and comments from readers, etc. All of these things could give you at least some overall idea on what you could do to improve your own website. Take some time to work on such ideas & implement them. Such implementations will really add to your website’s value and can increase website traffic.
Conclusion:
I implemented the above ways in my blog and I noticed an increase of 700 visitors/day, on an average. Some days it is more than an excess of 850 visitors/day and other days, it’s something like hike of 550 visitors/day. But I rounded it off to the lowest possible number to give you a fair idea of how it can help you, should you put these website traffic tips into effect, if you need traffic for your website/blog.
It took me about two months to achieve this result. Of course, these stats are not mind blowing if you compare them to the already established blogs, but think about it from the point of view of a blog that is just 1 year old. And an increase of hundreds of visitors, EVERYDAY, in just two months is a decent accomplishment, in my view. And remember, it’s not going to stop here. It’s ever increasing.
That said, I want each and every one of you guys to try out the different tips of increasing website traffic discussed above and let me know how it goes. Ya’ll have my best wishes. I want each of you guys to succeed. C’mon guys you know you can do it! Hit me with some good news each time you comment!
Your Turn!
What do you think of my achievements? Do you feel it inspiring? What do you think about these website traffic tips I have mentioned? Did you find any of them useful? Please feel free to share your thoughts on tips to increase website traffic in your comments below.