Whatever you’re selling on the Internet, you need a specific kind of traffic that converts and sells best for what you have to offer.
I’m sure you found countless of claimed-to-be top notch traffic sources. As I’m pretty sure that most didn’t live up to your expectations.
Best case scenario? A few ads clicks. Worst case scenario, lots of ghost or spam automated traffic. An even dramatic scenario, you got banned/de-indexed from search engines for using shady tactics to drive traffic.
Mark my word and never settle for less: if any traffic doesn’t convert, IT DOESN’T WORTH THE TROUBLE.
I’m laying down all the good traffic sources you can invest your time and money to get a real return on investment.
If you are looking for a one-click traffic source, this is not for you. If you don’t work your ass off, you won’t get anything worth it, in traffic, business and life in general.
Let’s get started! Here are 40 tested traffic methods that you can start to use right now.
SEO is a natural tool to get free traffic. Getting a spot on search results seems easy, but the truth is, it needs lots of work and time to take place and be implemented properly and effectively. Consider SEO as your long-term and lasting traffic strategy.
Search engines are great for long-term and accurate traffic acquisition. You don’t get automatically added to their index unless you perform some actions following their requirements.
Actions
Internal links are an important step on SEO ranking. They help spread the link juice from one article/page to another. A smart internal link strategy can keep your visitors on your website for longer by visiting complementary articles or related subjects.
Action
Advice
Schema is a set of specific of tags (or microdata) structures design to help search engines better understand your content. A successful and relevant Schema implement will give search results a more informative data showed, like:
And other useful information.
The better your data is explained, the higher click through on search results you get.
Images are a popular component of any article nowadays, and some search engines happen to rank them in their image search results. It’s another opportunity to get relevant traffic to your website by simply optimizing and documenting your images properly.
Actions
WordPress Tools
Search engines optimization best practices have a set of on-site requirements bound with rank signals. Having them implemented enhances your chances to get noticed by search engines for your ranking keyword considerably.
Action
Complementary
A quality, highly targeted and added-value content can help you get more traffic for mid- and long-term runs.
Google has more than 200 ranking factors. Each has its own influence on the ranking algorithm.
Experts happen to assume that content particularly is one of the top 3 factors. A detail that was confirmed by one of Google’s spokesmen, Andrey Lipattsev, while answering experts’ questions on Google’s Q&A, March 2016 edition.
Additionally, quality content makes your visitors more interested in your writes. You can easily get more subscribers, visitors hanging around longer and sharing your best and most interesting pieces of content. All those behaviors contribute to increasing your traffic indirectly.
Action
Lengthy articles are starting to rise interests as an efficient way to get noticed by search engines, rank comfortably and get quality backlinks in the process.
Notes
Advice
Long tail keywords are a new trend for online marketing.
Concept
Instead of focusing on highly competitive one or two words keywords, concentrate on longer and more specific requests by using keyword phrases. The traffic has less volume but at the same time, it has way better quality and convertibility.
Tools
Take advantage of known and interesting products, services or business by writing good and honest reviews. You can possibly top search results for your reviewed items and get a good chunk of traffic.
Your website needs to be review-friendly. This can be done on WordPress by using the appropriate plugin.
Plugins
Products pages are generally a genuine source of interests. Visitors will always try to read thoroughly to forge their buying decision upon the information they get there.
Have a clear, highly informative, and extensively written product descriptions will definitely help search engines to see it as a quality and interesting content.
Advice
Action
No one can deny the power of social media in modern marketing. With more than 2 billion monthly active users, connected and sharing content, it is by far the best place to push links to your web properties.
The following are some actions you can take to benefit the most of the social media, and use it as a reliable traffic source. A lot of those actions are easy to execute and done once.
Always document the website section on your social profiles.
Action
Social media platforms
Branding is one of the recently praised best practices to rank in search engines. One of the many ways to help strengthen your brand recognition is to use social signals from relevant sources.
Action
Advice
Platforms with business pages abilities
Never underestimate sharing your content on social media! Obvious but still worth the reminder.
A solid social media presence helps growing links reach and discovery. It can bring a fair amount of traffic with a minimum of efforts through automated shares.
Just to correct some misconceptions. Not only a written content gets clicks and traffic. It does apply to all kinds of content including pictures, videos, and even documents.
Action
Social media platforms
Lots of Q&A platforms rely on visitors contributions to answering people concerns and questions. These platforms are free to join.
Your contributions can be used to link to your website at many levels.
Action
Advice
Always use the following balance on your contributions:
Q&A platforms
Sharing buttons are a powerful tool to help your content get to similar visiting profiles. Unfortunately, most sharing tools focus only on public social networks, and rarely, or never, make it possible to share with messaging apps.
This is another opportunity to open up to other platforms and get some traffic out of it.
Platforms
WordPress sharing tools
Adding documents to your content is another way to attract attention and help find your website back. Infographics, PDFs, online SpreadSheets are an example of formats you can compile and share publicly.
The sharing process can also be done on dedicated platforms like Slideshare, Slides.com or Google Docs.
Again, quality and added value content are keys to motivating shares and referrals to your content.
Action
Advice
Platform for slides
Platforms for online documents
Platforms to share Infographics
Sharing third party links brings diversity to your audience, but at the same time, deviates traffic from your website to other ones.
Few sharing tools allow branding your shared links to make sure visitors have your links always displayed, even on third party website. Instead of showing the target website page, those sharing tools use an iFrame with your website’s button always showing on top of any site.
Platforms
You’ve invested lots of time to build quality content. It’s a shame to see it buried with time.
Luckily, many social media tools can help you revive old posts. Scheduling a long term reshare helps to get clicks and visits for your site.
Advice
Tools
Everyone on social media wants to grow their audience. Many communities, pages, and accounts managers wouldn’t mind selling or exchanging shout outs.
Action
Advice
Social media is all about engagement with others. The extensive use of hashtags helps quickly identify relevant topics to consider commenting, discussing or at least poking!
The goal is to get exposed by interacting with other social media users. And get them to check out your profile and eventually place a couple of self-promotion links.
Advice
Action
Platforms facilitating discussions
It’s a great way to involve parties with larger audiences to give more exposure to your content.
The only issue here is that you need a stunning content.
You can even reach out to mentionable known figures and brands, and tell them that they got a spot on your article. If your content is up to their PR standards, there is a good chance they will mention you on their social media profiles.
Advice
Action
Links
Communities are the synonym of highly targeted traffic. Getting involved, sharing content there or simply joining will help community members discover your website through your profile and shares.
Advice
Platforms with communities
Other potential targets
Press is a powerful medium to quickly gain visibility. It remains a viable option for established businesses and individuals able to provide interesting stories, value or quality content.
Just don’t venture into this realm if you don’t have what it takes. Most of the time, you have only one shot to get approved.
Google News is a news aggregator crafted by Google. If you have a news website or happen to post timely content, you can start thinking about getting in Google News.
Quality and frequency are critical to enable this feature. Some technicalities regarding the content’s structure are required too.
Action
Advice
The online publication industry is heavily saturated. They are always looking for new stories, products, services or features fitting their editorial profile.
Action
Advice
Most of us use emails every single day to communicate with family, friends, suppliers, and customers. Emails can be used to open a couple of traffic opportunities with nearly no efforts.
Some aspects of our businesses or personal processes may include automatic response to inquiries, like welcome emails, thank you emails, different shopping processes notifications, and similar.
Each response email can seamlessly include a link back to your website.
Action
Advice
Include links to your most important websites and blogs on your email signature. It will help you promote some aspects of your business that you can’t throw directly to your email recipient.
Action
Advice
Some actions can be done within your website to enhance your chances to increase traffic by ranking better in search results and having a ready to use mailing list to notify your subscribers.
The building, growing and maintaining an email list takes time and investment. But the reward is totally worth it. A significant and targeted email list is the best and easiest traffic boost you could get.
Action
Complementary tools
WordPress tools
Contests and giveaways are both a smart and small investment way to get traffic.
Concept
You set a reward to be distributed to one or several participants. The key is to add incentives to increase social sharing, following, and engagement. That way, you take full advantage of each participant’s social network to boost participation and at the same time get a consequent traffic.
WordPress plugins/platforms
Affiliation is one of the most powerful promotional methods on the internet. The concept is simple: affiliates attempt to sell your offer by sending prospects to your website. If a sale does occur, you pay a commission for the affiliate who brought that business to you.
The great thing about affiliate programs is, even if there are no sales, you always get relevant traffic to your website.
Advice
WordPress tools
There are a couple of opportunities to get featured on 3rd party websites and get some traffic out of it.
Some actions can be done within your website to enhance your chances to increase traffic by ranking better in search results and having a ready to use mailing list to notify your subscribers.
And I mean by that platforms that help discuss and engage readers easily and efficiently.
So far, the only platform I have tested and had good results using it is Medium.
Concept
Release an introductory blog post at Medium that links to your long-form content (1500 words and more). Think of it as advertising the topic of your main content.
The goal is to expose the topic, start discussions about it and bring the same dynamic to your main website.
Advice
Platform
Professional journalist and reporters always need experts’ takes on different subjects. Try to become one of those experts for hire or become a free expert consultant.
You need to be an established name in your field of expertise, with relevant and easy to check credentials.
Advice
Platforms
Publishing your articles on third party websites can get you a tremendous amount of traffic, especially if you get an opportunity on high traffic websites.
You can exchange guest posts with similar blogs and business as yours.
Magazines and newspaper have doors open for contributors, and most of them have an automated publishing platform for that. You just need to have quality and interesting writes to share.
Advice
High traffic publishers accepting contributors
Advertising is the most controllable source of traffic you can get.
We all hope to get free traffic, with minimal investment, but sometimes, paying for it is an inevitable road to take to get targeted traffic with the highest chance to convert. While we can find countless ads platforms, I’m going to mention only a couple of the most useful ones around.
Google Adwords let you publish your ads on both their search results and their ad network. It’s the largest, most diverse ad system you can use.
Google doesn’t offer tons of options to filter your ads display. But still, it’s efficient and can bring quality traffic to your website.
Google uses a bidding system to display ads. The advertisers compete for a specific keyword, the more it will cost to get you displayed on it. Sometimes advertising budgets can run out in no time.
Advice
Platform
Bing is not the sexiest search engine around. But it does shine in two aspects:
Try it, and see if it can get you enough traffic to stick with it.
Platform
The best you can afford.
Facebook Ads have a tremendous plethora of filters to help you build extremely accurate ads campaigns tailored specifically for your target.
The competition started to increase lately since everyone is turning to Facebook to get something profitable going. But still, you get away with lots of traffic if you pick the right audience and the right type of ads.
Advice
Platform
Native ads are the new hot ads medium of these last couple of years.
Concept
Ads do seamlessly look like regular posts. For that alone clickthroughs skyrocket considerably compared to any other advertising methods.
Depending on your target, the CPC of native ads can be extremely low or abnormally high.
Note
Native ads networks
In some cases, running ads directly on one website can give more returns than a broad ad campaign on Google or Facebook. It just needs to have your targeted audience.
Actions
Platforms
Some companies, blogs, open source projects, associations, charities, have sponsorship slots on their newsletters. If their audience fits your targeting criteria and the sponsorship fee is reasonable, go for it! You will certainly get some traffic out of it if you can place a relevant offer.
Advice
Warning
The offline realm is not to be excluded from your traffic quest efforts. We interact with the real world in so many ways, produce and distribute a consequent amount of printed materials. It won’t cost a lot to extend both and bring some traffic out of it.
Some local businesses still use printed materials to promote their products and services in face to face situations. If it’s your case, don’t miss the opportunity to add your website’s link out there.
Printed materials
Advice
Building a brand and helping people get exposed to it is a great way to land some customers from offline channels.
The idea is to design and produce branded gifts and distribute them for free.
Gifts ideas
Action
Some marketplaces
You can use your physical presence to promote your website’s link.
For stores and events, having a visible link around allows prospects, not ready to buy or engage yet, to visit your site later.
For everything else, it doesn’t hurt to expose your link on the road while you commute.
Action
Advice
Each industry has its activities, local, regional, and international. To make those happen, the organizers habitually open up for sponsoring opportunities to cope with the activities’ charges or some aspects of it.
The counterpart is usually monetary but it doesn’t exclude, in some cases, outsourcing an aspect of the organization to other companies and add them as sponsors.
You can be on the deciding side and host the activity by yourself, or your company’s means, instead of sponsoring it.
The good thing about sponsoring is you get exposed to a highly targeted audience, whether they decide to get involved in the activity or not.
Action
As you can see, there are multiple ways to get traffic to your website.
It’s up to where you typical audience hangs out and can be reached and what you can afford executing as a strategy.
Good luck on your traffic hunt journey
