Get Traffic Without Paying For it

DID you know you can increase website traffic without marketing?

I know, I know…It sounds too good to be true. But, it is.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects when it comes to business, and should be a primary focus from the very start. However, if you only focus on the usual traffic generation tips and tricks, then you’re going to be missing out on a lot of audience reach and potential customers.

Check out these simple strategies for increasing your website’s traffic without having to do a single bit of marketing:

Types of Website Traffic

Before we can focus on ways to jumpstart your traffic, we should first cover the various types of traffic. It’s a pretty well-known fact that having a high volume of traffic coming to your site is one of the signs of success in the online portion of your business. It means there is content that has drawn people to your site, and more visitors means more potential sales.

There are four types of website traffic you need to be aware of before you can implement strategies to increase your website traffic:

• Organic traffic
• Referral traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Social Traffic

Of these four types, the organic traffic is definitely the most important. This type of traffic comes from search engines, and brings in more valuable, targeted users. After that, referral traffic is high up on the list, but that really depends on what type of website is sending you referrals. If they’re coming from popular websites, you’re more likely to get quality traffic. Low-quality sites will bring in less than stellar traffic and, as such, won’t benefit you all that much. Direct traffic comes from a user visiting your website’s URL directly from a browser – They either bookmarked you or typed it in directly. Finally, social traffic comes from (you guessed it) social media networks.

Increasing Website Traffic

When it comes to implementing the following strategies, it’s best to keep your actions repetitive. Keep doing these things as often as possible, and you will really start to notice a significant (and steady) increase in your website traffic. It won’t happen overnight, or even within a single month, but it will happen. It will pay off, and you won’t have to spend a single cent on buying traffic or advertising your business.

Things to Do

Network, Network, Network!

This one really can’t be stressed enough, which is why it gets listed at the top. Social network traffic is extremely important for business and is pretty easy to get when compared to the other types – especially organic traffic.

Get active on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and even Snapchat. Don’t spam your followers, but make sure your clickable links are prominently displayed. Share their content, comment on their posts, and start a discussion. The more you network, the more connections you will get. Once you build a community or become part of one, you will see a steady increase in website traffic. Leave valuable comments on other blog posts and social media posts, and others will click on your link to check what you’re all about.

This is why you need to make sure your website’s pages are shareable, too. If they aren’t designed to be shared, you may want to consider adding some social plugins to your site in order to make it easier for readers to share your posts across social networking platforms.

Collect Those Emails

From the very first day, you start your website – especially if it contains a blog – make sure you are building your email list. Don’t force visitors to subscribe, but offer a valuable incentive for them to do so. This lets them subscribe willingly while getting direct benefits out of it. If they subscribe willingly, you will be able to send them posts directly to their email without them unsubscribing and considering your emails to be spam.

If you want to get more blog readers, one of the best things to do is to link your email list to the RSS feeds on your blog. This ensures your readers are notified as soon as you publish a new post. Your readers will stay in the loop, see your newest content, and keep your business fresh in their minds. They will be more likely to think of you when they need the type of product or service your brand offers.

Expert Tip: Use this cutting edge tool to collect emails!

Optimise Your Content

Pages and posts that are search engine optimised (SEO) are going to rank higher in search engines and, as such, will help you increase website traffic without marketing. If you have, say, 60 posts that are ranking even fairly high within search engine results and they each get 10,000 clicks, that means 600,000 clicks per month and millions of page views for your website.

How exactly do you do this? SEO can be pretty complicated and involved, but there are some basic practices you can implement right away to boost website traffic:

Conduct keyword research

1. Summarise your product or services
2. Highlight the keywords and phrases within that description
3. Take that list of words and create as many combinations as possible
4. Find more ideas via Google Keyword Planner
5. Test out all of those ideas with the Keyword Planner by using the “See how they perform” option.
6. Pick the options with the highest volume and lowest cost per clicks. These are your “Target Keywords”
7. Implement these into the content on your page, or hire an experienced freelance writer who is able to do it naturally

Optimise the entire site

• Use a unique meta description for each page, making sure to incorporate one or more relevant target keywords. Keep this under 155 words.
• Put a target keyword into the URL of each page/tab
• Optimise the images by using ALT tags with related keywords.

Use quality content

• The content of your site should have enough value to keep your readers engaged. This means your site should have at least 300 to 400 words of unique content on each page.
• Start a blog for your business, and publish a post as often as you can. A couple times per month is good, though more would be ideal.
• Promote your content across various social media platforms.

Use Power Words in Headlines

Using power words is one of the best ways to compel a user to click on your post and read the content of that page. A headline like, “Best marketing automation software you should buy” is likely to get more hits or clicks than one like, “Marketing automation software you should buy.”

It’s recommended that at least 70% to 75% of your time should be spent on the title of your web page, blog post, or article. You want to ensure it uses power words and is catchy enough to snag the reader’s attention.

Build Your Backlinks

Backlinks are basically hyperlinks that connect a single webpage to a full website. Not only are they incredibly important for search engine optimisation, but they also make it easier to increase website traffic without marketing. Backlinks will bring referral traffic to your website and/or business’ blog. This will boost your search engine ranking and domain authority, which will result in you getting more organic traffic.

Utilize YouTube

According to Fortune Lords, roughly 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, with nearly 5 billion videos being viewed each day. In fact, roughly 900 million hours of video are watched on YouTube each month.

If you upload quality videos to YouTube and then link back to your website, you are likely to receive tons of referral traffic to your website. If a video happens to go viral, then you are likely to receive millions of traffic! There is also the added benefit that, assuming none of the Terms of Service is being violated, your videos will remain online indefinitely. That means that source of referral traffic will never go away.

Remember to Use Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are a bit longer (hence the name) than specific target keywords, but they drive specific traffic to your blog and have far less competition. One of the best ways to find these is to check the related Google searches below the results. For example, a search for “find long tail keywords” brings up the following results:

Targeting these long tail keywords within your content can boost your organic traffic by more than 50%.

Focus on Building Your Brand

Increasing website traffic without marketing can be pretty difficult, but one of the most powerful things you can do is to focus on building your brand. Place an emphasis on providing quality, value-driven content to your readers and monetize your blog when possible.

A website that has a strong brand that stands out from the masses will have returning visitors and dedicated readers who place their trust in your authority. This helps you to stand out within your business niche and will bring in continuous support for your business without you having to spend oodles of money on marketing efforts that may or may not pay off in the end.

Things to Avoid

The following actions are pretty common mistakes. This list of “Don’ts” will adversely affect the value of your website and brand’s authority, and will decrease your website traffic.

Spamming Your Followers

This seems pretty common sense but is a huge mistake a lot of people make. Spamming of forums, social networks, and other websites should be avoided. It won’t drive traffic to your website for more than a short period of time, and will just annoy the other users, followers,  and website owners. It’s best to stick with the “80-20 rule of social media networking.”

Publishing Poor Content

You’ve undoubtedly seen this before: A website owner or blogger wants to get has many click-through rates as possible, so they post something once or twice per day. The content is of fairly good quality at first, but then just goes downhill from there.

Posting often may get you some great click-through rates, but it will tarnish your brand’s image to have poor content on your site or blog. Maintaining a solid reputation and brand authority within your nice will bring in the targeted traffic you want.

Buying Traffic

While there is some benefit to buying traffic now and then, it generally brings in non-targeted visitors who are probably not very relevant to your brand. There is also the added drawback of the traffic mainly coming from websites that are considered to be of low quality, which would affect your website ranking. If you want to keep a high-quality website, it’s best to avoid buying website traffic.

Final Thoughts

The above tips help show you what to do, and what to avoid when it comes to finding ways to increase website traffic without marketing. After a few months of regular implementation of these techniques, you will likely start to see your traffic climb.

If you put all of that effort into your content, but don’t see the result you’re looking for, you may want to review your content and hire an experienced freelance writer or web designer.

Looking for another great way to drum up some traffic? Check out PushConnectNotify and leverage the power of push notifications to really increase your traffic flow! It is super easy-to-use and a great way to optimise your site while securing leads.

What are your tried and true techniques for jumpstarting your website traffic without having to break the bank? Let us know in the comments below! 

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The Beginner’s Guide to Solo Ads (Solo Ads 101 is now in session!)

IN the online marketing world, it seems like there are endless opportunities to market you or your business.

Marketing opportunities like pay-per-click (PPC), native advertising, search engine optimisation or display advertising are among the most common.

But have you heard about solo email ads?

Solo email ads can be a great addition to your advertising portfolio.

Not sure what solo email ads are?

No worries, we’ll cover some of the important basics for you.

What Are Solo Email Ads?

A quick list or solo email ad is a one-time email blast sent on behalf of another party to their own email list, typically for a fee. Typically this is a flat-fee or performance based.

The ‘quick list’ component actually refers to a list that has already been built, but by someone else. This is not the same as purchasing an email list where you do get the email and contact information of people.

The list being emailed to is created, owned and maintained by the person or company you are paying. You do not have access to their list as the email is sent by the person or company who owns it.

You will typically provide the sender with the copy you want to appear in the email. In some cases, the sender may choose to edit your copy or write their own.

Now that we are on the same page of what solo ads are, let’s dive into some details.

Should You Buy Solo Ads?

The first thing you need to do is ask yourself, “Should I buy solo ads?”

While emailing thousands and thousands of people might sound good on the surface, there are some key questions you need to ask yourself.

Questions like:

• How responsive is the list? Has the list owner blasted it too many times and now it has dismal open rates?
• Does the list contain prospects of your ideal target audience? If the list is not targeted or related to your audience, chances are they won’t be interested in what your email has to say.
• Do you have proper tracking in place? You need to be setup to track these initiatives to know if you are getting what you are paying.
• What does my return on investment need to be in order to make this worth it? You’ll need to know what goals need to be met in order to make sure you are not going to lose more than you invest.

While there are certainly additional questions that might be specific to your situation, I’ve found that these are among the most critical that must always be answered.

Solo Ad List Responsiveness

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the importance of the solo ad list and their engagement.

Most solo ads will just tell you how many people are in their list in that they like to “wow” you with the potential to reach such a large audience.

While the size of the list is important to an extent, what’s more, important is how active the list is with the emails they get.

If you are purchasing solo ads from a person who blasts emails every day for anything and everything, chances are there will be a low engagement within that list.

So out of the thousands of people in that list, only a small percentage will be paying attention to any email coming from that sender. In reality, you aren’t going to be reaching thousands of people – just a fraction of what was promised.

If possible, ask the sender about their typical open rates.

Of course, it is not always the responsibility of the sender to generate opens since subject lines play a huge role in this. In fact, 33% of people say that subject lines determine whether or not they will open an email.

Finding the Right Audience For Solo Ads

While it is definitely important to find solo ads with an engaging audience, it’s more important to make sure you are messaging the right audience.

Think about this, would you talk about the top backyard landscaping tips to people who are apartment owners?

Probably not since they won’t have much use for this information since they don’t have a yard.

So with solo ads, you need to know not only your target audience but the audience of the list you will be emailing.

Most reputable solo ad providers can give you a good idea of the demographics of their list.

If a provider can’t give you these details, I recommend finding someone else to buy solo ads from.

Once you have identified a list that has your ideal audience on it, you need to evaluate if it will be worth your time and money.

Setting Up Your Solo Ads For Success

In the digital marketing world, everything needs to be tracked. This includes your solo ads.

Some solo ad providers will supply you with their own data, but it is important for you to track the data yourself.

This can easily be done with Google Analytics.

The ideal way to do this is by using UTM parameters in your URLs of the solo ads. UTM parameters work in Google Analytics and are essentially tags that can get passed to your analytics account with some detailed information.

For example, your URL might look something like this:

• www.yoursite.com/sales-page?utm_source=solo-ad&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=website-you-bought-the-ad-from

There are 3 required fields when using UTM parameters:

• utm_source – this is used to identify the source of the traffic
• utm_medium – this is the medium that the link was on (email, CPC, etc.)
• utm_campaign – this is used to label the campaign the link was marketed in (in this case, it could be the website you purchased the solo ad from)

When using UTM parameters, keep in mind they are case sensitive – so be sure to be consistent with your naming conventions.

You’ll want to use these URLs in your solo ad campaigns and then be able to tie your initiatives back to sales. Of course, you will want to be sure to have goal tracking setup as well in Google Analytics.

Having proper tracking installed will help you know if solo ads are worth it for your business.

It’s important to stay on top of your metrics, especially after you participate in a solo email.

Know Your Break-even Point With Solo Ads

With any investment you make with your business, you should always know what your expected return on investment is. You probably don’t want to spend more money than you will make – that’s typically not the best way to run a business.

Let’s say you found a solo ad with 1,000 emails and it is going to cost you $1,000.

This means that you will be spending $1 for every email that goes out.

Now, take the low-end worst case scenario expected a conversion rate of 1/2%. So this means you would expect 5 sales from this list of 1,000 emails.

With your $1000 investment, this would lead to a cost of $200 per sale. Therefore, at a minimum, you would need to have a product or service that will bring in at least $200 per sale to break-even.

If your typical sale is $500, then this particular list would be worth a potential investment.

However, if your typical sale is $50 then this would not be a good list in that you will be losing money.

But if you are confident that you can write a compelling email subject line and engaging content that will drive people to your website in order to purchase you can increase your expected conversion rate and re-run the numbers.

Over time, you will be able to have a good idea of what your typical conversion rate is and make more educated decisions when exploring solo ad opportunities.

You may find that your solo ads initiatives are driving a 2% conversion rate which would mean you would only need to make a minimum of $50 per sale to break even. But if you are selling a $200 offering, with a 2% conversion rate you could net $4000 in sales. Subtract out your $1000 investment and you would be left with a $3000 profit.

Ca-ching!

When you can get efficient with solo ads, it’s like printing money. Just be sure you have a tool in place to evaluate the return on your investment.

Knowing Solo Ad Basics Can Go A Long Way

Understanding the core basics of solo ads can help you be smarter to your approach. When you know what to look for, how to track it, and how to evaluate your return you can make smart business decisions.

Look, there are many shady providers of solo ads out there – but there are some really great ones.

Knowing the basics can help you weed through the garbage and find the right provider for your solo ads.

While there are not any guarantees around using solo ads, by asking the right questions and implementing proper tracking you can put yourself in a better position to make the right decisions.

Interested in using solo ads? Great!

Looking for a way to track their effectiveness before you get started? Well, kudos to you for being so business savvy.

Knowing how well solo ads perform financially is important and ClickPerfect provides the insight you’ll need to evaluate your success. This simple tool will help you learn more about the benefit of sending to a solo ad list as well as overall customer responsiveness.

Happy sending!

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Traffic Academy: Get In the Driver’s Seat! (Part 2)

WELCOME to Part 2 of our guide to driving traffic. In Traffic Academy Part 1, we covered what online traffic is, why it matters, and how you can increase it using free methods. In this section, we will cover the paid methods you can use which include Facebook ads, banner ads, solo ads, and PPC advertising.

By the end of this section, you will have the knowledge you need to form a strategy which integrates both paid and free traffic driving strategies to get the results you are looking for online.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are available through the Facebook platform and you can use them as long as you have an active Facebook business page. Facebook offers a user-friendly ad creation process that you access right from your profile page.

The native ads they provide can appear in the newsfeed of your audience so they blend in with other posts. Alternatively, they can appear in the right-hand column of the desktop version of Facebook.

There are many objectives you can choose from depending on what your goals are. You can simply boost your post to reach more people, drive traffic to your website, drive conversions, increase app downloads, increase video views, and more.

Once you select your objective, you can target your audience using very detailed options. From demographics to interests to behaviours, Facebook really allows you to fine tune your audience. They even allow you to create custom audiences through existing lists you have, and look-a-like audiences so you can target users who are similar to those on a list you already have. Once you target your audience, you will select your schedule, set your budget, design your ad, add in calls to action, and then place your order. When you have ads running, you can track their performance and cost in the Facebook Insights section.

It is a relatively easy process and the ads have shown they can be very effective. Facebook continues to focus on improving the experience for their users by limiting the amount of organic business posts in news feeds in favour of friends and family posts, so Facebook ads can help you to still get the exposure you need to reach your desired audience and drive them to your website.

Best Practices

When designing an ad for Facebook, keep in mind that those which are visually appealing do best. Be sure to choose engaging media whether it’s an image or video. You will also want to invest some time into strategizing your ad copy as you have a small amount of space to engage and interest the reader to click through.

It can also be helpful to create different messages to different audiences. You can create an ad targeted at people who have never heard of your business before, one to retarget those who have previously visited your website, and one for those who have watched your videos, etc. Lastly, once your ads are posted, be sure to always follow up to gauge ad performance and make adjustments accordingly.

Better yet, try out this tool to check out the ads that have worked for your competition and save yourself some of the guesswork!

Banner Ads

Next up are banner ads. These are advertisements that you can purchase that will show up in rectangular displays horizontally or vertically on host web pages.

They are typically image-based with some text and can link to the destination that you choose. You can pay host sites for these advertisements using 3 pricing models: views, clicks, and conversions.

If you are interested in investing in banner ads, you can buy them directly from websites (i.e. Waze), by joining an ad network, or by hiring an ad agency through a catalogue type environment where you buy remnant from various publishers (i.e. Google Adwords). There are various sites that you can go through. Here are some options you can check out:

http://web.blogads.com

https://www.buysellads.com

http://valueclick.com/

http://www.bannerspace.com/

http://www.eads.com/

http://www.doubleclick.net/

Best Practices

When using banner ads, you’ll want to identify your goal, who you are targeting, and what websites your target audience visits. Once you know, it is time to design your banner. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Identify what you want to communicate in the small space available
• Keep your message clear
• Include a call to action
• Use colours that match your branding
• Consider interactive elements to attract more attention
• Stick to standard sizes
• Create a hierarchy
• Forget flash

As far as designing the banner, you could hire a professional web designer, a freelancer off a site like 99designs, or create your own. There are services like envatostudio available which handle all the back end coding for you so you can just design it from the front end.

These can be a viable option for reaching a new audience and directing them to your desired destination.

Above is an example of a solo ad vendor website. Solo ads are another great opportunity for you to reach a new audience, particularly if you know your conversion rate based on past data. The way these work are you create an ad that is in the form of an email. Then you find a vendor who has targeted lists of email addresses and you pay them to send your email to their list. Now, to be clear, you are not buying an email list but one email you create is sent out to the list.

It is important to understand that there is a risk in solo ads because you are trusting that the vendor has a list of engaged recipients and that they are actually sending your email to them. You will want to choose a vendor who is reputable to decrease your risk. You will also want to look for a vendor that offers perperformance-based pricing models in comparison to fixed rates. This will ensure you are only paying for click-throughs, opens, and conversions.

Best Practices

Once you decide you want to use solo ads, it is important to calculate your marketing budget in order to ensure your investment is profitable. You will need to name your goal, for example: email sign ups, sales, etc. Then calculate how much each conversion is worth to you and how often conversions to your target audience occur. For example, if you get 100 email subscribers and 5 out of every 100 subscribers buy your product or service which costs $150 a piece, then every 100 email subscribers is worth $750 gross. Then look at your conversion rates from the solo ad. If you can get 100 subscribers and still end up profitable after your costs then this can be a useful tactic.

To find reputable vendors, you can go to well-known sites like Udimi and Solo Ads Testimonials. In general, just keep in mind that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.

Lastly, when creating a solo ad, keep in mind you have a small window to make an impression so you want your headline to be eye catching, your copy to be engaging, and a strong call to action to direct readers where you want them to go.

For more information about solo ads check out our post on Solo Ads 101.

PPC

In section 1 of this guide, we talked about SEO and how to increase traffic organically by using certain tactics. While highly impactful, it can take at least 6 months to climb up to first page rankings. If you need results faster, that is where pay per click (PPC) comes in.  PPC advertising allows you to display ads and only be charged when people actually click on them.

This means you can be making impressions and increasing brand awareness without paying. Your paid ads show up above organic search results on the SERP. Here is an example. Note the very top result which is marked as an ad. By pursuing both organic SEO tactics and paid advertising, Macy’s has dominated the search result for their name.

While getting to the top of search engine results can take some time, through a concentrated SEO campaign, paid ads allow you to buy your spot right away and show a 1.5x higher conversion rate. However, it has been reported that organic search results have an 8.5x higher click through rate. So, paid ads have their place in driving traffic and that is as a part of a joint campaign with organic SEO efforts.

Best Practices

When running a paid ad campaign, keyword research is of the utmost importance. You will need to use a tool such as the Google Keyword Planner to identify the right words to target. You will find that short tail generic keywords like ‘sweaters’ are searched more, have more competition, and cost more to bid on.

Long tail keywords like ‘hoodie sweaters for women’, which are more specific to your product or service, are searched less and are more affordable. Additionally, these long tail keywords often have higher conversion rates as the people who type them are further along in their buying journey. So, your campaign should include a balance of both.

Once you have your keywords chosen, you design an ad which will be relevant and attractive so that searchers will click on it. Then the ad should lead to a destination which is also relevant to the ad and keywords. In choosing which ad gets shown, Google takes into consideration what is known as the quality score. This is basically an analysis of how relevant and effective your ad is to the page it leads to as well as the results of the click through. So the more relevant and effective your ad, the more it will be shown.

As your campaigns run, you should be tracking and analyzing results to find out which ads and keywords are most effective. Over time, you can improve campaigns and earn a higher ROI. The ideal ads will result in high click through rates and conversions with a lower cost per click.

Time for Action!

Now you have an understanding of the fundamentals of driving traffic. It is important to consider the benefits available from both paid and free methods and to combine them strategically. For example, if you have implemented an active social media presence on Facebook and Instagram through which you have raised brand awareness, connected with influencers, and engaged your audience, paid Facebook ads can expand your reach even further.

Additionally, by implementing SEO practices on your website and blog you can climb the ranks of organic search engine results, while PPC advertising campaigns can give you visibility in paid results. By doing both, you can end up with total domination of the search results page for your terms.

A combined strategy is the best strategy. With this in mind, take some time to review your options. Here is a quick overview of what we covered through this 2-part guide to driving traffic:

Free Traffic Sources:

• Blogging
• Social media
• SEO
• Email marketing

Paid Traffic Sources:

• Facebook ads
• Solo ads
• Banner ads
• PPC

By experimenting with the different channels available and tracking your results, you can gradually find those which work best for your business. As a result, you can invest your marketing budget and time into those channels.

Also, always remember to try and strike a balance between free and paid traffic not only to benefit your wallet but also because they drive different types of results. Don’t be frustrated if your results aren’t what you hoped for right away. It is important to think of your marketing strategy as an ongoing process of refinement rather than one you get perfect on the first try. The only way to really know what works is to research, plan as best you can, experiment, track and adapt.

Best of luck in your traffic driving efforts and if you have thoughts to share, feel free to comment!

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