How to Get More Traffic (9 New Strategies)

Key Takeaways

in this video you're gonna learn how to get more traffic to your website fast in fact I've used these exact strategies to grow my site's traffic to over a hundred and eighty thousand visitors per month now I should warn you this video contains advanced strategies and tactics so I'm not gonna repeat the same tips you've heard a million times already like share your content on Facebook instead you're gonna see advanced traffic techniques that work great keep watching I'll be honest my first website was a complete disaster sure I had a great product in a growing industry but I lacked the number one thing a website needs to succeed traffic that's when I started googling things like how to get more traffic and increase website traffic unfortunately most of the advice that I read didn't work you know the kind of stuff I'm talking about create a Facebook page start a blog share your content on social media and look this kind of advice isn't horrible or anything but it's not gonna send thousands of targeted visitors to your site why because everyone in the world is using these exact same strategies so after trying dozens of different tactics I decided to try something new specifically I set out to test a bunch of different traffic techniques myself it wasn't easy but over time I discovered a handful of untapped traffic techniques that actually worked and once I started using these techniques my traffic shot through the roof hey mom I'm getting so much traffic your boys gonna be famous and now it's time for me to reveal these proven techniques and show you exactly how to use them to get more traffic to your site so let's jump right in with technique number one the upside-down guest posts here's the deal when most people read your guest post they completely skip the author bio section and I can't blame them most author bio boxes are buried at the bottom of the page like this which is a huge problem if people don't see your link in your author bio they're not going to visit your site fortunately there's a simple solution to this problem the upside-down guest post here's this step-by-step process first write an awesome guest post just like you normally would awesome guest posts done next include helpful resource sections throughout the post these sections should link to two to three useful resources on the topic you just covered here's an example finally include your content as one of the helpful resources for example here's a guest post that I published a while back as you can see I strategically linked out to my content as one of the resources to check out and that link brought in 78% more traffic than my author bio link pretty cool and that leads us to strategy number two use click to tweet links this is one of the best ways to get more traffic from social media in fact click to tweet links are one of the main reasons that this post for my blog has over 6,000 social media shares with that let me show you how click to tweet links work first find something tweetable in your content this can be a technique strategy quote or statistic for example this post my blog listed a bunch of list building strategies so I considered each strategy on the list tweetable next create a click to tweet link to do that just head over to click to tweet comm and write your tweet and the tool will generate a special link for you finally add that link to your content whenever someone clicks on the link they get a pre-written tweet for easy sharing it's that easy moving right along to our third technique publish more list posts there's no way around it when it comes to driving traffic to your website list post work great and there's evidence to back this up but suma recently analyzed a million articles to see which types of content work best and they found that list posts crush other content formats as you can see in this chart list posts get six times more shares than how to posts and 40 times more shares than infographics I'm going to look at my own content I noticed the same thing list post generate a ton of traffic for example this massive list of SEO tools is one of the most successful pieces of content of ever published to date this list post has generated over 18 thousand shares nine hundred comments in three hundred and thirty one thousand with that it's time for technique number four overhaul and upgrade old blog posts this simple strategy landed me fifty point nine five percent more traffic in seven days here's exactly how I did it first I found a piece of content on my site that was out of date and I found this guide on my blog that was really outdated next I updated and improved the post specifically I add a new screenshots sprinkled in new strategies and techniques and eliminated old strategies that didn't work anymore finally I updated the post to make the changes live and just like that traffic to that page shot up like a rocket ship and this wasn't a fluke I recently followed a similar process with this post this time instead of just updating the content I updated it and relaunched it like a brand new post so I shared the post on social media and sent out an announcement to my email subscribers which led to a significant boost in traffic including almost 5,000 visitors in one day so let's keep it moving with technique number five ad share triggers to your content in my experience content largely succeeds or fails based on one factor whether or not the content has share triggers so what are share triggers share triggers are things that you include in your content that push people to share it a lot of these principles were first discovered by behavioral scientists like dr. Jonah Berger and dr. Katherine milkman and they have proven in the lab when I discovered through trial and error when you include share triggers in your content people are significantly more likely to share and link to it for example one of the most powerful shared triggers is known as social currency social currency is the idea that we share things that make us look good looking good and this share trigger is a large part of the reason that this infographic that I made for a client a few years back did so well in fact this infographic generated thousands of targeted visits in the first two days now there are dozens of reasons this infographic did so well from the design to the content promotion campaign but a good chunk of its success was due to one simple thing it contained the social currency share trigger I'll explain at the time I'm a this infographic lots of people are up in arms about inflation and my content backed up their rants with solid data so every time someone shared my infographic and made them look good in other words it boosted their social currency so they shared it again and again in fact the infographic even got featured in Google News and it's all thanks to the social currency share trigger let's dive right into technique number 6 for getting more traffic go on podcast podcasts are blowing up right now in fact one survey found that 24 percent of Americans regularly listen to podcasts does that mean you should grab the nearest microphone and start a podcast no instead I recommend going on other people's podcasts as a guest this strategy works so well that I try to go on at least two podcasts every month in fact over the last few years I've appeared on over 75 podcast episodes and these episodes have brought me tens of thousands of visitors for example I once got 984 laser targeted visitors from a single podcast episode as a bonus you usually get at least one backlink in the show notes which can help you rank higher in Google let's move right along to technique number 7 create predictably viral content is there a formula for creating content that goes viral no if there was everyone would use it that said there are four things you can do to increase the odds that your content goes viral first viral content tends to contain lots of visuals this can be a bunch of images or an infographic or video the type of image doesn't really matter the important thing is that you use visuals in your content why industry studies show that image rich content gets 94% more social shares compared to content that's nothing but text second viral content tends to have a high utility utility simply means that your content is useful in some way maybe you show people how to steam broccoli or maybe you teach people how to nail their job interview either way research shows that extremely practical content has a very high chance of going viral third long-form content tends to go viral more often than short article and blog posts like I mentioned earlier in this video buzzsumo recently analyzed a million articles well in that same study they found that long-form content tends to get significantly more shares and backlinks than short posts in fact as you can see content that's at least three thousand words gets 208 percent more shares than short articles I've noticed the same thing myself for example here's a long-form article from my blog a giant list of SEO techniques this post weighs in at a staggering six thousand five hundred and twenty-five words and the simple fact that my post is insanely long is a big reason that it's been shared thousands of times and those shares have sent boatloads of traffic to my website lastly viral content needs an initial push to get going why well according to wordpress.com two million blog posts come out every single day so for your content to stand out you need to promote it for example a shop owner and backlinko reader chris gimr published this post on his site a while back and it went viral in fact that single piece of content generated 17,000 visitors to his site in one day and it wouldn't happen if Chris didn't promote his content on sites like Reddit which led to hundreds of visitors within hours let's keep things rolling with technique number 8 post on social media at strategic times so CO schedule recently analyzed the best times to post on social media sites like Facebook Pinterest and Instagram so what did they find they discovered that these are the best times to post on each network and now it's time for our last tip get more traffic with content transformation content transformation is simple instead of starting from scratch convert one of your articles into another format like an ebook video infographic or podcast for example I published this case study on my blog a while back as you can see this post generated lots of social shares and comments but I knew that I could squeeze even more value out of this content so I turn that post into a YouTube video that single video has over 90,000 views and has brought me hundreds of website visitors all from a piece of content that I published years ago you can also republish your older content on sites like LinkedIn and medium for example I published this study of YouTube ranking factors on my blog about a year ago and I republished that same piece of content as a LinkedIn article which along with my other LinkedIn posts led to a decent chunk of targeted traffic that's the power of content transformation now before we end this video I want to show you a cool bonus technique steal your competitors traffic sources imagine that you could see exactly where your competitors get their traffic from that would be a goldmine right well your competitors probably aren't about to send you their Google Analytics password fortunately you don't need it that's because you can see all of their top traffic sources for free with similar web similar web not only shows you a nice overview of a site's traffic but exactly where they get that traffic from so what can you do with this information for example let's say that you notice that one of your competitors gets a big chunk of the traffic from guest posting on a particular site well you can guest post there too or let's say that driving lots of visitors from YouTube it might be time to set up a YouTube channel you get the idea either way with this approach you don't need to wonder what the best traffic sources in your niche are instead you get a list of sites that you can get targeted traffic from let's end this video with one more quick bonus tip drive traffic from forums forums are a very underrated source of traffic when you become an active member of a forum you built a funnel a funnel that brings people back to your website let me walk you through a real-life example when I first got started with the backlinko blog I was starting from scratch I had fewer followers zero visitors and zero email subscribers and I knew that SEO and social media can be great ways to get traffic but they take time to kick in so to give my traffic head start I became an active member of a popular marketing forum I answer questions that people asked on the forum and I even posted some original content and this led to a solid influx of visitors to my brand-new blog so there you have it 9 techniques to help you get more website traffic if you learn something new from today's video then make sure to subscribe to the backlinko youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button below this video also if you want exclusive SEO and traffic techniques that I only share with subscribers head over to backlinko calm and hop on the newsletter it's free and now I'd like to turn it over to you which technique from today's video are you gonna try first are you gonna start writing more a-list posts or maybe you want to drive traffic from forums either way let me know by leaving a comment below right now and I could do like 10 more videos right now though oh it's a slide anyway nice - this one I'm calling my mom so nervous man but a good chunk how many ways can you squeeze it one this