Free Website Advice: How Do I Get More Traffic to My Site?

Oh hey.

Did I mention that I launched my DIY Website Workshop this fall?

You know, the one where I walk small business owners and creative types step by step through creating their own strategic, beautiful website in just seven weeks.

To celebrate said launch, I invited Facebook friends and group members to send me their marketing and website questions for some free advice. Then I created a few short videos to answer those questions.

Today, I thought I’d share another of those videos.

If you’re a business owner, blogger, or entrepreneur with a website, this one’s for you.

How Do I Get More Traffic to My Website?

Transcript: Hey everybody, this is Gigi Griffis of gigigriffis.com and the DIY Website Workshop. As promised, I’m doing website and marketing Q&A.

Today’s question comes from Abbey and she says “Will you talk about better or secret ways to get traffic other than Pinterest, Facebook, and SEO?” 

So basically she has some erratic traffic coming to her site and wants to have some steadier traffic.

Now, before I talk about getting traffic, the most important thing to do is dial it back to a strategy level and ask why you want traffic and what do you want that traffic to do?

The first thing I’d do is sit down and figure out why you want to get more traffic to your site. Are you trying to build up traffic because you’re a blogger looking for sponsorship? Are you trying to build traffic because you’re a writer and you want to sell more books? Are you a dental office trying to get more patients through the door?

The reason that matters is because it’s not only about getting traffic, but about getting traffic that converts–that does the thing you want them to do. If you have 100,000 visitors a day, but they aren’t buying your book, that’s not helping you.

So, the first thing I’d do is make sure you understand what your actual goal is. Is your actual goal the traffic or is your goal to have someone hire you for a gig, buy your art, come to your small business? Because the way you approach things should start with what that goal is and who your target audience is, who is going to buy your book.

If you’re writing Middle Grade fiction, for example, then it’s probably parents and kids coming to your site and you don’t need to go off and attract the goth community to your site. And that’s obviously a silly example, but that’s where you need to start from.

It helps to start from a place of what is my strategy, what do I want my traffic to do, what is the site doing?

Once you have that in mind and you know what you want people to do on your site (and who you’re trying to attract), that can drive every decision you make about everything on the site. Including design, photography, content, and including how you try to get traffic in the door.

For example, if you’re using SEO and you have articles on your site about healthy eating but what you’re selling isn’t related to healthy eating, bringing people in for that keyword may or may not help your goals.

Once you’re clear on that, then we can start to look at different ways to bring in traffic. Some of the things that have worked for me:

:: Creating quality content and paying attention to SEO

:: Guest posting or writing elsewhere
If you’re blogging (or even if you are a business and aren’t blogging on your site), it can be useful to go find relevant places – whether someone else’s blog or an industry website that publishes articles by someone with your expertise (e.g. if you’re a dentist, perhaps an industry website that would want to publish a paper of yours and link back to your site) – to publish and get traffic sent back to you.

:: Social media

:: Forums and Facebook groups

But all of that requires knowing who you’re trying to attract, why you’re trying to attract them, and what you can do for them. If you’re going into a Facebook group of forum, you can’t just go advertise all the stuff you’re doing, but you can go in and be helpful. So if someone in there is asking how much braces typically cost and you’re the person with the answer to that question, you can pop in and say “hey, I wrote an article about that – here you go.”

You start also getting word of mouth if you’re creating good content, stuff like that.

So the baseline of my answer is, number one, go back to strategy. What are you trying to do? And how much does that traffic really matter.

In my mind, having a lot of traffic isn’t as valuable as having the right traffic. So if you have a small audience but they’re the right people, the people you’re trying to reach, the people you’re trying to connect with, that’s more valuable than a giant amount of traffic. Unless you have a specific reason you need that giant amount of traffic (like if you’re trying to get sponsorship and that’s a requirement).

Second thing I’d do is looking at guest posting, writing elsewhere, being helpful in communities…trying to be part of conversations and not push your stuff on other people but really, genuinely help them. So, the other question there is “what would genuinely help them?” and that should start you down the path of what you can create or where you can go to help.

I will be back later with more Q&A and if you are working on a website or need a website and you want to chat with me, I’ve just launched my DIY Website Workshop, which is a seven-week program by email with videos like this, worksheets, instructions. They’re going to help teach you how to manage, build, design your website. So if that’s something that interests you, check it out (link above).