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Health & Fitness

Traffic Building Mid Summer Review: Top 7 Website Traffic Building Strategies

It's summer....In case you've been at the beach and not paying attention, here's the cliff notes version of the top 7 website traffic building strategies, thus far

It’s the end of July and time for a little review- just to make sure you were paying attention, and to cover you if you weren’t. The cliff notes.

We are nowhere near through- there’s an entire month of August to get through to make sure we’ve covered all of the big Poo-Bah’s and tricky little nuances of increasing traffic to your websites and blogs, but on this, our 50% mark, a review is in order, so that should any of our strategies have fallen by the wayside we can re-boot and take them for a whirl.

 Traffic Strategy #1: Comment On Other Peoples Blogs

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Especially on blogs where your target market might be visiting, and especially blogs that get high traffic.  It’s easy to check to see what kind of traffic their blog commands by checking their Alexa rating -with Alexa, the lower the rating, the higher the traffic. Generally, if a site does not show up at all on Alexa, they most likely are not yet getting any significant traffic, so your comments in this case will not necessarily garner you a big following, although I definitely advocate commenting anyway if you have valuable feedback. This is how we all grow and paying it forward will come back to you. Folks generally welcome this and you are now becoming an expert on someone else’s site, in front of their audience. 


If their work is relevant and good, ask if they’d like to guest blog on your site. If it's valuable content, it increases your SEO because of the "fresh" content ratio, which Google is also looking for.

You’re now adding value with another expert voice. Always make sure you’re including a link to your blog/website so that you get the backlink, as Google looks highly and ranks well sites with numerous backlinks. The other great reason to comment on “like” blogs is that you are now in front of a whole new audience who you can speak to. The hope is that if your content is interesting enough, you will get some followers of your own from their followers. This is a major reason why my traffic has grown, and it can be for you as well. 

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Big warning: Make sure that you are not commenting anything spammy or not relevant to the blog itself. This is an obvious link building technique that Google is all over and in its’ new Penguin algorithms is checking for and will punish you for. Slap you down. Bad blogger, bad. 

In other words, the comments and the blogs must be relevant to your topic and your niche. If you own a tire center and you are commenting on tire specials on a hair salons blog about hair styles and trends, that is a big no-no. Expect consequences.  Read more

 Traffic Strategy #2: Create Great Content

Give people a good reason to stay on your site. It’s noisy out there, and so the challenge of all small businesses is to make your info stand out- pop!- even if its not yours- grab articles, be a forum, or a resource,  run a tip of the day, or a contest ,or offer a quiz , either in your blog or in your email e-zine, with a link back to your original post on your site.

The most important thing when creating content is to add value. I can’t state this more emphatically. You don’t have to be Hemmingway, but you must add value. There are a lot of bloggers out there and they are all screaming for your audience’s attention.

Many more examples of how to easily do this in the Create Great Content blog

 Traffic Strategy #3: Google Loves Fresh Content (and Wordpress)

Without getting too technical and risking the old click off, basically what has happened in the past few years is that Google, in an effort to ensure a quality search engine browsing experience for their users, has been slowly at first, more recently much more often, rewarding websites and blogs whose content is continuously updated and changed, and “punishing” those sites whose content has not been altered since the day they launched their websites.

We talked about the importance of having great content last time, and now I’m here to tell you that sites with “fresh” content” are being indexed by Google more often and pushed up the organic ranks of the search page, and those who haven’t switched much up are not being given as much CRED, or search “juice”. Read more

 Traffic Strategy #4: Offsite Online Marketing

 4 Great Ways to Create Traffic to Your Website Using Offsite Marketing (the abridged version)

    1.    The most obvious: Social Media Marketing. Nothing says expert than you posting and interacting on your social media platform of choice. Always include links back to your website/blog and use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest of YouTube as you would a networking meeting. Build relationships, respond to others, and ask questions. Never just post post post, as now you’re just a one-way street.  This is not an overnight strategy. The good stuff never is

2.    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Make your signature count on all of your emails, newsletters and blogs you send out. This is such a simple one and yet I can’t begin to tell you how many business people still don’t have a live link to their website from their email correspondences. Come on people, this is gravy.

 Most   All email services today have the auto signature function where you can create a signature with your blog address, social media links and the catchy and very effective phrase:

If this has been helpful to you please forward it to someone you think might benefit from it as well”.

Which brings us to #3:

3.    Email Marketing: Of all the marketing you can do, most experts agree that email marketing is the biggest kahuna. Reaching people where they go 2, 3, sometimes, (hello) 10 times per day is in your face marketing.

When writing that blog post, creating that special offer don’t just post it on your website! Get it the heck out there in an email with a link back to your site.

Doing this consistently and with permission (Alert! Alert! Read this!!!) will cement you in your warm leads minds and lead them back along their merry way to your blog/website.

4.    If you are a blogger, share your blog with others, otherwise known as Article Marketing. You know, play nice, share a lot.

There are many sites out there, whether they be online hyper-locals like Patch, or “like” sites- a site where your content compliments-not duplicates-the other, who would be all too happy hosting your article (now that we’re on another site we’re called an article. Whatever. This technique is a win-win for everyone as it offers the host site and you valuable back links, helps build new relationships with the host sites readers and if your stuff is god enough quality, provides fresh valuable content for the host site (make sure it’s either original content for the host site or that you’re providing a backlink directly back to your original post or Google will give you the old duplicate content kabash  Read more

 

Traffic Strategy #5: Join Blog Communities and Link Round-Ups

1.             Post to Blogging Communities

There is a sea of blogging sites that are there for you and, as long as your blog is not total ca-ca, they will open their arms and welcome you into their warm bosom, giving you blog love, back links, and hopefully, if you treat them with respect, a large community of traffic back to your site, engaging with you.

What do I mean by respect? The same thing that you would ask of someone wishing to post on your site: no spam, no garbage posts, a level of good quality and interesting content, ie: stuff that people want to read.

Just as on the social media sites, you’ll be expected to engage and give, not just take take, take.

Now that we have that established, here are some of the better blogging community sites that I’ve been successful with, and then some: BizSugar.com, Inbound.org, Serpd.com, BlogEngage.comIMNewsWatch.com, FamousBloggers.net and MySEOCommunity.com

These are a good way to get started and get your feet wet, before you start begging    asking nicely for inclusion on some of the big boy ( and girl) link roundups

2.             Submit to Link RoundUps:

This takes a little more finesse and determination. A link roundup is when a blogger hosts a platform, maybe once per week where they post other peoples articles, blogs and links. They use their discretion and usually are looking for blogs within their “theme”, and their niche or closely related, as often times the posts are there to support the blog hosts’ current blog subject or a product or class they might be launching. Try and stay within your market, as you’ll have a better chance of acceptance.

How do you find these link round ups and what to do once you’ve pinpointed a few? Search in a Google query the following keywords plus a modifier, for instance:

Weekly Link Roundup + Moms

 

Daily Link Roundup + Marketing

 

Monthly Link Roundup + Exercise  Read more

Traffic Strategy #6: Create Joint Venture Partnerships

The #1 biggest factor that led to my website traffic skyrocketing within the past year-from a measly 250- ish subscribers to 5 times that last I checked, well ok yesterday, has come from 1 event that I launched with a friend, our Momtomompreneur Now! Tele-summit, almost 1 year ago. 

If you’ve been paying attention to the growing circle of west coast online marketing guru’s (we’re working on bringing this technique to the east coast but truth is, we’re way behind our west coast counterparts), you will see this practice in action: the same folks promoting each others programs, launches and services, commenting on each others blogs, featuring each other on their own websites and tweeting, posting and otherwise supporting each other all over social media as well as in their email marketing. And not just online marketers. Book projects being collaborated on, live events, and more business ventures that are using the same model and winning, all around.

Why? Because these folks get the power of Joint Venture relationships.

Take this scenario: If blogger #1 promotes a program of blogger #2’s, introducing blogger #1’s following to blogger #2’s program, and in doing so will benefit from a percentage of the profit of blogger #2’s sales, because it is tracked, it is well worth it to blogger #1 to do so.   Because once you promote each other shamelessly, you are introducing someone else’s product to your audience.

And visa versa. There are many scenarios for a successful JV partnership Read more to learn some of the best ways

Here’s another great way to multiply the outreach and subsequent blog traffic:

Curate a list of favorites within your niche; topics and writers who compliment your services.

Think ‘what would my audience benefit from knowing that does not directly compete with my services?’.

Take me for example.

I could write a “10 Best” list of my favorite Social media Experts. The Top 10 Social Media Experts to follow…or Top 20! Or…

”The Top 10 Most Creative  Content Marketers”

Traffic Strategy #7: Write Reviews or a Top 10 List

 In these top 10 lists I would research the experts, give an example of their work, write a small blurb about what I find valuable about them, and of course give a link back to their site, and maybe a link to one of my favorite articles that they’ve written; the one that pushed me to name them on this list.

Then I’d send them an email letting them know that they are included in my Top 10 List,  and include the link to the article I’d written and cited them in.

This is a huge honor! Read more

So there you have it. The skinny on the ‘best of’ website and blog strategies…thus far’.

I would love to know what strategies are working for you best. Tell me in the comments, and of course contact me with any questions to clear up any fuzzy edges

 

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