Five Strategies that Drive Website Traffic

(1) Make yourself easy to find, (2) Tell people what you’re doing, (3) Encourage others to refer to you, (4) Place your content where people might find it, and (5) Pay others to spread the word.

In my line of work, I’m often asked for advise on how to drive cost-effective website traffic. The short answer, unfortunately, is that there are no short answers. There’s a myriad of ways to drive website traffic and which one works for you will depend on who you are and, more importantly, who you are trying to reach.

Broadly speaking, you have five traffic-creating strategies to choose from. Please note, however, that these strategies are compliments to the be-all-end-all of creating best-in-class content. Nothing—and I repeat nothing—you do will help unless you have content worth caring about.

The strategies are:

  • List item one
  • List item two
  • List item three
  • List item four

Make it easier for people (and search engines) to find your content

  • Submit new websites to Google, Yahoo, and Bing
  • Submit new websites to directories such as Yahoo! and Open Directory
  • Submit new blogs to aggregators such as Technorati and Google Blog Search
  • Optimize your content for search engine “findability”
    • Ensure that 2-3 percent of your content consists of relevant keywords
    • Implement unique and accurate page titles for all of your pages
    • Implement META tags that includes relevant search keywords
    • Ensure that your URLs are unique, readable, and relevant
    • Create a robot.txt file to guide search engines crawling your website
    • Create (and submit) XML sitemaps for search engines to crawl

Tell people about your content

  • Target relevant blogs, post comments directing people to your content
  • Identify relevant thought-leaders, show tell them what you’re doing
  • Send press release to relevant news websites and blogs
  • Spread the word via Twitter, newsletters, and Word of Mouth

Encourage others to refer to your content

  • Make it easy for readers to share your content via email, Twitter, Digg etc.
  • Enter into link exchange programs with relevant websites
  • Send story ideas to relevant news websites and blogs
  • Submit your design (and story idea) to design websites

Place your content where people are more likely to find it

  • For articles, submit to FindArticles and ArticleBiz etc.
  • For video, submit to YouTube and Vimeo etc.
  • For podcasts, submit to iTunes and Audible etc.
  • For design, submit to galleries such as Konigi and CSSHeaven etc.

Pay others (e.g., search engines) to tell people about your content

  • For qualified leads, create search engine marketing campaigns (e.g. Google AdWords)
  • For completely useless and unqualified leads, contract (dodgy) services such as Revisitors or Wordlinx

This post was originally published in M_Dash—the email newsletter of Seattle-based brand firm Methodologie. The list makes no claim on being complete—it’s simply a representative sample of strategies and tactics I’ve used and/or encountered over the past decade.