Where to get targeted traffic

Even if you have a basic website , you still need to ensure that it is accessible and comfortably viewable across a range of devices , including smaller smartphones. Ever found yourself waiting thirty seconds for a webpage to load? Me neither. If your site takes forever to load, your bounce rate will be sky high. Make sure that your pages are as technically optimized as possible , including image file sizes, page structure and the functionality of third-party plugins.

The faster your site loads, the better. People want to speak their minds and weigh in on subjects they feel passionately about, so building a community into your site is a great way to start a conversation and increase traffic to your website.

Implement a robust commenting system through third-party solutions such as Facebook comments or Disqus, or create a dedicated forum where visitors can ask questions. You probably visit at least a few sites that are relevant to your business on a regular basis, so why not join the conversation?

Just remember that, as with guest posting, quality and relevance are key — you should be engaging with other people in your niche, not dropping spam links on unrelated websites.

Image via organictalks. Google Analytics is an invaluable source of data on just about every conceivable aspect of your site, from your most popular pages to visitor demographics. Keep a close eye on your Analytics data , and use this information to inform your promotional and content strategies.

Pay attention to what posts and pages are proving the most popular. Inspect visitor data to see how, where and when your site traffic is coming from.

Got a Twitter account? Then join in group discussions with relevant hashtags. Is your audience leaving comments on your Facebook posts?

Answer questions and engage with your readers. Nothing turns people off quicker than using social media as a broadcast channel — use social media as it was intended and actually interact with your fans. Choose a relevant subreddit, submit your content, then watch the traffic pour in. Why are backlinks important? So, if you want to get a tiny share of the overall traffic generated by Google and other search engines, is to make sure that your website is SEO optimized.

These platforms allow you to run paid campaigns and show your ads in the search results of Google and Bing for specific keywords. Unlike SEO that can get you traffic for free, in the case of paid search advertising you pay the search engine a fee every time someone clicks on your ads. In digital marketing , this is known as pay-per-click advertising. PPC campaigns are the fastest way to get targeted traffic.

Your goal should be to reach a point where you can get more free traffic from search engines and gradually minimize your paid advertising spend. Until very recently, traffic from social media was considered as non-targeted and while this is not completely wrong, things have changed dramatically in the last couple of years.

All major social networks think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have improved their algorithms to make social networking more targeted. The way to get targeted traffic from social media networks is to utilize their advertising platforms and run paid campaigns. While you cannot use keyword-based targeting like Google Ads , you can show your ads to a very specific set of people using other targeting conditions like the location of the user, device, age, gender, educational status, and interests.

This flexibility offered by social networks allows advertisers to segment the audience into groups and show them different ads, simulating the steps and groups of a typical sales funnel. Campaign 2 Targeted — Target people that interacted shared, saw your video, liked, commented on your previous ad campaigns.

Campaign 3 Highly targeted — Target people from campaign 2 that visited your sales pages because of a Facebook ad. While this is pretty much the same as search engine traffic explained above, it is worth noting that if you are after targeted traffic from mobile visitors, you need to have a mobile-friendly website otherwise you will not be able to reach users on mobile.

So, if you want targeted traffic make sure that you follow a mobile-first approach when designing your website and landing pages. For many, this may be a surprise but native mobile apps can drive targeted visits to a website and let me explain why.

A native mobile app either for Android or iPhone is uploaded to the mobile markets and in order to download it, users have to perform certain actions search for it, find it, and download it.

The fact that users are searching for something specific makes them targeted and if you can manage to satisfy their needs, you can win customers if you are selling something or new readers if you are a content publisher. How can you drive targeted traffic to a website through a mobile native app? In practice, this is a bit more complicated than creating an app and uploading the app to the mobile markets.

You have to think about what type of app to create, how to promote your app so that it is not lost in the millions of apps already available in those markets and most importantly how to make mobile app users visit your website and perform an action. Yet, few people know how to leverage Instagram to drive traffic to their website. However, many p eople have built multi-million dollar businesses solely by using Instagram as their main method for driving traffic.

LinkedIn's publishing platform is a great method for marketing the content that's already on your website. Publish a unique, high-quality post on LinkedIn that delivers an enormous amount of value and ensure that you link that content to anchor content on your blog or website to gain that all-important authority bridge to your primary post. Medium is one of my go-to platforms for marketing my content and provides another authority-site domain that gives you the versatility of link-dropping the way that you normally would through any blog post on a CMS like WordPress.

Leverage Medium to create intuitive content marketing posts that also link back to your primary posts on your site or blog. Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site or your blog, and to promote any offers, but it also means that you need a list to market to. Create a lead magnet and build a sales funnel immediately if you haven't already done so, in order to build up a list that you can eventually market not spam any of your offers to.

Historical refreshes of content is a good thing, especially if some of your content has expired. Note, this does not mean re-doing your content; simply refreshing it to bring it current if it isn't already evergreen content. Look at ways you can update outdated content on your site to drive more traffic through visibility on search engines like Google. Creating a free course is a great way to drive traffic to your site.

You can use Udemy , Teachable or any number of websites out there in order to do this. Ensure the course delivers an enormous amount of value and then pushes and links students to additional content and offers on your site.

Building high-quality infographics is simply one form of clickbait. There are loads of clickbait examples that you can utilize, but not all of them are created equal. However, if you can build a great infographic that many people will link to, you can essentially create an automated marketing machine for your site. Ensure you hire a great designer to do this. I'm always linking to industry-specific surveys through content on my blog.

This is a great way to draw in droves of links by delivering something of value. Ensure that it's specific to your niche and relevant to the content on your site or blog and then share that survey with the world. Serious about driving traffic? Then you need to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. Use Google's Page Insights Tool to check the friendliness of your mobile layout and see if it conforms to guidelines. You should also make sure that all your posts and content are AMP-specification ready.

Google and other search engines are inherently concerned about the speed of your site and page content. Free webinars offer a great platform for driving traffic to your website. You can automate your sales presentation with webinar platforms like Demio , GoToWebinar and others that exist out there.

Use the time to deliver value while also directing viewers to your site and its content along with any offers. Another great way to drive traffic to your site is to use Reddit.

Reddit is a wildly-popular platform where you can share useful information and engage in conversations with millions of people from across the planet. The domain is extremely popular, making any link from the site extremely useful for boosting your visibility across the web. You can use a platform like SlideShare to deliver powerful PowerPoint presentations that are Google-friendly, ultimately increasing your visibility.

If you do it right, and your presentations go viral, which they easily can on this platform, and that presentation links to your site, you will drive a large amount of traffic for free. Clearly, paying for ads and other initiatives is always one method to drive traffic to your site or blog.

If you have a small budget, and you track things properly, you can come up with a cost-per acquisition CPA. If your CPA is high enough, you can comfortably scale your advertising revenues.

Be sure to implement things like Facebook and Google tracking pixels to determine the effectiveness of your ads. Sending out regular newsletters and promoting offers through email is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and can also help to get traffic to your website. Provide useful information and links to pages on your website where they can learn more, such as through blog posts and landing pages for particular offers.

Also, put careful thought into your email subject lines. These heavily influence whether or not a user opens your email. Having an industry influencer publish a blog post on your site or turning an interview with them into a blog post can help to drive traffic both through organic search but also via that influencer promoting the content to their audience see the backlinks section above.

This can also help to add more variety to your content and show your visitors that you are active in your field. Alternatively, you could ask the influencer to mention your business in their own review or round-up post. This method is still free, but you still need the collaboration with the influencer to be an exchange with mutual benefit. You can also be a guest blogger.

Identify complementary businesses in your area whose audience is relevant to your business. See if you can contribute a post to their blog with a link back to your website. Comment on blogs and social media posts, answer questions people are posting, and participate in conversations about your industry. The more you engage with your community, the more exposure and profile visits you get. Just be sure to engage moderately and in a sincere way, and avoid including links to your website in your comments — lest you appear spammy and hurt your online and business reputation.

Increased traffic should not be the goal of your engagement, but rather a secondary result. Google Analytics is free to use, and the insights gleaned from it can help you to drive further traffic to your website.

Use tracked links for your marketing campaigns and regularly check your website analytics. This will enable you to identify which strategies and types of content work, which ones need improvement, and which ones you should not waste your time on. Paid advertising on Google is a great way to drive people to your website who are seeking out the services you provide. With Google Ads , you pay to have your website usually a landing page show up at the top of search results for particular keywords.

When a query is entered using those keywords, Google looks at all accounts bidding on those keywords and will display and rank the paid results according to the quality and relevance of the advertisement. Paid search results show up first, at the very top of the results pages. This type of exposure is a great way to generate more traffic to your website by qualified visitors. Furthermore, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

You can also select preferences through the Google Ads platform so that your business shows up at the top of Google Maps search results.

As with regular paid search ads, there will be an indicator next to your listing that this is a paid result, but the exposure you get from appearing at the top is invaluable.

Social media, display, and retargeting ads are all excellent types of online advertising strategies to boost website traffic. Display ads are branded banner ads that get placed on relevant websites.

If you are a fitness business and your ad appears on a webpage about athletic gear, your ad is likely to drive relevant traffic to your site. Retargeting ads can appear on websites or social media feeds. They are placed in front of people who have already visited your site once, and who are therefore more likely to return. There is such a thing as free website traffic, but there is no magic button or tool that just magically generates it independent of your own efforts.