We all want more traffic.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many “silver bullets” in online marketing. But, with a little hard work, this traffic strategy is sure to get more eyes to your website.
The chart below is a client’s blog traffic after six months of implementing this strategy. An almost 500% increase in blog visits in six months.
Why? Because they began creating content on a consistent basis.
If you’re committed to a content calendar, over the next six months you’ll see your web traffic increase. It may not look like the chart above but the strategy works for a few reasons.
The Strategy
It’s a two-step strategy that starts with one simple idea: Create content that your audience needs.
We created a plan to release 2-3 new blog posts each month. Not a huge commitment but enough to get some new content on the site AND make the content entertaining enough to keep readers coming back for more.
It sounds simple but it’s very effective.
The next step: Market that content. We had a variety of tactics outlined for marketing each piece of content, from social media and email marketing to strategic advertising and search engine optimization. We tested many different marketing tactics but the strategy remained the same: create content and send visitors to that content.
The Tactics
The more content you create, the more website pages available to be indexed by search engines. The more pages indexed, the higher the possibility of one of your pages being found.
Here is a visual from this client’s Google Webmaster Tools account showing the number of pages that were indexed before we began working with them in October as well as the current number of pages being indexed.
From 78 indexed pages to 110 indexed pages. An increase of 42 pages being indexed. We also did some search engine optimization work on the website to get pages indexed that hadn’t previously been indexed (a good topic for a future blog post…).
Use Your Assets
In addition to increasing the number of pages being found and crawled by search engines (increasing “organic” traffic), this client also had a good size social media following that was being engaged on a regular basis, but this audience wasn’t being fed new-original content on a regular basis.
This new content strategy gave us an excuse to encourage this audience to go to the website on a regular basis.
In addition to a social media following, this client also had an email list of previous customers.They were not currently sending emails to these customers on a regular basis, either.
Social media and email became two major channels for this client to share content regularly.
Last, we used community outreach events and digital advertising to target ideal customers. We offered free educational materials in exchange for their email address. This tactic increased the number of people we’d be emailing our content to on a regular basis.
The Results
- Blue bar (Direct Traffic): Increase of 900%. Growth mainly attributed to our email and community outreach efforts.
- Red bar (Organic Traffic): Increase of 117%. Growth attributed to searchers finding new and old blog posts.
- Green bar (Referral Traffic): Increase of 565%. Two large growth months due to traffic from “squeeze” pages that captured email addresses before sending visitors to the website
- Purple bar (Social Media Traffic): Increase of 2,069%. Growth mainly attributed to the increase of strategic communications with Facebook audience.
Get Started…
The social media and email audiences allowed us to increase traffic more quickly, but the increase in all areas of traffic proves that this is a strategy that works.
The more you hit the “publish” button, the greater the chances of your traffic increasing. Plain and simple. We’ve used it multiple times and haven’t seen negative results.
In fact, we’ve finally begun using this traffic strategy on our own business. We spend so much time helping our clients execute strategies that we often don’t have time to execute them ourselves.
Finally, we’ve decided to begin creating content that you need, on a regular basis.
We can’t wait to share our business results with you, and we can’t wait to see YOUR results. How could an increase in content help your website or business? Leave a comment below and don’t forget to measure everything so you can see the results.
