We all realize that Google is the gatekeeper of most search traffic and controls a fair amount of ad traffic too.
We also understand, as experienced and smart business owners that we need diversity built into our business model, especially when it comes to getting traffic, leads and sales for our online business.
The challenge is, how else can we get traffic to our website other than through the big G?
1. Referral Traffic
One of my favorite methods of getting traffic is via referrals, or via other websites that refer people to you.
How does this happen?
- Offer an affiliate program for your products or services, affiliates then refer traffic to you in return for a percentage of sales. There are people and businesses online that make 90% of their leads and sales from affiliate traffic alone, while that number may not be achievable, you should work toward getting between 25% and 50% of your traffic from affiliates. These are typically “warm” leads because they come with some degree of qualification and recommendation which means they tend to convert at a higher level assuming you have done a good job attracting and signing your key affiliates
- Syndicated content…your content should be good enough and relevant enough that others in your industry either syndicate and refer back to your site or simply refer their subscribers and leads to your content. This will amazingly happen quite naturally if you create great content
- Tool, gathering place or other useful resource. Can you think of a simple tool (think of a financial or mortgage calculator as one example or a goal setting template, etc…) that helps prospects in your market, if you can, then you will find huge referrals as list owners are always looking to give their lists useful referrals
Getting referral traffic is more a mindset than anything, if you keep in mind that you want to attract other list owners to send you their traffic then you can often come up with some pretty simple content ideas to give them a landing place
2. Great (Useful and Relevant) Content
At the end of the day, one of the main reasons people use the internet is useful and relevant content. The more regular, relevant content you produce (articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts or audios) you can create the more traffic you will get. Some of it will be from Google, but more of it will come from other search engines, referrals, and your past viewers who will come back making your site even more “sticky” making the likelihood that a visitor will take further action and either become a hot lead or buyer.
3. Social
Each year the degree to which one social platform outperforms another may change, but in general, social is quickly becoming a main way that people interact, discover, sharing and recommend content as well as products and services. The sooner you become involved and learn the basics of social networking (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pintrest, YouTube, etc…) the sooner you will figure out what works, gain your following and generate traffic, leads and sales directly from social. Once you gain credibility, followers and shares on social you get the added bonus of getting extra clout behind your content as search engines continue to add social networking cues to their search algorithms. Over time, you continue to get twice the benefit – definitely worth your time and effort.
4. Offline Conferences, Shows, Town Halls, Meetings, Seminars
The really great marketers have figured out that the power of online marketing combined with some offline techniques is more powerful than one or the other on its own. For instance, networking at a relevant industry conference can get you a few top quality partners who then setup referrals to your sites and double your leads and sales overnight. This really does happen. Or, you decide to run a 1-day seminar on your topic, bring in a few speakers who also run their own seminars and will have you speak means you get 4-5 speaking engagements in a year where you are in front of anywhere from 25-a few hundred highly qualified, targeted leads who then spread the word on social networks can bring you thousands of unique visitors and hundreds of new customers. Combining offline with online is really the future of business marketing
5. Buy Your Traffic
Advertising, when it comes to getting online traffic, has received bad press in this new world of content, search and social, but if you know your audience, know where to look to find reasonably priced ad opportunities and you have a website that converts on leads and customers you can really enhance your income substantially by buying your traffic. The key is to start small, test, refine and get your conversions to a point where financially rolling out a large-scale traffic campaign makes sense.
There is no reason to rely overwhelmingly on any one traffic source when you are marketing online, doing so is simply a risk that you should not be willing to take.
The challenge is that too many of us become more dependent on Google than we should for the majority of our online traffic, leads and sales.
Sure, you still want to attract traffic from Google, search is still the primary way that people find what they are looking for online, but increasingly you want to look to augment your traffic with other sources.
Do you have another traffic source that we haven’t mentioned here? Leave us a comment.
