21 Best ways on how to generate website traffic and market your website
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
How to generate website traffic and market your website – On-page strategies
How to generate website traffic:
This article is designed to provide you with practical and relevant tips as we examine the best ways on how to promote and market your website. There are 3 things as an online marketer you need to do very well: drive traffic to your website and convert those visitors into customers, subscribers, members, etc. The other is “Branding” yourself and your business. You need to get your name or brand out there, whether it be to your local market or to the world.
Let them know you are the EXPERT in whatever it is you do or sell.
What we are going to take a look at some of the more important techniques and strategies that can help you better leverage the internet to get the traffic coming to YOU rather than you having to chase down the traffic. There are two basic strategies on how to drive traffic to your site: Organically, through people typing in specific or preferred keywords in the search engines that are contained in your webpage or through Paid Advertising. There are some creative options available that allow you to do get FREE advertising and EARN advertising revenue at the same time. (see Banner Advertising below).
Understanding How the Search Engines Work:
There are so many components that go into building, promoting and ranking your webpage and it’s important to understand the function of the search engines and the relationship between them and your webpage. The search engines send out robot ”spiders” that crawl the internet on a regular basis. They are tasked to look for new content so they can index it. The search engines want to know what your article or webpage is about, so you want to leave a trail of keywords as clues throughout your content for the spiders to pick up. In order to be optimally indexed your page needs to have good quality content, relevant keywords throughout and properly labelled pictures and videos (with ALT tags) if they are are featured in your content. This approach is known as “search engine optimization”, more commonly referred to as “SEO”.
1. Targeted Keywords – When creating a webpage you want to build your content around a targeted keyword or keyword phrase, ideally that ranks high with the search engines. (see comments below #2 regarding ranking keywords). Google AdWords is a free tool offered by Google that allows you to research keywords, or keyword phrases and assess the competition for ranking with that keyword. Market Samurai is another great tool that performs comprehensive and in-depth SEO research and analysis on keyword relevancy, traffic and competition. The program offers other advanced tools rush as Rank Tracker for tracking website ranking and the ability to choose domain names that will further optimize your webpage and boost rankings. There is a cost associated with this software program.
Selecting the wrong keywords can be a huge and costly mistake, You don’t want to find that you’ve spending hours creating a webpage only to discover that you will never rank with those keywords; either no one is typing them in the search engines or the competition is so high for those keywords you have no chance of getting anywhere close to the first page of Google. A general rule of thumb – If you can’t rank on the first page, you won’t get found.
2. Creating a keyword rich title for your page or article – Perhaps the most important SEO strategy is the use of relevant keywords in your title that are repeated throughout the body of the text. Long tail keywords in general seem to carry more weight with the search engines.
Let’s say for example you webpage has the long tail keyword title “Ways on how to promote and market your website” versus a short keyword title such as “promote a website”.
Now in this example (we are assuming that your webpage is not a high ranking page at this time) you could have 10 times as many people searching for the broader keyword phrase “promote a website” versus your long tail keyword phrase.
However, anyone who types in the long tail keyword phrase is far more likely to find your webpage and click on it for two reasons: (1) even if you have a low or even non-ranking (PR) webpage, the search engines are more likely to place you on the first page of the search results because your long keyword page title is an exact match to the visitor’s search criteria and (2) chances are, visitors will read your page title and click on it, again because the title is telling them this is exactly whay they are looking for.
Omit as many filler works from the title as possible, such as “and”, “the” etc, unless the text is unreadable with them. That way the search engines are more likely to pick up the page title as a hyperlink.
Because most web pages are blog formats they are no longer static. If you change your page title for any reason, be sure to change the “permalink” so they both match. This way your page can be properly indexed. The link can be changed within your html code.
3. Keyword prominence – include keywords in your Headers – The search engines give weight to short or long tail keyword phrases that appear in the page header (H1) and sub-headers (H2 and H3). Again it leaves them clues as what the page is about and helps them index it. It’s a good idea to include your keywords in the H1 header which is your main page headline and again in one or two of the H2 and H3 headers sprinkled throughout the page content.
Including your keywords in the first paragraph of your content gives the reader as well as the search engines more confidence that the page is relevant and worth reading on. A strong word of caution though; do not over stuff your page with keywords. This is a potential red flag to the search engines and they can penalize you for having ‘spam” copy. It can also be a real turn off for your readers and you run the risk of them clicking off your page. An acceptable keyword density for Google is around 1.5% to 2.0%, so if your page contains 1,000 words it would be appropriate to populate the page no more than 15 to 20 times with a keyword or keyword phrase that should rank high. Build your brand, not your keywords.
As mentioned earlier, include descriptive keywords in the ALT. tag for any images or videos you feature on your page. These do help with their ranking and can help with the overall ranking of your page (we will cover video and image content later in the article).
4. Keyword rich META tags and Hyperlinks- The Meta tags provide the search engine spiders another place to crawl and find out more about your site for proper indexing. Adding your long tail keyword phrase in the Meta Tag description will help with reader visibility and increases the odds of visitor hits to your page, as most of the search engines include this description below your page hyperlink title in the search results.
Including hyperlinked keywords and keyword phrases in the body of your content provide not only clues as to the focus of your webpage but also suggest to the search engines they are potentially important links. Linking to another page on a high ranking authority site, such as “Wikepedia” will give your page a lot more link “juice” than simply linking to another page on your website.
Highlight the hyperlinked keywords. it will cause them to stand out in your text and entices the reader to click on them. Place them strategically – you don’t want your reader to click off your page in the first paragraph and lose them forever.
You may need some final SEO fine tuning, which can be done using WebPosition’s Page Critic tool or this can be outsourced to an SEO specialist.
How to generate website traffic and market your website – off page strategies
5. Creating Backlinks to your website – SEO techniques such as backlinking to your page or website will help you gain link “juice” and will boost your page ranking (along with all the other online SEO techniques). Backlinking is a complex science with many layers and strategies; thus many marketers will outsource this task to a third party SEO specialist. You can click on this link for more details on how to do backlinking and follow what the search engines call “white hat SEO” versus “Black hat” practices that can often get you “slapped” by Google and they can even “de-index” your site permanently.
Google will rank your site on the number of incoming links to your website (as in backlinks). They call it “link popularity”. It is a good indicator of your site’s relevance and will affect your Page Ranking (PR) by measuring the overall quality and quantity of incoming links. One thing to take into consideration when backlinking. Not all links are created equal. Links from, high PR sites, high traffic sites, specialty sites such as .ORG or .GOV.
6. Syndication – You can join a syndication network where your website content, a blog post about your product(s) or services for example, is shared by hundreds of people on their social networks and websites. What this does is create instant backlinks to your website and a huge boost in your search engine rankings.
TribePro is probably one of the most popular syndication networks used by internet marketers. Here’s how it works. When you join a TribePro “tribe” you are sharing other people’s content in return for them sharing your content. So for example, if 100 people share your content and they have an average of 300 followers between their Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, and Delicious accounts, your content will be shared among 30,000 people. Google loves this and will reward your website with boosted rankings.
You can set up a free account with TribePro but you will certainly profit by in the long run by opting in to one of their paid subscriptions.
7. Submitting your webpage to Key Directories – There are numerous web directories that will accept content submissions for one-way backlinking recognition. The idea is to get your site linked from a high ranking directory which will help with your own ranking. Many of the directories out there carry no ranking so you should do your research and stick with the higher ranking directories. Your content needs to be original, relevant and beneficial or it won’t get picked up. These higher ranked directories have editors who read all the content submitted.
Yahoo Directory, About.com and Business.com are high ranking directories that charge an annual fee to have your site considered for inclusion, which must meet their minimum criteria. Be careful of marginal directories that seem to come and go and few if any, have any ranking with Google, if any.
8. Submit Your Articles to Online Newsletters – If you start writing articles about your area(s) of expertise and submit them as free content to other Websites or Newsletters, such as EzineArticles.com. Again, your content needs to be original, high quality, relevant and offer value to the reader or it will not get approved. Make sure you don’t over stuff your copy with keywords. Most of these sites will not allow you to include backlinks to your website within the copy but you can often include a one-line description to promote your business with a link to your site in the resource box or simply ask the editors will include a description and link for you within the article itself.
This is an excellent platform to dramatically increase your visibility and “branding” and can often produce hundreds of links to your site over time, that will start boosting your rankings with Google.
How to generate website traffic and market your website – using social media
This is probably the most exciting platform to evolve on the internet for promoting and marketing you, your business and your website. Social media syndication is considered the new Organic form of SEO because real people are encouraged to interact with each other and comment and share each other’s blog postings, comments and status updates, depending on what social media platform you are using. They key is to get people to talk about you and share your site or your branding with others. the search engines recognize this and you get the credit rankings.
9. Building a Community – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the new kid on the block, Pinterest, are all about communities. You can share content and include links to your main website. Create a Facebook group and encourage your members to engage in conversation. Be very careful though if you are going to set up a Facebook Group. It is recommended that you nominate someone in your group to be the administrator. That individual would be in charge of administering the group, forums, and the content. You need to set guidelines to avoid members spamming the group with aggressive marketing and plugging their product or services. The goal of your group is to engage in conversation and build your community. You can promote your own website and invite your group to visit your site, but reciprocate and allow them to do the same. Just make sure your administrator keeps it under control.
10. Social bookmarking – You may also want to participate in social bookmarking where members in the community share and exchange information about other websites, blogs, articles and such like. Ask visitors to your site to bookmark it in their “Favorites”. You can add a clickable widget to your site such as “AddThis” that will enable visitors to click and save it, much like a Facebook “Like” widget. When you put the “AddThis” JavaScript on your webpage, it automatically identifies the title and the URL of that page. Using this widget throughout your website people will bookmark your site if you have good content.
Websites such as Digg, Reddit and Delicious focus on social bookmarking of news-related items and generate a lot of traffic. You can post content to these sites to add value to your own website as your website link appears in all the major search engines. This can give you a viral marketing effect, driving a lot of traffic to your site as well as backlinks.
11. Blog – one of the best ways to promote and market yourself and your website is through blogging. You can build a blog within your website or create a separate blog posting site. Blogging regularly is the key here as posting regular content will alert the search engines that your site is active. Follow all the steps for on-page SEO (described) above. You can talk about and include links to your own domain. Empower Network offers a very inexpensive pre-packaged blog site which you can host on their domain. The Empower Network domain is an authority site in Google’s eyes due to the massive traffic it gets so their affiliates also benefit from their high ranking.
12. Create a Youtube Channel – Videos are an incredibly effective social medium to engage with your target audience. If you are branding yourself or your business, video marketing enables you to communicate your message and brand in a driect and affordable way. The more your audience sees you the more they feel they know you and the product or service you are promoting. Having you own channel on YouTube is a great way to showcase your videos to the world. It’s like having your own wesite on YouTube. You can group your videos together to encourage visitors to stay on your channel for longer which will help with your Google ranking.
Video marketing using YouTube can give you massive leverage and is fast becoming one of the most effective SEO tools to use to promote your website. Google loves YouTube; of course , they own it and a properly optimized video with SEO keywords in the title, and description, labeling, backlinking, etc., will rank high with the search engines, Google in particular.
You can also choose to host your videos on other sites as well as YouTube. Amazon S3 and Vimeo are two popular sites. There are pros and cons depending on where you choose to host. Some of the private sites will charge you a fee but your videos can never been taken down or deleted. YouTube can, at their discretion, take your video down. Something to consider.
Promote and market your website using email
13. Autoresponders – Without a list of leads or subscribers you have a limited capacity to market and sell your products or services. One of the most effective tools for online marketing are autoresponders. There are several programs available; one of the more widely used in the industry is AWeber. When you are marketing a product or service on your website and visitors “opt-in” you need to capture their email address.
Autoresponders allow you to set up an email marketing campaign to provide information to your prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals. Always have a “call to action” in each of your emails, preferably to go back to your website and make a purchase, join your organization or subscribe to whatever it is you are offering your audience.
These lists are invaluable because once you have captured emails you can do multiple email campaigns to the same list over time. The autoresponder can also be set up to upsell existing customers if they opted in and purchased a lower tier product. you can also email
14. Email Signatures – Create a standardized signature you can insert at the end of all your email correspondence that includes your website URL and maybe a one-line description about your business. Invite your recipients to join your Facebook group as well.
How to generate website traffic and market your website – paid advertising
15. Email Solo ads – One of the most powerful ways to get a huge influx of traffic to your website is to buy email solo ads. Solo ads work like this. You purchase a dedicated advertising campaign for your product that is sent out to a specific email list that you in effect rent from other marketers or companies who have email lists of subscribers. As your offer is the only one that is featured in the email, your response rate tends to be greater than if you sharing the email with other offers that could potentially distract the email recipient.
Renting other people’s lists can be risky though. Make sure you are purchasing high quality lists and don’t overpay. There is a learning curve involved here too. Writing good copy for email advertising is challenging. Your heading has to be so intrigueing that the reader will open the email. Most spammy solo ads don’t usually make it past the inbox queue. The conversion rate is pretty low too, mostly because the click through rate upfront is very low.
16. Advertising on Google – Advertising your website on Google using their AdWords advertising platform has proven to have mixed results for many advertisers. However you do have a reasonable amount of control over your ads. For example, you can choose where your ad appears on the Google results page, set your own budget and track your advertising campaign results through the AdWords program.
By using the same SEO techniques as you would for your website, you can get your advertisement to rank on the 1st page by careful selection of keywords or keyword phrases in your ad campaign. The cost of your ad campaign will depend on a couple of key factors: your Ad Rank which is the amount of money you are willing to spend on the ad campaign and your Quality Score which is a measurement of the quality and relevance of your ads, keywords and website. Google calculates this automatically and determines which ads will appear and where they will appear.
Ads can appears on Google’s search results page on websites that people visit, on mobile phones with full browsers, tablets and devices and to specific audiences. There are basically 4 types of ads: text, image, video and mobile ads.
Text ads have 3 components. You need a compelling headline (up to 25 characters), followed by your website URL and a short description with a call to action (up to 35 characters per line).
Image ads are featured throughout the Google Display Network, rather than the Google search results pages. Their placement is dependent on keywords, topics and targeted audiences using the Google placement tool. Just like the text ads, you control the cost of your ad campaign. The best way to keep control of your ad costs is to set a daily budget.
Video ads can be created using Google’s tools. You can select from AdWords or the display ad builder. The one you select depends on the pricing structure and ad format you prefer. Check out Google AdWords website for information on which ad tool would be best for your ad campaign.
Mobile ads are designed to be displayed on high-end mobile devices such as smart phones that have full browser capability or WAP enabled devices which are smaller mobile devices.
Both text and image ads are compatible for either of these devices, however the actual display format will be different in each case.
17. CPC and CPM ads – Most people start out using the basic cost-per-click (CPC) bidding option, which seems to be a good fit if you are promoting your product or services and you want to direct people to your website. Through the CPC you will be charged only when someone clicks on your ad.
In other words you will never pay more than your budgeted amount but the number of clicks permitted and the frequency of your ad appearance will be adjusted by Google accordingly. Now, if the actual bid price is lower than your maximum bid then you will only be charged the actual bid price for each “click through”.
Once you become a more comfortable with your ad campaigns on Google you may choose to bid by Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM). This type of ad campaign is best suited for businesses that are focused on brand awareness and are looking for high visibility.
18. Affiliate Advertising – If you have a product or service you are selling, and depending on what it is you are selling, you may want to consider getting started in an Affiliate Program. Essentially, you are paying a commission to other retailers to promote and sell your product or service by advertising it on their websites. If a customer clicks on a link to your website from an affiliate website and a purchase is made, the affiliate gets paid a commission. You are still handling all the aspects of the sale.
The goal is to to build a large enough network of affiliates who have a financial interest in promoting your site. There are some important things to consider though. You need to determine if your business model is suitable for an affiliate program. For example, if your sales increased by 300% over a relatively short period of time, could you handle the expansion?
Now if you are selling an e-book, no problem, but if you are in the manufacturing business, you may want to build your affiliate network at a pace your business can manage. You also need to look at how much commission you are willing to pay.
The affiliate market is becoming very competitive. Where retailers were once able to pay commissions out between 30% and 40%, they are now having to pay upwards tof 70% or more. This is obviously a huge factor to consider and you will need to do some serious math before jumping into such a program.
Select a company to set up the technical details of your program. Clickbank.com is one of the more widely used companies. They represent tens of thousands of products and they set up and manage the affiliates as well as commission tracking and affiliate payment distribution.
Spend some time promoting your program to attract the affiliates who YOU want to work with. Find out how many other products and what type(s) of products or services they currently market and how hard they are willing to work to promote and sell your products. You can realistically expect a very small percentage of your total number of affiliates to be “super affiliates”. But that’s OK, because it could only take a small number of “super affiliates” to boost your sales and make you the “super retailer”. Affiliate advertising is another great way to boost your “branding”.
19. Facebook Advertising – With the constant emergence of new social media sites on the world wide web, the social media landscape is undergoing the most dramatic shift in its relatively short history. And one of the shifts is the growth in multi-generational users.
The social media marketplace has also become a great marketing platform to promote your website. Promoting your business using paid advertising allows you to narrow your target market using keyword searches, much like Google AdWords, so you can target specific followers on Facebook.
How successful your marketing campaign is will depend partly on the keyword optimization for your target market. You can also laser target your potential customers by marketing to specific demographics such as age, gender, geographical location, education, career, relationship status, etc.
As an example if you are a Wedding Planner, you would most likely want to target your ads towards females between the ages of 18 and 35 whose status may have recently changed to “engaged”. Conversely, if you are promoting a home based business opportunity you probably would broaden your keyword attributes to appeal to a much broader demographic.
Establish a realistic and manageable budget that will allow you to cost effectively reach your market and be sure to monitor and manage your ad campaign using the Facebook Ad Manager.
You can choose to use the CPC or CPM (see notes above) and set a daily or maximum budget for your specific campaign. Create links within your Facebook ad to promote a Fan Page or direct traffic to your off-site web page. Create a great “offer” your customers can opt-in to or invite them to join your mailing list. For more info on directing traffic to your website,
Consider creating a business “Fan” Page. Using the new Timeline Profile you can build your Fan page to resemble an HTML web page. You can create a home page with a custom header, banners, etc. By adding a capture page, opt-ins and URL links to off-site squeeze pages you can send customers to your main website.
A well designed Fan page with quality and up-to-date content is important to create a strong following and build rapport with your followers. Use branding techniques to promote your product or service so it is easily recognized and post content regularly. Insert pictures and videos so your followers can connect with a “person” and invite them to “like” your Page and “share” content.
It is always a good idea to cross promote social media sites. For example tell your Twitter followers to check out your Facebook page and so on. I’t amazing how viral your business can go using this technique.
20. Banner Advertising Co Op – If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet, you have probably seen more banner ads than you care to have. But, banner advertising is one of the most popular methods used today and can be very effective when you set up a carefully crafted ad campaign.
BannersBroker.com offers a unique advertising opportunity that allows advertisers to to advertise their businesses while earning ad revenue simultaneously. The concept is simple: on the advertising side, you sign up for the campaign of your choice. You are allocated a specified number of impressions depending on your campaign plan for advertising your product, services or website. On the publishing side, Banners Broker hosts specialized publisher sites from which you earn attractive advertising commissions, typically over and above the cost of your advertising.
21. Direct mail – Targeting specific markets, whether they are in your local market, regional or national using printed ads, flyers, letters or postcards can be very effective in promoting your business. Direct mail marketers will often compile lists or purchase lists to create a specific demographic target market. This tends to raise the probability that their messages will wind up in front of the right people.
The typical response rate is around 1-2% so this marketing approach is definitely a numbers game. However, many advertisers find this medium appealing because it takes their message directly to the consumer so a lower response rate can still produce successful results. There is a whole science in this attraction marketing arena to get people to open and read their mail. Most will simply throw direct mail pieces in the trash without even reading the material.
It generally takes a minimum of 7 hits before someone responds to your mailing piece so consistency, follow up and a large dose of patience is all part of the game. Direct mail marketing can also be fairly costly compared to other types of advertising campaigns.
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