David Frosdick
Last Updated: January 31, 2023
Discover 24 ways to get more website traffic and build your audience and exposure...
I often get asked from friends and family what it takes to have a website built in order to attract visitors.
They’re looking to build an online presence for their business and wonder whether or not it would help the success of a company?
It’s often a difficult question to answer well, without getting into marketing principles, which quite often leaves everyone feeling deflated, confused or frustrated at what the next step might be.
Obviously, it’s imperative for a business to have an online presence, but even after telling someone what to do they will still ask “how to do it?“.
The “how” part is where it gets confusing especially when you mention the word traffic. Not the crazy busy motorway type!
Many inexperienced online business owners fall into the trap of focusing on the styling and presentation of their business web assets without thinking about the actual marketing involved in reaching new customers.
We simply think launching a website would be enough to start getting eyes to our business products when in fact there’s so much more involved.
Yes, website presentation is very important, but no one will know how good it looks if they don’t know it exists!
One of the most important factors of building an online presence is getting traffic to your site.
We’re not talking quick fix traffic. We want long-term consistent traffic that comes from real people interested in what you have to share.
In this article, we’re going to firstly list the essential traffic sources you should be using and then some other unusual types.
We will briefly explain each method, how it will benefit your business and how you can use it to get traffic?
Before we start you’ll need a blog as your platform. Basically, the place where we send traffic.
The place where we publish content and get our message out. This is how we measure our traffic strategies and see what’s working.
Why a blog? For the simple reason that it allows for Google’s search engines to index your site and as you publish new content your site stays fresh and reminds Google to return and index newer content.
The principle is to provide helpful content that your target audience and prospects will appreciate.
By providing helpful content and value upfront, we build trust, authority and set the foundation to sell our products later.
Your blog is essentially an online business card, letting your prospects know who you are, what you do and help establish yourself in your niche.
If you don’t have a blog yet you can install WordPress via the CPanel admin area inside your hosting provider. 26% of blogs on the internet run on the WordPress platform.
Once you’re set and ready, install OptimizePress software and begin styling your blog, making it look clean and professional and begin crafting the perfect blog post.
See a detailed overview on how to set up your blog in OptimizePress in our knowledgebase.
Before you dive into these different traffic sources you may want to consider where your audience hang out.
If your target audience is 60yr old (the people with most money) they’re probably not much point using YouTube to get traffic and find new customers.
If your niche market audience is teenagers then Facebook might not actually work as well as Snapchat.
Please don’t quote me on any of the above. My point is this, to get the best results know where your audience are before you try getting new traffic.
If you don’t know where your audience hangs out then start surveying them.
If your audience tells you they like reading a video is probably not the type of content to use. If they tell you they don’t use mobile to view your content then Snapchat or Instagram stories is not a good traffic source.
As with all marketing, you must have some way of measuring its success. An easy method for clickable web links is using bitly links as you can see how many clicks you get.
A Bitly.com link like would not be the preferred method where you have to speak out the URL as it becomes a mouthful to say.
Here's how the Bitly default links look:
However, you make your own custom bitly like custom link as shown here:
Google analytics will also work for other pages giving you a conservative figure.
Let's look at the essential sources for driving traffic in no particular order. You don't need to be doing them all, but pick a couple to start with.
With over a billion people now on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. There’s simply no reason not to establish a presence on these sites. It’s free to sign up and will allow you the flexibility to build pages, take part in active groups around your niche and join the discussion.
To maximise your reach on social media create a posting schedule on each platform, where you're sharing your recent blog post articles.
Over time, your social media presence will take effect, allowing you further exposure and traffic to your site.
The key thing with social media is sharing content consistently and also sharing other resources, not just your own.
The idea is to keep your brand in front of people.
How do we get traffic?
Share content that links back to your blog.
With Youtube now officially the second most popular search engine in the world, there are hundreds of thousands of new videos being posted daily.
Impressively, more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day.
300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
It is a key resource for people to go to find how-to information and entertainment.
Creating an account is a very simple process and will allow you to start posting your own content immediately after signing up.
How do we get traffic?
Upload short (3-5 minute) snappy, interesting videos and either:
Podcasting is all the rage right now, but it requires a lot of hard work.
When used well, it's a great medium for giving content that requires extensive discussion or explanation.
99.9% of podcasts stream from Apple’s iTunes, which is an ideal platform to spread your reach to an audience that may or may not consume content with Youtube or Blogging.
There are many automated tools currently available that will allow you to quickly and effortlessly upload your audio like Libsyn, Podbean, Blubrry & BuzzSprout.
Although podcasting can seem a daunting technical task to get started, once it's up and running, all you do is talk into a mic or strip the audio from your video interviews.
The audio quality has to be the BEST. Nothing else is acceptable.
How do we get traffic?
As your content is just audio, you must tell people often where they can go to get a free gift, free video (lead magnet) related to the audio.
An example would be: "thanks for listening if you want to grab this transcription that contains 4 more strategies for growing your podcast then go to mysupperpodcast.com/more"
You can also add links in your iTunes page:
This is open for discussion. While SEO is not known as a traffic source, if you work at getting articles ranked high in the SERPS, you will get the highest quality source of traffic. This is known as organic traffic.
SEO has been misused over the years by wannabe marketers by building black hat spammy sites and blog networks.
Blog networks do work in some cases, but most of the content on these blogs is worthless. Clogging up the web with unreadable content. They only use blog networks to gain multiple backlinks to a site, or keywords to trick Google into thinking the site is popular.
Without going too deep into this topic or ranting about it, it's far from dead and as important as ever. It’s imperative to learn the basics of good SEO site structure, on-page tactics, and good content distribution. Linking to relevant content and gaining links from credible sources.
This will result in a better user experience; making it easier for Google’s Robots to scan your site and help better rank it in the search engines allowing for higher rankings and exposure.
For a good in-depth tutorial on best SEO practices, be sure to check out Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
How do we get traffic?
You can setup on-page SEO to all of your Pages by going to the Cogwheel icon in the PageBuilder and selecting Page Settings.
We also recommend using the RankMath SEO plugin.
Write useful and in-depth articles, gain inbound links from credible sources. Have a site that runs fast, use a good host, clean code, keywords in pages. These are only a few factors in ranking your site higher in SERPs.
Another great resource for SEO is Backlinko by Brian dean. His free content is incredible. His paid training will blow your socks off.
Mathew Barby also has a wealth of experience ion SEO, his site is worth a read.
The organic traffic is free traffic. This type of traffic is great in the long term, it builds trust but takes some time to see results.
If you’re looking to boost your traffic as quickly as possible, then paying to advertise on Facebook, Twitter, Google and Youtube are great starting points.
We can't go over every social advertising network so we'll cover the current daddy of them all.
Facebook has been a very popular tool for marketers and business owners alike due to its powerful ability to target specific demographics and it's quick and cheap to get started.
If you know your customers are on Facebook and have a small budget to test with go and dive in!
You can also set up retargeting from within some of these social advertising platforms.
If you’ve ever visited a shop online, then seen a related advert later on Facebook, there’s a strong chance that you’re being retargeted.
The benefits of this are clear. It allows for marketers to recapture lost visitors for a second chance of promotion. The response rates to this method of marketing are powerful and one that many marketers are employing more aggressively inside their business, thus increasing their bottom line.
How do we get traffic?
Use a piece of content from your blog. Chose an advertising goal and start building your campaign.
Start with a small budget, run a few different ads together. Always have an end date on your ads by setting a lifetime budget (you never know what can happen in your business or daily life and you don't want to be paying for ads if they're not working or you're not able to end them).
Turn on your ads and drive traffic to your blog post, not just landing pages. Read the Ad Guide for more info.
And briefly for the retargeting to work, you have to setup a custom audience and then create new ads for that audience.
Banner advertising is a form of native advertising, that allows you to place creative banners on other people’s websites for traffic and exposure.
Some big brands still use this form of traffic generation and typically spend thousands of dollars for ad impressions or clicks.
There are many Banner Ad services you can use to help create advertising. Google Double-Click Ad Planner & MediaMind are some.
How do we get traffic?
To get started with banner ads, you can research into high profile competitor websites and check the footer menu for links like “Advertise” or “Advertise Here”.
Many sites will offer banner space for a set price and you can start testing your traffic.
Google content networks will help you build banner ads and position those on sites for your chosen keywords and demographic.
Email Marketing is without a doubt, the single most effective tool for your online business.
The purpose of any business is to build a solid customer base of people who actively love what you have to say and frequently purchase your product.
Emailing your prospects directly allows you to build that relationship and eventually convert them into devoted customers. The benefit of this is that your customers have allowed you to contact them so you can use this to drive traffic.
There are many autoresponder services available at this time that will help you build your email list. OptimizePress is proud to say that we integrate with all of the most popular email services and can get started very quickly.
How do we get traffic?
We recommend building a landing page using one of our pre-made templates to capture data or write a useful blog post formatted with some of the tips mentioned here and include the inline opt-in form to collect email.
Once you've published new content on your blog, email your subscribers and tell them about it. This can give you a big traffic spike depending on your list size.
The more emails you collect, the more traffic you get each time you email to your list.
Keep growing your email list and watch your traffic grow. As your traffic grows your social engagement should follow and result in more traffic to your site.
Free Ebooks are one of the most popular forms of content by marketers, which are generally given away as incentives for subscribing to an email list.
Ebooks are referred to as ‘Lead Magnets’ or ‘Reports’. These are great for generating exposure and allowing for shareability of your content.
How do we get traffic?
Write a valuable free report or guide around your topic. You can embed links in the report content and footer, linking back to your articles and landing pages.
Encourage people to give away your ebook, share it with their friends and colleagues.
As more people read your ebook they will click the links taking them back to your site. Look how Bitly have a collection of free ebooks available for download with lots of links in the content taking you back to Bitly.
Don't underestimate the power of meeting people at trade shows and events. Meeting someone in person builds real trust and genuine credibility. Use this opportunity to arrange future meetings or hand out business cards.
How do we get traffic?
Create a custom landing page related to your event. Create a business card with a trackable web URL (EG youname.com/TCS2017). Hand your cards or flyers out at events.
The next step would be to track traffic to any event pages you create.
Medium is a Social Site allowing you to write stories about anything. The benefits of using this service are that it allows you to broadcast your content to a wider audience who are already there reading stories.
Anyone who downloads the medium app will be able to search for your article.
Medium makes it very easy to publish content or setup publications. People can follow you, comment on your stories and like your content.
Some marketers have even begun republishing blog content to medium in the hope of it being found and reaching a wider audience.
How do we get traffic?
Carve a niche out within your existing niche or even encourage your team to publish their own stories. You could write about another topic in your business or write something completely different. If you work in a mundane office job answering phones but have a desire to start an online business you could write about your journey.
A great example of using Medium in business is how Buffer have started stories where their staff write about what they learn.
LinkedIn is commonly known as the social network for business. It allows you to connect and network with other business owners as well as create your own business profile, listing your accolades and past work experience.
The Pulse feature allows you to submit news announcements of your company, similar to Medium but contained within the social network. A great way to spread your message and to increase exposure in your chosen category.
How do we get traffic?
Write useful articles about your niche directly into LinkedIn Pulse and throughout the articles and link back to related content on your own site. Head over to LinkedIn and start publishing.
Reddit is a community-based website that allows for sharing content and taking part in active discussions. It’s a great place to generate and build buzz around a topic and has been known to make content go viral.
You can drill down to specific topics called ‘subreddits’ and bookmark areas that you find most relevant.
How do we get traffic?
Gain a stupendous amount of "comment karma" and be brave enough to self-promote something.
Be warned self-promoting is not like so be careful. If you provide enough value you can get away with it (just). By "enough value"I mean provide more than you have ever provided anywhere.
Some subreddits don't mind self-promoting but generally, it's a place for discussion and helping others. Do it well and it can be a great traffic source.
But I repeat myself. Self-promoting is not liked. Help people or the Reddit community will tear you apart like a teddy bear given to a new puppy.
If you’re a content curator and want to a way to actively promote your business to your audience, Snip.ly is the service for you. With Snip.ly, you're able to share content from popular services and show a call to action back to your own site.
This benefits of this are it allows you to place your links next to brands that are popular and well known, which will build your authority and create a stronger brand. Setup is quick and easy with a very simple user interface; allowing you to get started right away.
Another great feature is being able to share other people's content and show a bar with the call to action to your content.
How do we get traffic?
Sign up for an account and start sharing other people's content with your own snippy link.
Testimonials are good for a number of reasons. First, it allows you to connect with other business owners in your niche by leaving a positive review on their products and services. This creates reciprocity and the chance to be seen by their own audience who have an interest in what you have to offer.
As seen on the OptimizePress homepage.
Be a case study for someone. If you have purchased a product, write up a complete study of using the product and share your results. If you have amazing results, the company will want to tell their audience about you as this is social proof for their product.
How do we get traffic?
Either by a direct link or visual URL of your site. People who are curious will search for you. For case studies, include links in your case study back to your own site or landing pages. If the case study is published on another site ask for links back.
Email signatures, while simple at its heart provides you with the ability to include links in the footer of your emails.
Think about it.
How many emails do you send a day? How many emails have you sent that have may have been forwarded on?
We are not talking about email blasts, we mean emails that you send directly from your phone or mail account to family, friends, accountants, property inquiries, school parents kids, or sport teams
If someone else sees your signature and it grabs their attention they may click through.
Some friends and family might not even know the existence of your business or website. This will allow new prospects and visitors to view your website.
Most email service providers will allow you to set up email signatures that show automatically at the bottom of every email you send.
For more information on how to do this, please refer to your email service provider’s documentation.
How do we get traffic?
We hope that people who see your signature will click the links taking them to your site. You could write something enticing to encourage them to click through, like a free report or article.
Do you have any processes in your business or niche that can be automated for your customers? This is common in most financial companies offering mortgage advice, loan calculators and currency conversion.
Here's a mortgage calculator from Money Saving Expert.
Click to Tweet is a popular plugin from Coschedule making it easy to create tweetable pieces of text. See this example of it below.
Pablo by Buffer helps you turn any piece of text into a social image.
Look for ways you can automate parts of your business that will allow your customers to find a solution quickly and efficiently. This will create shareability, allowing viral exposure of your business with the aid of effective tools that would benefit your market.
How do we get traffic?
First, you need to create a niche related tool or resource that is extremely useful, solves a problem or is the ultimate resource.
As people start using the tool you can embed various links to your own site using "made by me"
You could collect emails within the tool or make it compulsory before using. Bring those people into your email loop and send them to your blog posts.
Referral programs are excellent for generating viral traffic and getting your visitors to share. Many brands and companies typically use this strategy to great effect and are commonly used during a product or software launch. A perfect example of this is how Dropbox grew by asking people to refer friends and gain more storage space.
Look how Uber asked me to invite a friend by offering me a discount.
How do we get traffic?
Another example would be giving away or giving a discount to your $197 online course when someone refers three or more people to signup.
Think of things in your product line right now that you can run a referral program on. Referrals and affiliate programs are very similar. Referrals carry more weight as they are like word of mouth marketing from friend to friends. Affiliate referrals and traffic are often money driven and sent to everyone.
Slideshare is a public presentation service that allows you to create presentations, upload them and have them consumed and shared by the general public. If you have previously created presentations for talk or video then repurpose this on Slideshare
Some presentations get thousands of views. Visually they are easy to digest and can force people through learning steps by using individual slides.
How do we get traffic?
Under each SlideShare, you can add a link back to your site. You can also include text rules in the slide content.
Infographics or Information Graphics are graphic visual representations of data and knowledge that are designed to present information in a fun and clear format.
What’s powerful about this form of content is that it's precise.
It cuts out the unnecessary explanations needed to understand the topic.
Infographics do require a little design skill to make them stand out and patience to create.
Thankfully, there are many paid services that will allow you to create infographics easily and efficiently that doesn’t require hiring outsourced designers. We’ve listed a few services below to help you get started.
How do we get traffic?
Create an amazing guide in graphical format and share it socially. Also, make the infographic embeddable by providing the embed code like this:
Reach out to other sites who may benefit from the content and ask them to share it.
Twitter recently added a feature providing you with the ability to interact with your audience using polls.
What’s great about this is it allows you to do quick audience research and intel in order to get an idea what type of information they like.
This is great for coming up with content ideas, product ideas, and information that is directly relevant to your customers.
To create a Twitter Poll, log into your Twitter account and click on the ‘Tweet’ button to create a new tweet. Click the small spreadsheet icon inside the tweet box. Then create your poll and publish.
How do we get traffic?
By creating a poll you hope to gain new followers who later will see your social posts. You could create a poll and post your results and opinions in a new blog post. Next tweet those people who entered the poll telling them about your new blog post.
With Facebook Live, Periscope, Youtube and now Instagram, you can stream live on your Profile/Page to your followers. This opens up huge potential to connect with people in real time and build further authority.
Some networks allow the use of hashtags, others will push notifications to your followers like this email from YouTube:
Others change icons within the platform make it visible to tell someone it is live.
In the past, Live Video Streaming was possible in the form of Webinars using services like GoToWebinar, which required a paid monthly subscription.
With the free services mentioned, you can do this using your mobile phone and computer device.
How do we get traffic?
Firstly, tell your followers to turn on notifications.
Gary Vee smartly reminds people of this.
In Facebook, schedule live streams so your followers see it in your events.
Now you are ready to hit Go Live and broadcast.
During your live broadcast, you have to tell your audience what to do next. Physically speak the webpage they must visit to get X.
Do a regular show, tell people where to go on your site, collect email and watch your traffic increase.
Giveaways are a tactic used by marketers to help generate traffic through virility and audience recommendations.
Giveaways can be set up in many ways using the following examples:
Many business owners tend to prefer this method of promotion due to its social-proof as cited by Robert Cialdini in his seminal book ‘Influence’. It’s a powerful form of marketing that is indirect and helps establish your brand as a genuine place for information and service.
How do we get traffic?
Create a giveaway on your site and start sharing it via social media. As people enter the giveaway ask them to share it. There are various tools like Contest Domination that allow social sharing to gain more entries. Although this is a prime list building method, it also drives traffic back to your site.
Have a go at creating some funny GIF’s and posting them on social sites like Reddit and Facebook.
In this example, you can create a GIF on Gifs.com and add a link back to your site from inside the gif and on the gifs page.
How do we get traffic?
Find a video, create a gif, add links back to your site and share it.
Create a basic course on Udemy or other course marketplaces which target keywords around your product (better for software) and leads users back to your solution.
If you're in a different business, you could use this to establish more credibility along with driving traffic.
How do we get traffic?
Make your courses free, mention your business or website during the videos and explain how people can contact you. Show your website URL during videos as watermarks.
Create the ultimate list or collated links and turn those into a guide. Look at Brain Dean's Link Building The Definitive Guide. This guide is an immense resource of SEO related content. Note that it's not just his own content. He's gathered the best from around the web.
How do we get traffic?
If you create these types of high-value guides and resources, they will always be shared by the site owner included in the guide and others who find it useful.
Once you think outside the box, it's not hard to find other ways to generate a little traffic to your site or landing pages.
Remember to try a few of these first, measure your results and then try others. See if you can find a hot traffic source for your niche.
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17 replies to "24 Ways To Get More Website Traffic"
I appreciate the effort you put into providing valuable and practical content.
Great article… You mentioned Reddit but what about similar strategies for groups on Facebook and Linked In?
Yes, those groups are more popular and should be in your essential list.
I highlight Reddit as an untapped source.
Great article! Thank you for putting this together David!
You’re welcome Jason!! Thanks for sharing your appreciation.
Very useful. Thank you. Now to implementation which is the key.
Yes! Often the hardest as well.
Powerful article , thank you for posting such great resources.
Thanks Sara!
Wow! I read list posts like this and get all enthusiastic. I agree with Doug and always try to ask myself the following three questions:
1. Who is my audience?
2. What problem am I trying to solve?
3. What value do I offer?
These three questions really make a difference in where I spend my time to increase traffic to our site. It’s early days for us, but with incremental changes, reader-focus and our conviction in our values based system, we know we will grow to be a successful business.
I like those little q’s! Good to step back and take a timeout before diving in head first.
Once you find where your audience hang out or what sources give your quality traffic, then double down and put more effort into that source.
Just do a little bit everyday and it will grow.
The underlying premise of all of these ideas is that you know your customer and can so well describe him or her that you can figure out where he or she hangs out or visits. I think describing your perfect customer in great detail is the first and most important step to driving traffic.
You are certainly correct. I’ve seen business spend money on Facebook ads with no idea their audience is even there.
Nice read. I would love to get these going. What’s the best way to start implementing most of these. Right now, we’re just a team of two. Do we need a small team?
Pick the ones that require minimum effort but high impact like giveaways, live streams. They don’t require much leg work to get going.
Also pick maybe two each week and focus on just those as your traffic source. Look at presentations you already have that could be slideahares or blog post you can publish on Medium.
Ebooks and resource guide take time to create but have long term reach.
Just don’t try doing it all at once.
Very good. Thank you David. So, I can get away with reusing old content on Medium? Or, will Google penalize my site?
I’ve seen some large bloggers reusing the same content on Medium. They may change small amounts or publish 70% of the article and link to the full content, I’m not certain exactly.
The duplicate content thing scared lots of people and that good as people were abusing platforms. Also the black hat SEO guys were filling the web with rubbish.
I think from a small business perspective, don’t try and cheat Google. That said republishing a few posts shouldn’t harm your site.
As long as you content is helpful and not full a spammy links, why not share it on other platforms.
Just publishing on Medium doesn’t give you instant traffic, you have to get traffic to the Medium article 🙂 or hope Medium features you 🙂