• 131
• 255
• 14

So you want more traffic to your WordPress site

by bernt & torsten

Do you check your traffic statistics? Are they go up or staying steady maybe even dropping. More traffic leads to more exposure., which will be the key to your success, so you need to be obsessed with site statistics.

You probably know that already, it’s important to have a steady flow of visitors and page views. If you been having a site for a long time, you are aware that you need to create great content on a regular basis. You would need to, focus on creating content that would solve your target audience’s biggest pain points while maintaining a consistent posting schedule.

Long-tail keywords

Focus on long-tail keywords, focus your efforts on including common phrases and terms that appear in conjunction with your main keyword.

Promote

Promote your content on social media. Being on several social media services will help you in fostering relationships with influencers in your industry, curating their content while inconspicuously adding your own links to the curating content. While you can automate the majority of work when it comes to social media, you cannot automate creating relationships. And that alone can take a significant chunk of time out of your already busy schedule.

You can use tools to automate the work you need to do on social media, for creating relationships you need to spend time in contacting your contacts, which will take up some of your time.

Competitors

The problem is that everyone is doing this, your competitors, what do you have to do to stand out? How do you attract attention and turn that attraction into traffic for your website?

There are other methods that you can incorporate into what you already doing to increase the traffic to your website. You might already have used them, I just add these tips to this article, so you can come back and look at them again.

SEO Tips

If you’ve paid attention to basic SEO tips, you’ve probably created categories for your website content. Instead of focusing on promoting one post, promote your categories and add some SEO to them?

Go to the backend of your WordPress site click on Posts > Categories. From there, click on Category Descriptions and fill out the description field. This is a great place to include a long-tail keyword that makes sense for your niche. Once you are done, click Save. This can help you a long way to get on top of search engine results.

Create a Start Here Page

Improve your existing About page by adding links to your most important pages and posts that bring in the most traffic, and rename it into “Start Here” or something similar. Use it as a page that will give people an overview of what your site is all about and that can act as a one-stop-shop for getting up to speed with what you do quickly.

Create Resource Pages

Do you have a list of must-have tools and apps you use in your everyday life? Create a page that will list them all, along with a brief description of why you like them. Then link to those posts on the Resource page.

Create a page that lists all the posts containing your valuable free content. If you can tie those resources cohesively like a series of how-to posts, that will help you increase the traffic.

Repurpose Content

Who says you have to constantly create new content? Take your existing content and repurpose it. From one blog you could create an audio podcast, a video post, a slideshow presentation, a PDF guide, or a checklist… You are limited only by your imagination.

Run a Contest/Giveaway

If you sell products or services on your website, create a special offer like a chance to win a huge discount on your most popular product or give away one of your service packages for free. Ask your visitors to share your offer on social media for a chance to win.

Start a Forum on Your Website

An active forum can be a great way to expand the conversation, increase time visitors spend on your site, build a community and decrease your bounce rate. On top of that, forums can begin ranking for long-tail keywords rather quickly.

Using Social Media to Increase Traffic

Social media can play a large role in driving people to your site. Simply curating content and scheduling updates isn’t enough. Reaching out to people on a one-on-one basis is wonderful as you can establish great and valuable relationships.

Optimize Your Profile

Your social profile should be optimized for every social media account you are active on. Having all details like photos, bio and links to your website are critical.

The URL you add-in should go to a page for the social network on your site, that page can offer a checklist with tips and tricks for the social network users, or tools that help you manage social networks more effectively, including a call to action on that page – either a signup form for your newsletter or a link that will lead them deeper into your site.

Take Advantage of Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are a great place to participate in conversations where you provide genuine insight on a specific topic that will inevitably lead to people clicking on your profile to learn more about you which is where the previous tip of optimizing your profile comes in handy.

As a complement to your website, you can go a step further and create your own Facebook group where members can ask questions, get support from others, and also gain direct access to you.

Use LinkedIn to Drive Traffic

There are many different ways of using LinkedIn to increase website traffic but let’s focus on three major ones here.

LinkedIn Groups

Similarly to Facebook groups, you want to join relevant LinkedIn groups and be active. Post thoughtful comments in discussions, create your own discussions and go above and beyond to be helpful.

LinkedIn Answers

The other great way to build authority within your industry and drive traffic back to your site is LinkedIn Answers.

LinkedIn Pulse

Having your article featured on Pulse is equal to having a guest blog post published on the top blog in your specific niche.

How to Leverage Pinterest to Increase Site Traffic

The easiest way to drive traffic to your website from Pinterest is by making sure every image you pin from your website has a brief summary of what the pin and/or article is about. The summary needs to pique the interest of your target audience and should be followed up with a call to action to click through to read the rest of the post or to download a checklist or a free worksheet.

Using Social Currency

Among various social media sharing plugins, there are those which allow you to “charge” your site visitors for content with a simple like, tweet, follow, or share from the social network of your choice. This method works well when you offer downloadable content on your websites such as a checklist, a PDF, a short ebook, or something similar.

Answer a HARO Query

HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and it serves as a sourcing service in the English-speaking world, connecting journalists with relevant expert sources to meet journalists’ demanding deadlines and enable brands to tell their stories. Answering a pitch only takes a few minutes, and leads to great PR, high-quality inbound links, as well as referral traffic to your site.

Submit Answers on Quora

Quora is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field and to come up with blog topics when you run into writer’s block.

Quora is filled with new questions on a daily basis and some of the questions sometimes go unanswered for a long period of time. You can sign up for email notifications on topics relevant to your niche and provide short and concise answers.

Then you can provide a more detailed answer in a blog post and update your answer to include the link.

Write an eBook

You might think that writing an ebook has nothing to do with website traffic. However, a simple Kindle book can lead to a significant increase in your traffic. You can link directly to your website inside the book when you submit your book to Kindle Direct Publishing.

Host webinars or online workshop

People love to learn, and webinars are an excellent way to share your knowledge with your audience. When you combine webinars with a social media promotion campaign along with some clever email marketing, you can expect an increase in your website traffic.

Send out an email a few days before the webinar takes place, as well as a few last-chance reminders on the day before the webinar as well as on the day of. Once the webinar is done, you can offer a replay for either a set amount of time (between 48-72 hours) or archive it and allow those who missed it to watch it whenever they want.

Offline ways of increasing website traffic

Working with websites, it’s not uncommon to forget that there is a world outside the internet. And you might think that there is no way of promoting a website offline. But, you’d be wrong.

Sometimes, you can achieve great results by connecting your website with something tangible.

A few ways you can do this include:

• Put your site URL on business cards
• Create branded t-shirts
• Create branded posters
• Create branded postcards
• Take your blog posts, re-format them into a zine, and drop a pile off at your local coffee shop
• Have mugs made
• Have branded stationery or pens made
• Create a branded calendar
• Have keychains or door magnets made

But these aren’t the only ways to promote your website in the offline world. You can also:

Attend and Participate in Events

Check out your local Chamber of Commerce for meetups and events, or use Meetup to network with people from your industry. You can also attend a fair related to your industry.

Book a Speaking Gig

For you that do not know me, I have always stated that everyone has a story to tell, use that story and the experience that you have to help others. Take your story and create a PowerPoint presentation, then you can pitch that idea to event organizers in your field of expertise and hopefully, you get included in an event to present as a speaker.

If that happens, make sure that you have handouts or other information on how you can be contacted ad links to your websites.

Make sure that at an event you get your presentation recorded as a video, and put it on Youtube or iTunes that you can share across the web. This is the building block of becoming an authority in your field of expertise.

Ask Your Friends and Family for Help

As a last resort, you can ask your friends and family for help, let them know about your website and ask them to send your blog link to at least three people they think will find it valuable. Be careful and do not do this too often.

Conclusion

There is just some ideas that I have brought forward of bringing in web traffic, treat it as a starting point and try to find even more ways of generating traffic for your own sites.

What are your favorite methods of increasing website traffic? Which ones from my list have you used?