Traffic certainly says a lot about a website these days. The number, which is used to calculate the amount of users who click onto a website has become a determining factor in whether a website is “worthy”. Websites with significant amounts of traffic are considered gods in the industry, whereas website’s with a less favorable number are cast aside, and overlooked by the masses. Well that doesn’t seem all that fair now does it? Hypothetically speaking, Blogger X decides to start up a new website. Sure, he blasts his mailing list with links to new posts, and he Facebooks all of his friends asking them to “like” his brand new URL, but it is more likely than not that our good friend Blogger X won’t be racing onto the track with mind-blowing traffic right from the get-go. No, it seems more reasonable to estimate that in the beginning stages of Blogger X’s new online project, traffic will be sparse. So with his name on the line, and his website hanging in the balance, how does Blogger X significantly increase his website’s traffic, and fast?
Not too long ago, the imonomy crew found themselves in a similar predicament. With the imonomy name gaining more oomph by the day, and the publisher base on a steady rise, only one factor was dragging us down, and that was the amount of user traffic we were seeing on our website. Just 120 short days ago, we decided to take matters into our own hands in order to shape our website’s destiny, and the positive results we achieved were well-beyond any of our original expectations. The question ultimately wasn’t how to increase traffic to our website, but rather how to increase traffic to our website, fast. Over the course of the past 4 months, a special team of dedicated imonomy employees devoted themselves to naturally driving traffic to imonomy’s website. Now that our success has been recorded, we wanted to share our tips with any other website owners who are currently scratching their heads, wondering how they are going to jolt their traffic.
STEP ONE: The Proof is in the Proofreading
Prior to our traffic-driving crusade, imonomy’s website was actually quite active. We were posting on our website’s blog section regularly, and we had worked hard to develop some eye-catching pages. The speediness in which our website was produced and published was the first error we had to correct in order to spike our traffic. While blog posts were published regularly, the grammar was not up to par. There were also some very noticeable grammatical and spelling errors in the text of our main website. For any publisher hoping to take their website to professional levels, proper spelling and grammar are key. Now, I am not suggesting that anyone with a URL go out and buy the latest edition of the Miriam Webster Dictionary, and reference it every time they write a post. However, spell checker, free online editing tools, or just another person to read over a post before it’s published certainly won’t hurt. I guarantee that any extra time you spend editing, or proofreading your website’s pages will be time well spent. Having original content, which we wrote in-house, also played a big role in boosting traffic to our pages. Owning and managing a website is time consuming, and adding ‘writing original content for posts’ to the list of to-do’s is often the last thing a publisher wants to deal with especially when writing, or finding generic texts to fill pages is so much easier to get done. While setting aside the time to write and develop original content is time consuming, the extra effort will certainly help you get your website traffic on a steady rise.
STEP TWO: Become Friends with Alexa
No, I don’t mean finding a girl on Facebook named Alexa and sending her a friend request. Alexa.com is a great website and excellent resource for any publisher who wants to quickly increase the amount of traffic coming to his pages. The Alexa rank is based on how much traffic a website sees, and this smart system monitors most aspects of a website’s day-to-day activity. Our next important move, which led us to increase our traffic in such a short period of time was to become very close friends with Alexa. A team of imonomy employees were closely monitoring our website’s status on Alexa in order to get a better idea of the areas which needed the most improvement. Not only did Alexa allow us to track our website’s rank, the statistics provided by Alexa allowed us to monitor our bounce-rates, page views as well as the general geographic breakdown of our website’s traffic.
STEP THREE: Use Your Resources Wisely
There are plenty of resources available to publishers. The best tip we can offer anyone who wants to drive more traffic to their website is to get better acquainted with the tools that will help them do so. Over the past four months, Google Analytics became a resource we used religiously. The beauty behind Google Analytics is, as a publisher, you have first hand access to your user’s behavior. Google Analytics allows the publisher to monitor where their users go once they land on the website, as well as intel into how long users are sticking around for. With the help of our new source of information, we were able to monitor which pages were getting traffic and which pages were not. Google Analytics and Alexa are often confused and many publishers use one instead of the other. We firmly believe that the best way to fully understand, and monitor traffic is to follow the statistics from both resources and make critical changes to your website based on the findings you gather from both Alexa and Google Analytics. The important information we gathered from both resources allowed us to focus in on the areas of our website which required the most attention, and by doing so we were able to reconstruct the imonomy website in order to ensure that we were seeing an optimal amount of daily traffic.
STEP FOUR: Expand Your Reach
Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest are all great places to get exposed. By properly marketing your website on these social media channels you are sure to see a boost in traffic. As part of our four month traffic-mission, we became very involved in social media. We spread the imonomy name as far as we could reach, and made sure to have active members of the imonomy team connecting with followers on all possible channels. Social media channels are not only great for getting noticed, they are also easy-to-use public spaces where you can promote a new post, photograph, or even contest. Earlier this summer, imonomy decided to host its first ever Summer Vacation Instagram contest. The online event not only spread the imonomy name, but it gave old and new imonomy followers a chance to get involved, and have fun at the same time. Organizing, and hosting your own online contest to promote your website, or brand is not an impossible feat. In fact, if orchestrated properly the results can be quite encouraging. The trick is to use social media channels in order to generate buzz, because once you’ve managed to spark people’s interest the traffic to your site will certainly follow.
STEP FIVE: Listen to Your Users
Getting in touch with the users who already visit your website is a great way to get new people to join-in. Typically website users always want to be involved, and can often be a great source for feedback. Make sure you have an inviting comment, or contact section on your website and be sure to encourage visitors to share their thoughts. If you have exceptionally good relationship with a specific user, then don’t be shy to send them an email asking for feedback. You would be surprised how much you can learn from your own website from the people who visit it. Sometimes the small details that you miss, are the one’s that will have the most impact on your users. Listen to your users, and be open receiving constructive criticism and making positives changes. Over the past few months, imonomy received plenty of emails from users offering-up friendly tips and suggestions. As oppose to sending the emails straight to the trash, we took the time to read over every email and make changes when necessary. Ultimately, a great website provides its users with an unforgettable experience, and the best way to achieve high traffic is by ensuring that your users enjoy their time on your website.
Driving traffic to a website is an important factor in ensuring online success. While buying artificial traffic may seem tempting, ultimately this is only a band-aid solution that will not guarantee long term success. Increasing traffic means committing to a set plan, and focusing on strengthening your website’s look and appeal. imonomy successfully increased its traffic by 400% in only four months, and it has been an enjoyable journey that the entire office managed to take part in. After seeing such great improvements we are pleased to share our secrets with anyone else who is interested in focusing on increasing their website traffic.
Quick update for the end of the year 2013.We managed to significantly improve our traffic performance, we want to thank all our readers and users that have been with us from the beginning.
Do you have a unique strategy to generate more website traffic? Do you want ask us any questions on how to build traffic? Please feel free to leave us a comment bellow.
This post was co-written by Avishai Sam Bitton and Leytal Ross