We’ve all heard of the common methods marketers use to drive traffic to their sites. There’s the good old advertising strategy with Google Ads or YouTube Ads and the more trendy method of using social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. While these are the more commonly known ways of reaching an audience, there are some more discrete traffic sources as well. Here are some you should consider trying.
1. Build an online community
One way to start getting very consistent traffic is to build your very own online community. This is done by setting up a forum where like-minded individuals can join and participate in discussing whatever topic you’ve built your forum around. It could be about fixing community problems or smiling at cute animals or discussing digital marketing challenges. The point is, find something you think will resonate and corral your potential customer base and use that as the focal point of your forum.
Once they become regular contributors, you can convert them with ease. Just make sure the discussion point of your community is related enough to your business that it actually attracts the right kind of people who will likely be interested in what you have to sell. For instance, if you’re in the resume writing service industry, a community built around offering resume help hits the target audience right on the mark.
2. Guest Blogging
This is a killer strategy because not only does it drive traffic to your site, it also helps with your SEO efforts, which means you’re killing two birds with one stone here. An important thing when applying this strategy though is to make sure you are targeting blogs that will give you an actual link to your site. Depending on what blogging platform you’re guest posting it, the editors will have their own rules of when to link out. Make sure the platform you guest post in allows for at least an author bio where you can link your site. If you’re merely allowed to mention your company, no one’s going to bother actually searching you up on Google to find your webpage. Here’s an example of one that a fellow coworker of mine wrote related to resume and CV writing.
3. Press Coverage
Instead of promoting yourself with guest blogging, get others to promote you instead. What about your company is unique? How has it changed the industry? Once you’ve discovered your company’s newsworthy story, you can ask for media inquiries on popular news sites and blogs. There’s usually an email address you can find on their website that’ll let you do this.
Another great perk to getting covered on the press is that it makes your business more reputable in the eyes of your potential customers. A neat thing to do is create a press page on your site that mentions all the publications you’ve been covered in. That way, visitors who see this will really know that your business is the real deal.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Instead of doing all the work yourself, let some people help you out! Affiliate marketing, when done right, is always a win-win situation. Your affiliates get their fair share of the purchase and you get yours. A bit of the negative side of affiliate marketing relates to its startup costs. The upfront fees to affiliate marketing can be very burdensome, especially if you’re just trying it out for starters to see if it’s something that can work for you. Not to mention it can be quite disingenuous to suddenly close your affiliate program and leave your affiliates high and dry.
Of course, with more risk comes more award as well. Affiliate marketing takes your business to a whole new level as opposed to something like guest blogging. Not only is the source of your traffic likely to be a high converting one (assuming your affiliates know what they’re doing!), but the amount of traffic that this can produce can be astronomical.
5. Email Marketing
As old and uncool as it may be, it’s still a very viable source of traffic. Email marketing is a powerful tool, and perhaps the biggest upside of it is that it’s really, really cheap. Traffic options like this is great cause the consequence of a failed email campaign is abysmal compared to other things like affiliate marketing. Keep one thing in mind though. Don’t annoy your email recipients with constant spam. No one likes that!
