7 Tricks You Can Do TODAY to Get More Visitors to Your Website (Free Methods)
Have you ever wished to know how to magically get more visitors to your website? How to start a blog, and months later have thousands of visitors?
Do you know the feeling when you start a new website and you check Google Analytics on a daily basis? It is so frustrating that you have been working on it for weeks now, and nobody reads your brilliant posts! And when finally there is one click, it is sooo painful to find out, that it was only you, clicking on your own website…
Have you ever felt like you are writing to a ghost town? That you have posted 30+ posts yet organic traffic was somewhere around 50 clicks a day?
Tell me about it, I have been there.
Do Not Give Up
I have been there, not so long ago, and I am glad that someone told me to hang on for a little while. That I must trust the training and just wait what happens. And then I saw my old posts getting more and more traffic… Without doing anything ‘special’, my first website went over 50 clicks a day, then a 100, then 200… My next goal is 10,000 clicks a month, and again, I don’t need to do anything special…
- No backlinks
- No social media (Facebook, Twitter)
- No writing to forums (Quora, LinkedIn etc.)
- No spamming
There are some basics that I have been doing since Day 1, and there are a few tweaks that I figured out as I was adding more content and progressed with my training course.
What you need to do NOW to get more traffic to your website is to build a solid foundation. Only a solid, strong website will be able to serve you and earn you money for years down the road.
In PART 1 we looked at various reason why people may not visit your website. These were site speed, reliability, quality of content, quantity, poor use of keywords and lack of basic SEO.
Let’s see how to fix them (or do it right from Day 1).
Fix your site – Images
Images, multimedia etc can improve the quality of your content drastically. Your readers will engage more, makes your content easier to read. But if you use too many images and/or they are large, it can hurt your site speed. Site speed is a major contributing factor in ranking.
So, resizing the images on your website may take long, but it’s worth the effort.
- First, make sure that your images are not too big, so they don’t affect site load speed. I always use Irfanview (that’s a free image viewer with a lot of editing features, https://www.irfanview.com/) to reduce the size of them to around 640 pixels width. These are not too small for a computer screen, and fit easily on a smartphone screen. The size of them remains under 100kilobytes, that’s a 500-times smaller than the original picture.
- Second, make sure you have a decent image optimiser plug-in installed. If you use WordPress, you can install an image optimiser plug-in, like EWWW or Kraken.
- Thirdly, proof-read your articles to ensure that images are at the right place and break the text awkwardly. Ask a friend or a member of family, to proof-read it for you, on different devices.
- Ask other online marketers to give you some advice and feedback (like SiteFeedback on WA)
Fix Your site – Hosting
There are plenty of decent hosting services that won’t charge you a lot. Some hosting may seem cheap, but they are sneaky and raise the price from the second year. Plus, your site may be offline quite often, and big hosting companies like Bluehost or Hostgator have a really bad reputation for poor customer service and helpdesk.
If your site is offline a lot, it does affect you ranking.
So if you have checked your site speed and it slow, or you have had technical issues before, move your website before it is too late…
Although it is not the fastest, I can recommend WA’s own hosting. For the price ($39 for up to 50 websites, or 2 for free) it is pretty much unrivalled. All sites hosted by them come fully loaded with add-ons like free email, free SSL, free site-speed enhancement, Kraken image optimiser tailored to their servers etc., on top of the comprehensive training courses on WordPress, Affiliate Marketing, and other aspects of online marketing. Sites hosted by WA usually rank high on Google.
If nothing else, the brilliant site support is alone good enough reason to consider transferring your site to WA. My website was down ONCE. It took them 5 minutes to answer, and less than 2 hours to put me back online…
Write with intent
And your intent should be helping people, helping your audience. Focus on quality content. Try to be as helpful as possible, and do your best to write the most helpful post, better than any other that is on Page 1 for that keyword you are targeting.
As for monetising (as an ultimate goal), I recommend waiting with your pop-up ads and affiliate links. If Google does not trust your site, and you ‘spam’ it with ads, well, that trust will never be earned.
Basic keyword research and SEO
Make sure you do your research, plan your post and write riveting content that is easy to digest, easy to understand. Make the titles appealing but not too catchy, not too spammy. The title should summarise your post, tell people what they get if they click through. It should also reflect on a specific query.
If you have a post like ‘9 things why I love my Pomeranian’ that’s great, but I can’t think of a search query that would have this ‘answer’…(Why anyone would love a Pomeranian, maybe…?). Instead, keeping the same post, just change the title to meet user intent. ‘Is a Pomeranian a good breed?’ or ‘Is it easy to train a Pomeranian?’ etc.
Follow the simple steps to optimise your post for search engines. If you haven’t read my post on How to Get on Goole Page One, make sure you read my post on it.
Get More Visitors with a Healthy Content Mix
A healthy content mix is a must to attract as many people as possible. If you have written 100 posts, but every one of them starts with 100 Ways to… or TOP 50 Best… then you probably do not have a healthy mix of content.
So what does a good content mix look like?
To maximise the traffic to your website, and to reduce the time until your website reaches its full potential, you must create three types of articles, listed below.
To understand the idea, look at this image.
At the toe of the graph, there are the very specific sub-niche keywords, long tail keywords. These are easier to rank for, but there is less traffic. You target these first, and then work your way up. You start writing shorter posts first, a.k.a Answer posts (copyright Jim & Ricki at IncomeSchool.com…)
Answer Posts – 1200-1500 words. The shortest ones, to show Google that you exist, and that you create helpful content on a regular basis. These posts explain a specific idea, reflect on a specific problem within your niche, answer a very specific question. These will target long tail, low hanging fruit keywords to rank on Google first. These increase how authentic your site looks and Google starts trusting your site. Don’t worry if they don’t bring in too much traffic yet, the purpose of these is different.
Staple posts – 1500-2200 words. These are the posts that will start with ’21 Great…’ or ‘Top 10…’. You can share these posts on social media easily and it will bring in additional traffic. They target more competitive keywords, but at the same time they bring in more traffic.
Pillar posts – over 3500 words, researched to hell, the most valuable posts on your website. There are a lot of other internal pages linking to these posts, and they link to a lot of others. As the name suggests, these are going to be the pillars of your website, so you won’t stop working on them. You must have to go back and improve them, all the time.
Improve, Improve, Improve
I go back to my older posts and update them from time to time (not just for the ‘Pillar posts’) Maybe it is just a broken link, a link to a product that no longer exists, a typo, or a sentence too long. I can always make some improvements to make it even better. It also shows Google that those posts are still relevant (the older your post ie 4+ years, the less likely to rank high)
Other Sources of Organic Traffic
You can always consider other sources of traffic. There are two that worth spending time with.
Pinterest – although you don’t see Pins appear on the Google search results, Pinterest has a distinct advantage over Facebook or Twitter. Pinterest is basically a search engine. Whatever you pin, that pin stays there for years. Keyword research and SEO works on Pinterest too. It does take time to create pins that look appealing, but, especially in certain niches with predominantly female audience, it can make a huge difference in visitors to your website.
Youtube – for very similar reasons. Whatever you post on YT, it stays there forever. It is also much easier to rank on YT than on Google. If you create a post, it takes another couple of hours to create a video of it.
Don’t think anything special. Your 21 Greatest Chainsaw for Christmas posts can be easily turned to a video. You just shove the pictures in Microsoft Powerpoint, add a bit of text and export it as a video. Once you upload it to Youtube, put a link in the description that points users to the post on your website. (Google also considers this as a backlink, that can improve the ranking of your website)
Google displays Youtube videos on top of Page 1 of the SERP, so even if your new post ranks low, the Youtube video will be on page one.
Conclusion
These simple steps are not top secret, not (fake) guru top tips that you must pay for. Everything I know I have figured out myself, learnt it for free, or someone from the brilliant community of affiliate marketers gave me as a tip.
There are plenty of other ways to get more visitors to your website, such as building backlinks etc.
But the ones I highlighted above are essential to build a solid a foundation, and make Google love your website for what it is, not for what you’d like to make it appear.
That is not the only, but it is the most sustainable way to build an online business that lasts, and generate you income for years.
As a reminder, you need to be vigilant, patient, consistent and you should not give up. The method works, but it takes time. The only way you can ‘fail’ is if you give up.
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