Where to get traffic is a perennial question so in this post I’d like to introduce a simple framework for thinking about traffic STRATEGICALLY and guide you to nine resources you can use right now to help you get started generating visitors.
Because nothing happens on the web without traffic. Ultimately if you can’t generate traffic then your website – no matter how good it may be – will NEVER make you any money.
And in fact, it’s worse than that – without traffic your website is nothing more than a COST – a DRAIN on your precious resources of time and money.
Where to get traffic – the four ways
In essence, there are just four ways you can generate traffic:
1. You can BUY traffic.
Banner advertising, pay-per-click advertising, renting email lists and paying for offline advertising are all ways you can BUY traffic.
Easy to understand, right?
Pros: it’s immediate, potentially very targeted, and takes up minimal amounts of your time.
Cons: there’s only one obvious con – the cost involved.
Learn more about buying traffic:
- Read more about pay-per-click advertising in The Holy Grail Of Marketing?
- Should you advertise on Facebook?
2. You can CREATE traffic.
Creating or ‘curating’ content – whether that be blog posts, articles, tweets, YouTube videos, Pinterest boards – allows you to ‘create’ traffic too.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) and social sharing are the icing on the cake that make it easier for other people to find and share your content.
You can also use your existing resources to create traffic – for example, writing to your offline customers to direct them to your website.
Pros: needn’t cost any money, and helps you to establish your brand and reputation along the way.
Cons: takes often considerable time and knowhow.
Learn more about creating traffic:
- Getting Traffic From Content Marketing: Eight Strategies to Stop You From Imploding!
- An excellent Twitter interview: A Twitter Masterclass From The Purple Dog
- The 3 Biggest Myths In SEO
3. You can BORROW traffic.
In essence, this is about doing deals with other people so that they either act as affiliates for you, or you do some kind of marketing swap (e.g. I tell my website visitors about an offer you have, and vice versa).
Pros: can deliver targeted traffic at no additional effort once the deals are set up.
Cons: you need to find and do the deals, and keep up your end of the bargain.
You can learn more about one of the neatest – and most instant – ways I’ve found of borrowing traffic here:
4. You can MULTIPLY your existing traffic virally.
By using viral concepts like ‘tell a friend’, giving away viral ebooks (whereby you entitle others to distribute or sell an ebook you’ve created that contains links to your site), Pay With A Tweet (see below) and other methods, you can create new traffic out of the traffic that’s coming to you from the other methods.
Pros: generates additional ‘free’ traffic from the traffic you’re already generating, has viral potential and can potentially run and run once set up.
Cons: you need knowhow, time, and occasionally money to set good systems up.
Here are a couple of useful free services that allow you to multiply your traffic. Both work in a similar way:
In essence what you do with both of these services is to give away something of value (like a voucher or interesting free report or video) in return for a visitor posting your link to their social profile – which has the potential to multiply your original traffic many times over.
(In some ways, this is similar to what I do with my Facebook page – because by ‘liking’ The Tyson Report’s page on Facebook (an action that often shows up on Facebook to a person’s friends and therefore has a viral element), visitors get access to an exclusive free report, ‘7 Free Tools To Rock Your Facebook Business Page’.)
This is really just scratching the surface of where to get traffic but I hope it may have helped you think about it in a more structured way. For more free regular resources on building traffic, download my workbooks and get my free email newsletter by entering your details in the box below.
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