Having a website for your business is vital—but it’s also vital to get traffic to your website. After all, if no one is looking at your website there isn’t much pointe in having one is there?
But how do you get traffic on your website in the first place?
The TL;DR is you need to create evergreen content for your website AND you need to create content on social platforms that lead to your website content. And the good news is that you don’t “have to” do paid ads to make this marketing strategy work (though you can if you want to).
How to Increase Website Traffic Organically
Create Evergreen Content aka. Blogs, Podcasts and/or Youtube Videos
The first step to getting traffic on your website is to create evergreen content for your website. Evergreen content is any content that will show up in search results for longer than 24-48 hours, unlike the average Instagram post. This is the type of content that can potentially rank in Google searches for years depending on what topic you’re creating the content for.
The most important thing is to pick one evergreen form of content that you’ll stick with. Creating content consistently is super important so it’s way more to choose one and do it well than try and stumble thru doing all three.
Blogging
Blogging is my go-to form of evergreen content creation. Even though writing blogs is not necessarily my favorite task I personally don’t have the bandwidth to do a podcast right now and the last thing I want to do is to be on camera constantly for a YouTube channel.
Blogging is arguably the easier type of evergreen content to make because all you need to get started is a laptop and a website. And even if you do go with one of the other two evergreen strategies those also involve blogging.
Why You Need a Blog on Your Website
Podcasting
Podcasts are becoming more popular than ever, and it seems like someone’s starting one every day. The nice thing about podcast listening is that if someone is willing to give you an hour or even a half hour of their time they’re a very warm potential customer.
The bad news about podcasting is that podcast episodes don’t show up in search results on their own or very very rarely. You have to create blog posts with a link to the episode in question followed by a word-for-word transcript if you want it to be searchable.
Youtube Videos
Creating a YouTube channel for your business is another form of evergreen content. But YouTube videos also have some of the same problems with podcasting (but not quite as bad) that you need to create corresponding blog posts with transcripts for all of your videos to help with coming up in search results.
Drive Traffic to Your Website via Social Media
The secondary content component to getting traffic to your website is thru social media. Unlike evergreen content social media posts don’t rank in search engines (*Pinterest is an exception to this—more on this in a sec*). Therefore the one and only primary goal of any content that you create for social media needs to lead to your website. Or at least 90% of it does. Yes—you may want to create some types of posts that are just for social media—but the majority of your content needs to lead to your website.
Pinning content on Pinterest goes hand and hand with creating other content on your website. AND unlike all of the other social media platforms, Pinterest does have an evergreen component. Are pins going to have as long of a shelf-life as a blog post? Who knows *shrug*—but pins do last significantly longer than say an Instagram post so I’d still put it in the evergreen bucket. That’s because Pinterest search has SEO worked in aka. They want your old content to come up in searches if it’s still relevant. And unlike say Instagram they’re not as afraid to send people to your content and have them leave Pinterest to view it. Instagram on the other wants people to stay on their platform so you’ll often find that it’s hard to get people from your feed to your website.
Now you might be thinking that you can do Pinterest by itself. But you need content on your website that you can pin. You’ll need to either blog, podcast or YouTube along with Pinterest to be successful.
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Linkedin, etc.
Social media posts very very very very very rarely rank in search results. It doesn’t mean that you have to avoid social media entirely (though if you want to you most certainly can). BUT it does mean the primary goal of posting on any of these social media platforms needs to be getting someone off of your feed to your website. Which in case you haven’t guessed already can be difficult, but not impossible. Because Instagram in particular doesn’t like people to get off of their platform.
Instagram Marketing Alternatives for Introverts
Build Your Email List
The last key component of getting more traffic to your website is building your email list. Most people who land on your website aren’t going to want to buy or book from you the first time that they land on your website. AND the best way to stay in contact with them is via your email list. And once someone is on your email list you can in push them back to your website via your newsletters.
That’s why it’s super important to have a freebie/freebies on your website as an opt-in incentive on your website. Because most people aren’t going to just subscribe to your newsletter unless you give them a reason to like a free download, discount code or something like that.
What Email Marketing System is Best for Creative Entrepreneurs?
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