Before you drive traffic to your website, you must provide good value to your visitors. Your audiences visit your website for a reason, and you'll have to solve their purpose by adding valuable contents they're searching for.
Website owners are a part of a group who aim to make money through users visiting their website to generate traffic. Typically, their revenue is an amalgamation of different services provided by the website or through the use of the services provided by another website. That being the case, owners as well as prospective businesses are always looking at how exactly they can increase their web traffic to maximize their earnings.
Advertising your website is without a doubt the most obvious way to gather and increase your web traffic. One could look into paid search, social media advertisement, and display advertisement as their both proper ways to garner more users to their website when done correctly. In part, you’ll need to look into tailoring your paid strategies to the specifics of your goals as well. That is, if you simply want to increase your traffic with more customers or convert users from one of your competitors, you’ll have to consider each avenue and what type of advertisement will cater to them. It should be noted though that each of these channels have their advantages and disadvantages and as such, due diligence should be done.
The most key thing to gather web traffic is to raise awareness of the website in the first place. Social media may get crazy and confusing at times, but it is still without a doubt one of the most ideal and easiest ways to market and advertise any product and service simply because of its sheer number of users. Twitter works great for short and snappy comments and tweets that can spark some curiosity and interest in readers while Google+ works particularly well in Business-to-Business (B2B) niches. On the other hand, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies might want to consider Pinterest and Instagram as they’re focusing on photos and imagery makes it a lot more captivating and interesting to advertise your website.
Above all, however, is that with social media, there is an opportunity to respond and engage with others. This is possibly the more important part of using social media to garner more customers because people will continue to go to your website or services if they feel a sense of community with others through the website.
Another basic thing to consider is to have captivating headlines and interesting content on your website. It’s often so basic that many simply do not give it much thought, thinking that their website design or focus is enough to keep people coming back but often times, its not. One of the first things anyone is going to see on your website or an advertisement for it will be the headline, and as such, you should make sure it’s captivating and interesting enough to pique some curiosity out of potential readers. Article titles such as "Top 10 Interesting Places to Travel" and "25 Things Parents Do Wrong, Number 12 will Shock You" and other such "click-bait" titles are becoming very common in this regard but in truth, these articles and their headlines do more to deter people away from reading the articles than clicking them. This is because the content of these articles rarely live up to the "hype" and interest surrounding the titles, which is why the content of the article is just as important as the headline. That being said, it’d be a smart move to steer clear of any such generic headline because while others might say "Don't be fooled, click-bait titles still work", they're simply becoming the most common place thing to see and how does that stand-out from the others to increase your traffic, right?
Referral traffic functions in a way similar to advertising but in the reversed order. Instead of you having your website be advertised on other ad spaces or search engines, have people request you to have your website advertised on their own websites or through their own services. This way, you not only greatly reduce the cost of advertising but you’ll also gain some fame and renown in the process from your website as well; which is basically killing two birds with one stone. Admittedly, it’s not easy to accomplish this. It’s something that requires a great deal of work to have your website become known in the first place which can only be accomplished if its a standout website from the rest or offers some type of service or content that is unique to it. To accomplish that, you should see the previous point; but admittedly, if you can accomplish it, your network traffic should grow massively. I guess that would make it killing three birds with one stone instead, huh…
Internal linking is one method that is, for some reason, overlooked and functions somewhat as the opposite to referral traffic. That’s not to say that one couldn’t implement both methods at the same time; but rather, the process involved is what helps you reduce having to refer other websites from your own. Admittedly, there’s nothing wrong with referring other websites from your own, as a matter of fact, if your website’s goal is to function as some kind of directory for all things under a certain topic or niche, that means more people are likely to use it in order to find other websites which they’re looking for. Nevertheless; by internal linking, what is meant is to have all information mentioned to in your website’s content link to another page of your website. This keeps the traffic internal to yourself and could also promote them to return to your website in the future as well as it becomes a central hub for a user to find their information. The best part is as well, that this will help keep your website updated as more things within its niche becomes available because there then becomes a need to add that new thing into your website as content and then provide internal links to it.
It was mentioned briefly before, but building a sense of community is indeed a very important thing that many websites should employ. It does not have to simply be through social media either; one could implement a forums for their targeted audience to share their thoughts and opinions or a comments section upon each article. Having features like this keeps people coming back for more as they become a part of the community you build through the website and the bonds they build through each other. And all the while, your network traffic will be sure to take a bump as well the larger that community gets.
Chances are that no one knows about your website, and no one will visit your website unless you promote it. Building a website is an easy part, but driving traffic to your website is extremely time-consuming and costly. Before you invest a large amount of time and money into promoting your website, you'll build a marketing strategy to generate traffic to your website, and convert visitors into customers.
A website without visitors is useless no matter how well it is built or how much content you offer because no one will read your web pages. Also, driving traffic is one part of equation, and the more important part of equation is driving targetted traffic.