All websites, with rare exceptions, are created in order to be visited by people. And the more there will be, the better. In a general sense, the flow of users to the pages of a web resource is traffic. Commercial projects convert traffic to sales, and information sites monetize it in other ways.

Your Retail Website Needs Traffic: Professional Tips How to Drive It Properly

Search engines are the most important source of high-quality traffic. To attract it, you need to optimize the site for the requirements of the SE. This is a difficult job, which requires significant time and financial costs. Search engine promotion, or SEO, is a far too multifaceted area of internet marketing.

Today, there are more than 200 million blogs on the Internet, but 71% of them receive less than 5,000 visitors per month. Getting traffic is one of the biggest problems if you are blogging or have your own online business. In addition, if you have a very young business, then most likely there is not so much free money for advertising. This means that the best option is to receive free traffic, which is not so simple.

Increase traffic with contextual advertising

The Google Ads service provides website owners with a powerful tool to drive traffic. Contextual advertising is shown, taking into account the interests, requests, or search activity of users. Payment is per click, which means you pay for real traffic, not just impressions. Targeting settings allow you to show ads based on geolocation, time of day, and many other factors.

There is a significant point in using contextual advertising to attract traffic – this is its cost. The cost per click, especially in popular and commercial subjects, is quite high. Therefore, this tool is not suitable for information projects or commercial sites with low profits from a single sale.

Guest blog on popular sites

When you don’t have any traffic at all, it can lead to despair, and it will be psychologically difficult to post content further because nobody sees and reads it.

One of the best ways to avoid this is to publish guest posts on popular blogs that are in your niche. These sites already have an established audience, so you don’t need to worry about your content being unnoticed and useless. You can also hire professionals who can promote your website easily.

Let’s take a brief look at the critical steps that you need to consider before you start publishing on a guest blog because you don’t want to write a site for an inactive website that no one else visits.

• Step 1. Evaluate sites that have the same target audience as yours and are popular in your niche (see how many subscribers they have in groups on social networks, how many stocks, and how many comments on each post).
• Step 2. Select the part of the text that is most suitable. You want your work to appeal to the target audience of the blog, so create something epic, catchy that people definitely want to read.
• Step 3. Add a short biography or signature with a link to your site. It is with its help that you will attract traffic to your site, so make sure that your biography or author is convincing enough so that people want to go to the site and get acquainted with it in more detail.

Expert Reviews

Attracting influential people to your posts on the site is a great way to attract more attention to the site. But influential people are influential for some reason, and they won’t just share your post because you asked him to.

Instead, you can include a quote from one of their sites, a link to their blog, or refer to a piece of information that may be included in the article. After you have added a piece of expert information, you can contact him and ask him to share the post in which he was mentioned (this can often be seen, because we like to share what we contributed or were part of – it’s just human nature).

Reposted by opinion leaders

Earlier, we wrote about the inclusion of information of authoritative people in expert reviews. Still, this point reveals the concept a little deeper.

Industry leaders tend to support their followers and are respected in thematic communities. This means that by default, you get some respect and an audience if they share your post or become an active visitor to your site. You might think: “Why should this respected and cool person visit my blog?” But be surprised to find out how many of them agree to answer some of your questions – after all, this is also an advertisement for them.

Ask thoughtful questions and encourage a famous person from a niche to share your material when it is published. This will help to achieve maximum results.

Comments on sites

We bet that there are several sites in your niche that you regularly visit. They may be some of the best blogs in your niche, and you like their content, or you just follow what they post.

Despite this, you spend a few minutes there every week, so why not spend a little more time and drive traffic? Most popular blogs in the niche have an active comment section, which is filled with useful posts and links to other sites. You can take part in this, and here is how you can do it best:

• Define 4-7 key authoritative blogs in your niche and set up notifications for them, for example, by mail, so that you receive a notification every time a new article or entry is posted;
• As soon as a new publication is made, read its contents (speed is very important here because you need to be one of the first to comment);
• Leave a long comment regarding one or two key points of the publication (comments like “excellent post” are strictly prohibited).
• Add a link to your site or a specific thematic post in the comment or specify as your name.

Email Marketing

This tool continues to work, but today you need to forget about spam completely. Only a high-quality lead magnet, that is, a bonus offer, can attract traffic. You can interest a person with discounts, unique content with limited access, information about interesting events, etc.

Blind newsletters do not work well, so it’s best to focus on building your voluntary subscriber base. In this case, Email marketing will not bring new users to the site. Still, it will effectively return a loyal target audience.

Increase traffic with YouTube

YouTube video hosting can also be called a full-fledged social network, and one of the most popular in the world. The best way is to create and maintain your channel. But this option is not suitable for everyone since the regular generation of high-quality video materials is a complex and quite expensive work requiring creativity. But if a business has the opportunity and desire to lead its own channel, then it must be taken advantage of.

Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at LinksManagement and an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs. She shares her insights through blogging. Follow her on Medium.