Working hard will let you sleep knowing you’re exerting all the effort you can, but working smart will let you enjoy a long and hot bath whenever you need to, right before you get a sound sleep session. It may feel that working hard is the best way to get results, but it’s usually not. You spend too much time and resources on exerting effort, probably not seeing results. While it’s important to have patience, you can only wait for this patience to reap its rewards after you’ve done everything you can. In this case, we’re talking about investing in the most efficient ways to increase your traffic, not just implementing a couple of random strategies and expecting to see your traffic bloom. Just like what you’re doing with every aspect of your business, tackling your exposure strategies should be smart and, well, strategic. Here are some of the most efficient ways you can boost your traffic without wasting any unnecessary efforts:
1. Set Your Goals
First things first: you need to set your goals and make your objectives clear before investing in any efforts. This started long before you’ve stumbled on this post; it started right when you’ve crafted your business plan and set up your goals. Your marketing strategies should all be aligned with your original goals. This is the only way you’ll make sure you’re walking in the right direction and not wasting time, money, or resources.
2. Optimize Your Website
Before you exert any effort in increasing your traffic or attracting new customers, you need to make sure that they’ll like what you have to offer. The worst thing you can do is to implement perfect strategies only to have your visitors leave right away. That is going to happen for sure in any of the following cases:
- An overwhelming amount of cluttered information
- A confusing design
- Using too many colors
- An incomprehensible copy that doesn’t give them valuable information
- A hard-to-navigate website where they get lost
- Technical issues, just as slow loading pages or broken links
- Security issues
3. Invest in SEO
You should always focus on building a strong infrastructure for your website before taking the next step, which is investing in SEO. While a bit complicated, you can learn the best SEO practices yourself. However, to get the best benefits while optimizing your resources, hiring a team of experts will be your best option. In order to understand how experts operate, make sure to check this SEO proposal example and all the points it includes. This is how you know that the service providers you’re about to sign a contract with will do the job. The field of SEO is, unfortunately, full of scammers and inexperienced practitioners who can get your website penalized, so make sure you’re only choosing the most credible practitioners.
4. Leverage Your Social Media Platforms
While your performance on social media will not directly impact your SEO efforts, social media can be utilized smartly to increase your traffic. If you have active social media profiles, make sure to leverage your campaigns and audience engagement to refer your target segments to your website. Social media is exceptional in its capabilities of enabling you to reach wide segments of the audience or making content go viral. Whenever you implement social media campaigns, make sure that your website will benefit from some of this traffic as well.
5. Partner Up with Influencers
On the other hand, you can use social media platforms of other people to get exposure. In this case, you’ll want to target social media influencers who operate in the same niche, or in a different niche in which you want to expand. However, influencers aren’t always easy to finalize deals with. You’ll have to find something that either tempts them or provides value in a cause they support.
6. Direct Traffic from Your Online Profiles
Social media isn’t the only way you can direct traffic to your website. If you’ve set up your online brand identity, then chances are you’ve created a profile for your business on different online directories, those related to your niche. If you haven’t yet, then it’s high time you do. Make sure to include your website in all your online profiles; this will make it a lot easier to reach professionals in your niche and anyone looking for services like yours.
7. Partner Up with Other Businesses
Today, businesses have started to realize the power of collaboration with their competitors. Instead of wanting to dominate the market, but probably failing anyway, businesses benefit greatly from creating mutually-beneficial partnerships in which everyone wins. You don’t have to go for your competitors directly, although you can find some form of partnership that benefits you both. But you can always go for someone who operates in the same niche, but offers other kinds of services and products. In exchange for what you can offer them, they can redirect their own traffic to visit your website as well, a win-win situation.
8. Try Guest Blogging
If there’s an industry leader or an established business whose attention you want to get, how about writing a guest post on their blog? It’s a great way to get exposure while providing value, which will establish you as a field expert. Likewise, you can invite them to write a guest post on your own website.
9. Engage Your Customers
It’s easy to forget about the customers or loyal visitors once you’ve acquired them. After all, it feels like you’ve added them to your list and there’s nothing more you can do; it’s better to focus on getting more customers. However, as a matter of fact, customers aren’t cash that can be stored and called upon later when you need it. You need to keep your current customers engaged at any given time, be it by email or SMS marketing, offering them discounts and promotions as appreciation, or throwing a contest and engaging them with your brand.
Getting traffic and acquiring new customers is the dream of every business, whether it’s operating online or even offline. Unfortunately, most businesses invest a lot of time and resources in the wrong area. Boosting your traffic shouldn’t take years to happen, though; you just need to work smartly and focus on what’s effective.
Allen Brown – A keen writer covering topics such as Internet Marketing, SEO, Travel, Beauty and such. He enjoys spending time with his two kids in his free time.
