Getting more website traffic for free is easier than you think. And why is more website traffic so important? Because it means more leads and sales for your business.

In this article, I will show you how to get more visibility online to get more website visitors.

Disclaimer: This is a long-term strategy, that will take some time before it starts taking effect. So if you are looking for a quick fix to increase website visitors, then this article is not for you.

How to get more website traffic

I will show you a simple 3 step process to creating a Content Marketing Strategy, that if followed correctly will undoubtedly boost your website traffic. If you are willing to invest some time and implement the strategy properly and consistently, then you can say goodbye to paid advertising!

There are no complicated methods or intricate strategies involved in this process. Everything I discuss can be easily implemented by yourself. Are you ready for the 3 simple steps to getting more website visitors for free? Here they are:

1. Set up a blog
2. Create content
3. Share content

That’s it. I apologise if you were looking for something a bit more exciting or elaborate than that. But the truth is, that this is all you need. And if you implement those 3 steps, as I am about to demonstrate, then you can create a predictable traffic generating machine!

1. Set up a Blog

Before we dive into the “How To” part, let’s talk about why blogging is so important.

Let me ask you this – if you are looking for a solution to a problem, where do you go? Probably Google, or other search engines like Bing. You type your query or problem into Google, and within seconds you are provided with a million potential answers. Magic!

Those answers come in the form of blog articles and content, not created by Google, but by hundreds of thousands of people and businesses like you. Google’s one and only job is to decide which of those million answers are most relevant to your search query (here’s an article on how Google ranks websites.

People read blog articles and content to educate themselves on a certain topic, service or even company. Who better to educate potential customers on your services than you? Or would you rather let them read about it on a competitors website?

In summary, a blog will help you to do 3 things:

1. Establish yourself as an authority in the field (which means more people will want to read & share your articles)
2. Build trust with your readers (making it easier for you to convert them into leads & sales)
3. Boost your search engine rankings (badda bing, badda boom, more website traffic)

Here is a great article on how to set up a blog using WordPress.

2. Create Content

This is categorically where 99% of businesses go wrong when they want to get more website traffic.

Chances are that you already have a blog, but you are posting infrequently and even then you aren’t sure what you should be posting. The problem is not the “doing” but the “strategy”. The trick with creating good content is knowing where to start.

You should start with a content strategy. For our clients, we use a two-phased approach:

Phase 1 – Foundation Content:

Foundation content is what we use to populate empty blogs for our clients. Generally, it’s content about their business, services and products. The fastest way to come up with foundation content for your business is ‘frequently asked questions’:

1. Write down as many of the questions your clients ask about your products or services.
2. Write the answer to those questions in 500 words or more.

Voila, you have foundation content. Within no time at all, you could have 5, 10 or even 20 quality blog articles that help visitors educate themselves on your products, services or even industry.

Phase 2 – Marketing Content:

Marketing content is less about your own business and more about providing valuable insight to your readers, and helping them make a better buying decision.

1. Create a customer avatar – who is your ideal client, what’s their name, how old are they, what are their hobbies, where do they spend time online?
2. Write down their pain points – what are the problems you solve for them? I.e. what would cause someone to look for your services.
3. Brainstorm some articles & content ideas – come up with content ideas for each pain point.

Following this strategy for each of your services and buyer personas will give you a solid content strategy, with a ton of content ideas. The best part is that you will no longer be thumb sucking your content – each article you write will be relevant to a particular type of customer and the problems they have.

But, if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. So, the next step would be to create a Content Calendar. Schedule 1 article or content piece per week, until you have used up all of the ideas from your brainstorming session. Set reminders in your Outlook, Apple or Gmail calendars and stick to the damn schedule!

The last thing to remember when creating content is to create valuable, share-worthy content! Do not just write articles for the sake of writing articles – this leads to poor content that no one will want to read or share. Put some effort in, do research, draw diagrams – remember you aren’t just creating content, you are creating value!

Bonus Tip: You will need to optimise each blog article for search engines once you have written it, here’s an article on how to do SEO for blogs.

In summary, the 3 golden rules for creating content are:

1. Relevancy – using this content strategy will allow you to create content that is relevant to your customers.
2. Consistency – stick to your schedule! Google loves blogs that are constantly being updated.
3. Quality – when you write an article ask yourself a) Would my customers find this article useful b) would they share it with their friends.

3. Share Content

It’s going to take a while before these articles start generating more website traffic by themselves. And speeding up this process is a catch-22 situation to be honest – because you need the traffic to get traffic. I know… but bear with me.

Using blog articles as an example; it can take months before Google starts ranking your articles. And even then, Google’s algorithm will determine how well the article will rank (i.e. whether it’s page 1 material, or page 592). So to get Google to index your article more quickly, you have to generate some traffic yourself.

Luckily, today it is very easy to get your content in front of people. Here are some tactics you can use:

1. Email – every time we write a new article, we send an email out to our database with a link. This gets us a few hundred hits on an article almost instantly.
2. Facebook – Facebook is the king of content – people are reading and sharing images, videos and articles all the time. So share your content on your company page, groups and your own personal page. Encourage people to like and share.
3. Twitter – every day there are trending tags (topics) on Twitter, if you have a piece of content that can leverage off a trending tag, then post a link and hashtag it! This does involve checking Twitter every day, but the results are worth the effort.
4. Linkedin – if you’re a B2B company, then LinkedIn is the place to be. Post your articles on your feed, company feed and on any groups, you follow. A popular form of content on LinkedIn is SlideShare – which is essentially a PowerPoint presentation.

However you choose to share your content, just make sure that you do! The goal, of course, is to get people to share your content for you. And how do you do that? By creating content that is worth sharing!

Bonus: Not-so-free website traffic

The strategy we have discussed above will increase your “organic traffic” – which is traffic from search engine results that is earned, not paid for. But if you are like me, then you want results now. Therefore you can look at driving some “paid traffic” to your website through PPC (pay per click) methods:

1. Facebook Ads – when you write a new article, post it to your company page and boost the post for a few hundred Rand. This will show your post to thousands of people within a few hours. Facebook also allows you to really pinpoint specific target audiences.
2. LinkedIn Ads – very similar to Facebook in that you can share your article with a highly targeted audience. The main difference is that LinkedIn is more suited for B2B.
3. Google Ads – drive traffic directly to landing pages on your website. A landing page is like a sales page for a specific product or service. Don’t just send people to your home page – create ads for each of your services, and link those ads to the service pages on your site.

Bonus Bonus: Paid Traffic vs Organic Traffic

Paid traffic should definitely be a part of your online marketing strategy, but it should not be the entire strategy. To produce a consistent amount of website traffic that provides consistent leads, you need a paid traffic strategy and a content marketing (free traffic) strategy. It’s important you know the benefits of both methods:

The biggest takeaway should be that a Content Marketing strategy (free traffic) will yield better, more consistent results in the long run. All the content you create (articles, infographics, videos, eBooks) will not only boost your website rankings but will build trust with your audience making it more likely that they will do business with you.