I have been working with online technologies for 16.5 years this month. My experience has spanned web design, blogging, mailing lists, bulletin boards, social media, and so on.
Trust me when I say that I have tried and failed with many technologies in an effort to drive traffic to different websites. Despite my failures, I have found 3 indispensable tools that work together to drive traffic.
1. Blog
The hub of the three tools is the blog.
You must plan to post regular content on your blog (I post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on this blog). This will do three things: it will provide fresh content for your website, provide content you can share, and will make your website SEO rich.
By providing fresh content, you will give your readers a reason to keep returning to your site, creating loyal fans out of them.
Your blog posts give you content you can share via social media, by email, or by search engines.
By linking to other blogs posts and pages on your website, you can improve the search rankings of your website content.
Make sure your blog posts have social share buttons (see the bottom of this post for example) and that somewhere on the blog are links to your social media pages.
2. Newsletter
Set up a newsletter using MailChimp, iContact, or one of dozens of other mailing list solutions. Send an email to your customers, inviting them to join your mailing list, explaining what content you will share and how often it will go out (I send mine out every Friday). Do not add them without their permission.
The great thing about this newsletter is you already created the content, so you don’t need anything new. Just use the content from your blog. Try to use images and only a short blurb, providing links to your posts. Here’s an example of mine. Make sure to link headings, images, and action words.
Don’t forget to link to your social media pages in your newsletter to drive traffic there.
3. Social media
It’s difficult to run a business without using social media today. Consumers expect to interact with businesses online: asking questions, finding out about specials, and sharing what they like most about their favourite companies.
Create your company social media page (see my Facebook and Google+ instruction posts). Populate it with content related to your business. This content could be news articles, related memes, product photos, tutorial videos and more. Be sure to check out my Stump the Social Media Guy series for ideas.
One good source of content is your blog posts. Try to include images or video if you can. These are the most engaging types of content and will encourage more likes, comments, shares, and clicks.
Another good source of content is past newsletter issues. This will further drive traffic to your blog and will also increase subscribers.
As you can see the key to good traffic is by integrating these three tools. They must work together to drive traffic.