Getting Traffic

Now your site is ready and has a strong brand and name, you can begin to promote it with internet marketing techniques aimed at getting traffic to your site.

We’ve already touched on what this entails. There are a few “Pillars” of internet marketing that include:

• SEO

• Content marketing

• Social media marketing

• Advertising

The good news is that all of these have some overlap and that they all basically come down to creating excellent content that you can then market. You will promote your articles and blog posts as though they were products themselves – which means posting them to social media, talking about them before they launch, and more.

The aim is to build a loyal following this way by gaining maximum exposure so that people are more likely to want to buy what you’re selling.

If you integrate SEO into your content (by learning keywords and subtly including them), you’ll then be able to gain SEO benefits from your writing as well. And of course, this is also what you will be sharing on your social media.

In short, content is very much what makes the web go around, and is the key to a successful internet marketing campaign. That means you need to get it right.

And getting content right means making sure that it stands out with something unique to say. This is why it is so important to choose a subject matter that you understand and are passionate about.

The rest is consistency. Post regularly and build inbound links point at your site as much as possible. Do this, and your traffic will grow over time.

Where is Your Traffic Coming From?

The OTHER secret to successfully running and promoting a website online is very simple: it’s about data.

The more data you have and the more accurate that data is, the more you’ll be able to create a detailed picture of your user base and your marketing success. If you don’t have the right data, then you won’t be able to make informed decisions when updating your site or investing in new marketing techniques. 

This is one of the most important aspects of internet marketing and something that is too often overlooked. If you want to succeed at SEO and marketing, you need to track your success and learn what is effective this way.

Why the Source Traffic is Important 

One of the most important pieces of data here is where your traffic is coming from. Do most of your visitors find your site by searching on Google? If so, what keywords are they using? Alternatively, are they coming from YouTube? Or Facebook? Or have you landed a particularly effective link on an external site? 

By answering this question, you should then know roughly which of your marketing strategies have been the most successful and this then should inform the choices you make in the future. 

Of course, the obvious way this will affect your future decision-making is by showing you which strategies had the best ROI. If your AdSense isn’t bringing in any traffic but your social media marketing is, then you might conclude that you should spend more of your budget on the latter and less on the former. Ultimately this will result in more traffic – and more customers – for the same costs. 

But you can also turn this concept on its head. If barely any of your traffic is coming from Google, then this suggests that your SEO isn’t all that effective. Now you can either cut your spending on SEO, or you might decide that your SEO isn’t working because you’re not spending enough there – perhaps this is an area to work on and improve on?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that the source of your traffic sometimes tells you more than just where your visitors are coming from.

How to Find Out Where Your Traffic is Coming From 

So now you know why you need to identify the sources of your traffic, how do you go about doing it? 

The most common method is to use Google Analytics. This is a free tool that Google provides for Webmasters and which can be used to gather all kinds of data about your site. It takes a few minutes to set up the first time you use it, but it is an invaluable tool and well worth that initial time investment. 

You might find that you have a similar tool included in your hosting package. Hosting accounts with CPanel for instance will normally come with ‘AwStats’ and ‘Webalizer’ which do essentially the same thing. For WordPress users, there are several plugins you can download that offer comparable features too. 

At the end of the day though, it doesn’t matter what tool you use, as long as you are measuring this critical piece of data.