Brian Basilico — October 4, 2017 — October 4, 2017
Certificates Of Appreciation
One of the things I get asked about a lot is how I increase traffic to my website. Then the question is, why do you want to increase traffic to your website? Well, hopefully to make more certificates of appreciation. Now, what is a certificate of appreciation? One of my friends and I were having a conversation one day, and we were talking about income and growing your business and all this other stuff. He pulled a dollar bill out from his wallet, and he held it in front of my face and said “Do you know what this is?” I said “Yeah, it’s a dollar bill.” He said “No, it’s not. This is a certificate of appreciation. The more that people appreciate what you do for them, the more of these they give you.” Whoa. He made a great point.
This same thing is true about increasing traffic to your website. The more good stuff you give people, the more they’re going to utilize what you have. What happens is a lot of people create websites, and they just sit there like a bump on a log. They don’t look at them, they don’t change them, they don’t do anything, and they say “Why am I not getting more business from my website?” Do you know that the average business gets only 300 visitors or 10 visits a day from any kind of traffic to their website? Now I work with people that get thousands per day, or thousands per month, rather than 300. What I want to give you are five ways that you can increase traffic to your website.
Update Your Website
The first thing you have to do is look at your website and say “Is it fresh? Is it time to update?” Not only the look and feel. That’s the beauty of a WordPress site, is you can put a new theme on it and you can change the look and feel in a heartbeat. But it’s not just the look and feel; it’s really the content that’s inside the website. Now, I am a cobbler whose kids have holes in their shoes. I’m so busy working on client stuff that I have a hard time updating my own, but I have to do it. I do post good content and we’ll talk about that a little later.
You’ve got to ask yourself, is it current? Is it current with what you’re doing today? A website that’s three years old is generally outdated because what you do as a business has changed. Your business has grown, your business has morphed into something new. You need to ask, “Is my website representative of what I’m doing today?” If it’s not, then update it. Update the pages, change the pages, get rid of some, add some new ones. Update that look and feel. Make sure that your website is engaging to the audience and talks to them the way they want to be talked to.
Check Your Analytics
The second thing you can do is check your analytics., which a lot of people don’t do enough. I recommend you have Google analytics on your WordPress website and you check it a minimum of once a week. You maybe even want to check it more. I tend to check it after every event. Meaning, when I post a blog, I check the website traffic. When I post a podcast, I check the website traffic. Now, you have to give it a day because it takes a day to register, so the day after I post something I go look at it to see if it increased the traffic. You have to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. If one particular post or blog or podcast tends to skyrocket your traffic, then do more of that. If it’s something that’s brought down your traffic, then stop that one. Look at what your audience is responding to.
Create Great Content
The third thing that you have to do is get in the habit of creating great content on your website. Google indexes sites that are updated on a regular basis. If you have a blog or a podcast and are doing that weekly, Google is going to force itself to index your podcast, index your website, index your blogs because there’s new stuff there and it wants to serve it up to its audience. Make sure you’re adding great new content to your website that people will consume.
Post To Social Media
The next thing you want to do is take the content that you’ve created and post it to social media. Now, here’s the caveat. You don’t want to just post new content all the time; you want to make sure that you’re talking to your audience in other ways. An example of this is every single day I have a quote of the day and I have my caption contest at night. Those two things create personal engagement with people. Now, you have to be careful with this personal engagement; you don’t want to do things that are divisive. It’s really easy to get into political arguments, or post topics that may create some divisiveness amongst your audience. Do things that are innocuous but more generic towards an entire audience. By doing things like that, it gives you permission to occasionally post things to your social media. Then, now that you’ve got peoples’ engagement, you can post a blog, or you can post a podcast.
On Facebook, the way you want to share content is you want to post your blog and your podcast to your business page. You’re not going to get a lot of engagement there because Facebook does not show business pages in news feeds anymore unless you pay for it. So you either have to advertise or you have to boost the post. The way I circumvent that, and this is the tip of the day, is to post it to the business page and then share it from your business page to your personal profile. Because you’re posting other things that they engage with, people are going to be less of “all this guy or this girl is doing is selling.” It almost gives you a “get out of jail free” card, hall pass, whatever you want to call it, when you use this way of presenting your business information in front of people on Facebook.
Some other social media can be a little harder, however. You can do some of that on LinkedIn, but it’s a little bit different. You can post to your wall and then share to groups, but you have to go into each group and post it now. Things like Twitter and Instagram don’t allow you to do that. On Instagram, you want to create accounts for each one of the brands whether it’s your blog or your podcast and then post things there. Of course, that’s pictures and it does not link back to the original content. Use each social media, the ones that you’re getting the most engagement with, in a way that’s going to suit the audience. Do your best to get that posted on a regular basis.
Engage With Your Audience
The final thing to do is engage with your audience. If somebody’s commenting on your stuff, comment back. Say thanks. Somebody said “This was a great response” to a post that I put up today, and I just liked it and commented back to say thanks. Make sure that you’re engaging with your audience when they engage with you, and they’ll do more of it. If you never engage with your audience, they’re basically going to ignore that stuff.
Secondly, you want to make sure that you ask people to do things. When you post a blog, when you post a podcast, make requests in the comments. Don’t put it in the main piece, but put it in the comments: “Hey, I’d love if you like this to share it with your audience or let other people know about this, and give me your comments and feedback or go to my blog and give me a comment there.” When you tell people what to do, they will generally do it. If you don’t tell them anything, guess what they do? Nothing. So, ask your audience to engage with your content, share it and comment, and then make sure you’re commenting back and engaging with them.
Final Thoughts
If you really want to increase traffic to your website, it takes a little effort. Make sure that you’re spending time thinking about how to improve your website, how to check your analytics, create great content, post to your social media, and engage with your audience. By doing those five things, you can just sit back and watch your traffic grow.
I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this subject. Comment below and share your thoughts and ideas on how you use currently try to increase web traffic to grow your business! Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/
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