Website visitors are everything! You can have an impressive website design, a killer web hosting company backing you and the most phenomenal product on the market, but if you don’t have a daily stream of people clicking on your website each day it’s all for nothing. Imagine if no one ever visited Amazon.com! All the many products that Amazon features would just sit there, collecting dust.
The most successful webmasters know that a combination of offering a good product or service and employing just the right promotional techniques is what makes for an award winning website. Want to double your traffic by the end of 2012? Here are three dead simple ways to get there.
1. Reach out to local media
I was reading the weekend paper on Sunday and saw a local business featured that makes holiday gift baskets out of produce and goods from their farm. At the tail end of the interview was the businesses domain name. I immediately jumped on my iPhone and surfed to their website, where I ended up buying four gift baskets for family members. That’s free advertising at work. Local news outlets love to run human interest stories about unique websites and businesses. Instead of paying money to run ads, consider these free news outlets:
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Newspapers: This includes your free community newspapers and the bigger papers.
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Television: Try local TV news stations, and then branch out to the nearest biggest city.
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Community Centers: Get your domain featured in community newsletters.
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Radio: Offer to do an interview with local commercial and non-profit stations.
2. Make being helpful part of your brand
Many forget that social media is really meant to be a social experience. Too many webmasters get out there on forums, Facebook and Google + and push their domain name, products and blog posts without ever really interacting with anyone. Big mistake!
You’ll get far more attention from people if you’re kind, courteous and helpful. Take Quora, for example. If I own a web hosting company, I make it my business to search Quora questions daily, answering every question about dedicated servers, cloud hosting and shared hosting I can find. The more helpful you are, the more eyes see you and the domain name you represent.
Think outside the box here. Don’t put all your attention into Facebook. Try these websites:
3. Put more than just your heart and soul into your website
I once ran a very successful vegetarian food blog on which I discussed and rated the different meat-free products on the market. I had less experience than my competition in every imaginable way, but was able to become one of the top rated blogs in this area because I did one thing that my competition wasn’t doing: I gave things away regularly. At first, I reached out to vegetarian food manufacturers and asked them for donations in running such a promotion. They were all too happy to oblige, often giving me double what I asked for. Within two months of doing this, vegetarian food manufacturers were contacting me, and shipping copious amounts of donations for me to give away. Again, free advertising. This was good for food makers and good for me, and I didn’t have to spend a cent. People love freebies! No matter what kind of website you’re running, you can draw people in with a promotion.
These three simple ideas don’t take up much of your time, won’t cost you any money, and will have you reaping big rewards before the year ends. What are you waiting for?