You might think traffic is the hardest part, but it’s actually a lot simpler than you think to get traffic! We’re going to take a look at a few of the best strategies for getting traffic, both free and paid.
Free Traffic
As far as free traffic goes, there’s only one method that’s quick enough to generate traffic starting today, doesn’t have a hefty learning curve, and provides quality traffic that can convert: social media.
Keep in mind that certain markets are more inclined to use certain social networks than others, so it’s important to locate your market and be certain you’re focusing most of your time and energy on those locations. While you can still use other social networks, most of your effort should be focused on those sites that have a higher concentration of your target demographic.
We’re going to look at a few of the most popular social networks, and how you can locate your target demographic on each one in order to find out which one(s) you should concentrate on.
Locating your target demographic on Facebook is relatively simple. Begin by searching for a topic related to your niche and find pages and groups that fit your niche.
For example, if you are offering a dog walking service, you’d want to search for things like groups for pet owners in your city or state. Find out how many people are in those groups, and how many groups there are. This will give you a rough idea of how many people you can reach on Facebook.
Join these groups and participate in them, making sure you follow their rules. If they don’t allow promotions, you’ll need to contact the group administrators and ask for permission to advertise your service. Otherwise, you should be able to pipe in if people happen to ask about dog walking services.
You can also start your own group, which is your best option. This will give you a source of traffic you can turn into leads anytime.
You should also start a Facebook page for your business, and you can even include a link to your squeeze page on your Facebook page.
Pinterest is like an online corkboard. You can have multiple “boards”, and then pin images with links, sort of like bookmarking a page.
You can find out how popular your niche is on Pinterest by performing a search, and then clicking “Boards” to find out how many people have boards related to your niche AND how many followers those boards have.
You can also search pins for the niche and see how many repins each one has. This will let you know how interested people are.
Pinterest has a huge amount of traffic, and it’s relatively easy to access just by following accounts that have some connection to your niche and pinning content related to your niche and using keywords in your board names and descriptions.
You’ll need to have some interesting content to pin, so it’s a good idea to have a blog or website that you use to post content related to your field. For example, you could have a dog care blog for your dog walking service and post useful information for pet owners.
One important thing to note is that Pinterest is heavily imaged-based, so you’ll need good images to pin that relate to your article.
For example, if you’ve posted an article called “5 Tips for Housebreaking Your Puppy”, you’d want to include a photo of a dog being trained, or something related to housebreaking a puppy, and have the title of your article on the image.
If you take a look at Pinterest, you’ll see that most images are taller than they are wide. That’s because they take up the most screen real estate since images are constrained by width, but have much more space to expand lengthwise. Thus, try to make sure your images follow the same format.
Instagram is a great platform for visual content, and you can get a lot of traffic from it, especially if your business is related to fashion, beauty, art, lifestyle, food and cooking, crafts, or other topics that are popular.
You can get a good indication of what’s popular on Instagram by opening the app and clicking the search icon, searching for a term related to your niche, and then clicking “Tags”. This will show you how many posts are currently on the site using that phrase, as well as lots of related phrases.
For example, when I search for “dogs”, I see millions of posts with such hashtags as #dogsofinstagram, #dogs, #dogstagram, and #dogsitting.
You can also click the “People” tab and click some of the top profiles to see how many followers they have. This is another good indicator of interest in your topic.
There are three important steps to getting traffic from Instagram:
1. Fill out your profile and include a link to your website or squeeze page there. Make sure to choose an interesting photo of either yourself or something related to your niche for your profile picture. And include that link because you can’t include links in the descriptions of your individual posts! (Just tell people to check your profile for a link.)
2. Post often. Instagram posts scroll by and are gone quickly if someone is following a lot of profiles, so the best way to get seen is to post as often as possible. Don’t spam! Just a few posts a day is fine, but spread them out every few hours. And don’t forget to add at least 5 relevant hashtags to every post!
3. Follow people who are related to your niche. Many will follow you back, and others will find and follow you from those people’s profiles. It’s a good idea to follow at least 20 new accounts each day, which you can find easily through the search function and referrals from other people. Stick mostly to following accounts related to your niche, because you want qualified leads, not just a high follower count!
Other Social Networks
There are other social networks that can be effective, too, depending on your market. I suggest giving each of these a try to see how they do for your particular market, but you might want to concentrate your efforts on the other sites we’ve talked about earlier in this chapter.