‘Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.’
—Helen Keller, author and political activist
ONE OF THE questions I get asked most by clients is, ‘How do I get more traffic to my website?’ If you are wondering the same thing, I’m going to answer that question for you today. But before I do, I want you to consider something: are you ready for traffic?
Sometimes people breathlessly ask me how to get lots of visitors to their website, but when I look at their site my first reaction is, ‘You don’t want any more people to see this thing!’ That’s because their website is a half-finished mess with mistakes and missing content. Or it isn’t clear what it is they’re promoting or what they want visitors to do. If I sent them a million fresh visitors they’d have nothing but a million confused people quickly leaving their site.
So before you worry about traffic-building strategies, make sure you have two things in place. Firstly, a decent-looking website. It doesn’t matter if it’s just one page, it just needs to look professional (which you can often achieve with a free or cheap website builder as we saw on Day 17).
Secondly, you need an action for people to take when they come to your site. What is it you want them to do? That should be either:
You also need to know that this action ‘converts’ – i.e. when people land on a page describing why they should buy your product/service or why they should follow you, some of them actually do. In the early days you only need enough traffic to prove people like what you do enough to follow you or buy from you. And you can usually get that from your existing network of friends and colleagues. Once you’ve proven people are engaging you can look at strategies to bring more people to you.
You can grow traffic organically by blogging regularly, sharing posts on social media and generally engaging with your market and playing your project out in public. However, the fastest way to get a big boost in traffic is to go where your buyers are. Answer the following three questions to put this hack to work for you:
So, for example, you might …
Ensure you provide real value to both your partner and their audience and you could switch on a massive stream of traffic, email subscribers and even sales very quickly.
Open your mind: could your competitor be your best collaborator?
Sometimes, though, you will need to open your mind about who is a competitor and who is a collaborator, as I did at the beginning of my business. I wrote for free for careers sites that needed content and included a link to my careers toolkit on my own site. I also assisted at careers workshops and handed round a sign-up sheet on a clipboard at the end of the workshop. This gave me my first 2,000 people following me on email and at the same time gave me valuable experience writing and working on my subject of expertise. I could have considered these sites to be competitors but by working with them as collaborators everybody benefited – the websites got their blog content, I got traffic and subscribers and the readers got helpful advice.
Getting national press, or even coverage on radio and TV can really put your project or business on the map.
To win press, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got a good STORY, as we saw on Day 23, and that you’ve applied the ten keys to make it remarkable that we learned yesterday. You need a story that is clear, specific and a fresh, strong, or very personal, take on something.
The press additionally want to know three things before they will feature you:
If you can come up with a remarkable and fresh take on something you could see multiple press stories that bring you a flood of new enquiries and business. That’s what Jody Day managed to do in fewer than 30 days.
How Jody Day launched a global movement in 30 days
JODY DAY WAS a freelance PR and marketing consultant when she joined The Screw Work 30-day Challenge. She had only a germ of an idea: to do something to help women who were childless not through choice. Many childless women (who didn’t choose to be) report feeling undervalued by society, which is particularly painful if they are also having feelings of grief at not having had children. As a childless woman herself, Jody felt strongly about this and as a trainee psychotherapist she was keen to do something to help others. She coined the term Gateway Women – because a gateway is a threshold that can either be a block or an opening to something new.
Jody’s goal within the 30 days was to set up the website, write her first blog post and find somewhere she could give a talk. She got her Gateway Women website set up and wrote her first blog. She then went out to a women’s business networking event to ask if she could speak there. While at the event she met a woman who was also a blogger, who then referenced Jody’s post on her blog the next day. This brought women from all over the world to read Jody’s blog post. They started leaving comments like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not the only one that feels like this!’
In the spring of 2011 Jody gave her first talk to eight people. One of them was a journalist and interviewed her for The Guardian newspaper. The article was entitled, ‘I may not be a parent but I’m still a person’.
This generated lots of buzz and lots of traffic and women started asking Jody, ‘Can you help us?’ so she thought about the easiest way of testing a course out. She found a cheap venue near her and met with five women on Saturday mornings for ten weeks. The experience was a powerful one for the participants. Jody turned the syllabus she’d developed over the ten weeks into a weekend workshop and then into a self-published book that was crowdfunded by other Gateway Women.
Now Jody runs an online community for Gateway Women with 700 members around the world. She also runs weekend workshops and sees clients one to one in person and over Skype. She revised and updated her ideas when she got a book deal from a major publisher for Living the Life Unexpected: 12 Weeks to Your Plan B for a Meaningful and Fulfilling Future Without Children. The new book hit the number one slot in the infertility category on Amazon.
Gateway Women now has a global reach of 2 million across the website, mailing lists, Facebook ‘Likes’, Google Plus, Twitter followers and meet-up groups in the UK and Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere.
Jody has been invited to speak at many prestigious events and has been selected by the BBC as one of a hundred women to represent feminism. More importantly, she has been able to make a real difference in the lives of women all over the world.
Learn more about Jody Day and Gateway Women at www.gateway-women.com.
You can, of course, simply pay for web traffic. Two of the most popular ways to do this is to pay for adverts on Facebook or Google which only charge you when someone clicks on them. Facebook in particular provides lots of different options to choose the people you want to see your ads. You can advertise only to people who have ‘Liked’ certain pages or who fit a certain demographic.
However, it’s best not to pay for traffic to your site until you know you will get the money back in sales. That means that the amount you make on sales exceeds the amount you spend on advertising. Once you get to the point where every $10 spent on advertising makes you $20 in sales profit, you can spend as much money as you can on advertising. It’s kind of like a slot machine that gives you $20 for every $10 – assuming there is no limit to how many sales you can cope with.
If it’s too early to tell yet, you can spend small amounts on adverts to bring just enough traffic to test whether people will buy.
Getting adverts right is a skill. If you have a feel for marketing and you’re not technophobic, it’s a useful skill to learn. Otherwise, hire someone who is an expert from a site like upwork.com.
‘How do I get on the front page of Google?’ When you first create your website you will probably find you won’t even register on a Google search. In order to get noticed, you need to get other people to link to you. Search Engine Optimisation is the science of getting featured in search results. It includes making sure your website includes words that people are likely to search for in Google, writing regular good quality content and getting others to link to you in order to be seen as an important website by Google’s search algorithm. SEO can be very effective but there isn’t much point going beyond the basics until you’re getting a really good response from people who visit your site.