Getting Eyeballs on Your Website (Goal 1 – Day 7)
If you build it — will they come? In an ideal world, they would… In this world of millions of websites, just putting a website up is not going to bring you clients. If your website is ONLY an electronic yellow pages ad (the only people who arrive – are people who you personally send there), then you can create the site and sit back and relax. If you want new people to find you from your website you need to do some work!
My last task in getting my very simple site up and running is to prime it for getting traffic. Yes, this does involve SEO (we’ll talk about that in a minute) but also setting up tracking (so you know what is working).
Is Your Website Working?
How do you tell? The LONG range answer is – you know your website is working when you are getting clients and making money.
But… (and this is a big but…) your website can be doing its job for a while before you actually sell anything. Just like fine wine… websites have an aging period. It takes time for Google to find you and it takes time for people to start to hear about you (it takes over 15 times before potential customers start paying attention).
And, google page rank isn’t a valid measure either – because your page rank can vary wildly depending on who is doing the searching (Google localizes results) and how many other people have sites in your niche.
Measuring Eyeballs
The first thing you want to measure to see if your website is working is traffic. In a lot of ways, traffic is your least important metric because traffic rarely turns into money without some sort of further action from your website viewers.
Yet, without those eyeballs, no further action is possible. To measure the traffic on your site, install Google Analytics. You can do that by going to http://google.com/analytics and registering your site. Then, add a google analytics plug in to your site (just search for google analytics in the plug in menu) Pop in your account number and you are all done.
In addition to just counting visitors, Google Analytics can tell you WHO is visiting your site, what they are looking for, where they are coming from and much more.
Are your eyes beginning to glaze over? Google Analytics is really useful once you get it set up. Here is a great article on google analytics for beginners by Kristi Hines that will take you through the basics of account set up and beyond.
Increasing Traffic To Your Site
Once you have a good baseline number of people visiting your site, the next step is to try to increase that number. There are long, medium and short-term ways of getting traffic to your site.
Long Term SEO, blogging, podcasts, videos, etc are all LONG term traffic methods. Unless something goes viral, this is a game of quality content over time increasing your rankings. The good news is that if you create quality content, you will eventually have a steady stream of new visitors, subscribers and customers without a lot of ongoing work. The downside, of course, is that these strategies take a while to work.
Medium Term Social media, guest blogging, e-mail marketing work really well in the medium term. You still need to take the time to build an audience, But, you are going out and attracting people to your site instead of waiting for them to come to you. You still need time and patience for the campaign to work, but you can significantly grow traffic to your site in a few months.
Short Term The quickest way to get traffic to your site is to pay for it. In my work with a Fortune 500 online marketing company, I’ve learned that they rely *mostly* on paid traffic to power their offers. It is dependable, and if you are sure that people will buy your offer, you can make serious money and grow your list quickly. And… it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to start. (Tho, once you know your offer works, the more money you spend, the more money you make). Most people start with Facebook, but be creative. I’m currently reading an e-book, Shiny Object Lemonade with some very creative paid advertising ideas – including advertising in other people’s newsletters.
You need a good mix of all three methods to grow the traffic to your list. If you want more ideas for growing the number of visitors to your site, check out this article by Noah Kagan. I’m going to be using a lot of Noah’s plan when we write our traffic plan for the Time Traders club site.
Next time, I’ll talk about making it easy for visitors to take action on your site.
Does all of this seem overwhelming? Get help for free by visiting Time Traders Club. We have experts who would love to give you some help with installing Google Analytics on your site and setting up SEO.