How to Grow Your Website Traffic?
When starting a blog or website for your online business, the number one thing to focus on initially is traffic. Without traffic your website it pointless.
What is traffic?
Traffic is the term used for people who visit your website. Many website owners gauge it based on sessions and page views.
In order to track your website’s traffic you will need to set up a Google Analytics account and link your website to it.
Don’t worry, it’s free and it will only take about 10 minutes to do so. Check out this tutorial on how to set up Google Analytics…
Once you’ve set up Google Analytics, you can track your website traffic for a few months to get a baseline number to compare with in the future as you work hard to grow your traffic.
When looking at your Google Analytics traffic report, you’ll see 4 main sources:
- Organic – search engine traffic that comes from Google & Bing
- Social – traffic from social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
- Direct – unknown traffic
- Referral – traffic that clicked links on other websites who were linking to you
Below we’ll discuss these 4 sources of traffic more in depth as well as some additional sources of traffic you can expect.
Overall, focus most of your time trying to increase your traffic and build awareness of your website’s content so that you can build your community of fans and followers.
As you’ve established trust and built relationships with your fan community, you’ll be able to sell them products and services which will make all your hard work worth it and validate your belief that you can be successful earning an income online.
Let’s get started…
Google Searches – Website Traffic Source #1
You should spend time each week writing new articles to publish to your blog. If you don’t have time, hire a writer to assist you and send them a list of articles you want written as well as any instructions, checklists, etc. that the writer can use to craft an article that meets your expectations.
By writing consistently, you’ll start ranking articles in Google’s search engine results. People searching questions and phrases related to your blog’s articles, will come across your articles in the Google search results and click through to your website.
Social Media – Website Traffic Source #2
When setting up your online business, you should create profiles on all the major social media networks. Include your website link in your profile biography/description so people can click through to your website from your social media accounts. Here is a list of sites to get on:
- Facebook Business Page
- Snapchat
- YouTube
Out of these social media traffic sources, I believe Pinterest is the best for driving traffic to your website. Learn more about my opinion of Pinterest here.
Email List – Website Traffic Source #3
Once you’ve attracted traffic to your website via Google and Social Media, you’ll want to capture this traffic by getting them to subscribe to your email list.
Here are several articles covering tips on building your email list:
- How to Set Up an Email List with ConvertKit
- The Ultimate Guide to Starting an Email Newsletter
- What to Give Away as Your Email Lead Magnet
Once someone joins your email list, you’ll be able to keep in touch with them by sending them weekly or monthly emails. You can even set up an autoresponder series of pre-written emails that get sent to your subscribers automatically when they join your list.
As you write new articles and publish new content to your website, you can send your email list the links to this new content which will drive traffic to your articles and website.
Within your email marketing software, you’ll be able to monitor analytics such as email open rates and link click rates within your emails.
Resource: ConvertKit Made Simple – an eCourse teaching you how to use ConvertKit and quickly double the size of your email list!
Direct – Website Traffic Source #4
When you look at your stats each month in your Google Analytics dashboard, you’ll notice one of the traffic sources named “Direct.”
Direct traffic is people who type in your website address directly and/or traffic that Google has no clue where they came from. Here is a quote explaining this by Search Engine Land
When they don’t report where they were in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) referrer header, often the traffic is considered “Direct” — which really means, “we have no clue where they came from, maybe they typed the URL in or hit a bookmark
Referrals – Website Traffic Source #5
As a blogger, you should begin building relationships with other bloggers early on when you launch your online business. As you build relationships, other bloggers will link to your content which will send referral traffic to your website that came from theirs.
For example, if someone is reading a blog post on your friends website about “how to sell their home fast” and you happened to write an article on 15 home staging tips for sellers, then your friend may link to this article of yours since it would be relevant and helpful.
You could also guest post on another blog and link back to your website in the author section as well as link to helpful articles related to your guest post.
This would drive traffic to your website that is now exposed to your brand due to guest writing for another blog.
Now that we know how to read the 5 traffic sources inside your Google Analytics dashboard, let’s turn to a resource that shows you how to drive traffic to your website so you can begin analyzing the data.
How to Get Visitors to Your Website
Once you’ve set up your WordPress website, the next step will be getting traffic to it. You can go the slow route and try to rank your website in Google using SEO. You can take the expensive route which includes buying Facebook ads.
Or you can take the best route which is using Pinterest to drive FREE traffic to your website.
If you want to learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website to quickly grow your audience, double your email list size, and make a living online then make sure you check out my course, Profitable Pinterest Traffic.
It comes with worksheets, checklists, and lots of training videos to help you set up your Pinterest profile and drive traffic back to a website page or email landing page. Discover the strategies to rank your pins higher in the search feed so they get found by Pinterest users. Save yourself time and money using my system.
Get started driving traffic to your website
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