How to create a great website, pt 6: Increasing traffic July 21

Traffic is about attention. Attention drives sales. Sales fill pockets. So anyone wants to be popular. How to grow the traffic to your site? In the long run, it's all about adding value. Is the stuff on your site interesting / valuable / useful enough for people to reach you? And more importantly, do they want to come back and recommend it to their friends?

A lot has been said on this topic in one of my previous posts, Writing Content. So lets skip the basics -- the need to be interesting, readable, search engine friendly. Lets talk about getting attention. What are the things you can do without spending all your money?

Where do your customers hang around?

1. Real life. Before planning your placement in the web, think what are your potential customers doing in real life. As outdoor ads are too expensive, then be an ad yourself -- grow your authority. Speak at industry events and give university lectures, become a guy whom media contacts for comments on anything that takes place in your industry.
   
2. Search Engines. People turn to Google for help more often than they call to their moms. Times more. Up to 50% of the traffic to any popular website derives from search engines. People are looking for answers, constantly. In search results, 90% of the clicks go to the first 4-5 unpaid links. So you must be the first answer. Nothing more to say. SEO is crucial part of growing traffic. There are tons of great resources to get started. Try Copyblogger for one.
   
3. Industry specific sites. There are forums, blogs and review sites for every business niche you can think of. Some of them are popular. Get reviews or links to your company / product in the popular ones -- or become a commentator in forums yourself. Check out popularity from Alexa and Compete.
   
4. Social media. Instead of living a real life, even your grumpy old neighbour is plugged to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Among all other things people share and discuss with acquaintances there, your industry is a topic. But social media is more about recommendations from friend to friend than for you to step in from scratch. So put more effort in the previous three steps first and social media will do its part largely by itself.
   

What would grab their attention?

In addition to being present in mediums listed above -- hard work, honesty and devotion of course. Plus long company history and all the rest of the solid virtues one can't buy with money. But there are some tricks to speed it up.

1. Attract links. Write a blog with great headlines, bold statements, top10 lists, illustrative graphs and great design. Tasty and easy to digest, what more would one want.
2. Write newsletters. As important as attracting new visitors is to keep those who you already "won" to your site once. Make it easy for them to leave you their email addresses so you can send them your great newsletters for updates from time to time.
   
3. Run a campaign. Spend your next ad money on buying 5 iPhones and throwing them out in Twitter. You'll be rewarded with gazillion clicks :) part of them recurring if you do it right.

And finally, don't forget that it's terribly easy to go the opposite way and decrease traffic -- by stopping or pausing the hard work of attention grabbing.

Other stories on creating a great website:

• April 20th: Introduction
  
• April 23rd: Gathering team
• April 30th: Writing content
• May 7th: Creating design
• July 14th: Building functionality
• July 21st: Increasing traffic