And sent out an announcement to my email subscribers:
Which led to a significant boost in traffic (including almost 5k visitors in one day):
9. Create Content That Appeals to Influencers
Here’s the truth:
If you want influential people to share your content, you need to write stuff that appeals directly to that group.
Example:
A few years ago I created an infographic for a client in the investing niche.
Even though that niche is far from “interesting”, our infographic went viral. We’re talking thousands of targeted visits in the first two days.
Here’s the infographic:
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 appealed to the influencers in the personal finance space.
I’ll explain.
I noticed that, at the time, a lot of high-powered financial bloggers were up in arms about inflation:
So I decided to create an infographic that highlighted the problem they cared so much about.
And this led to shares and mentions on several authority sites…
…and a boatload of traffic.
10. Share Videos On LinkedIn
LinkedIn is growing FAST.
In fact, a recent study found that the number of people sharing stuff on LinkedIn has increased significantly in 2018:
That’s great and all. But HOW do you use LinkedIn to increase traffic to your website?
Post video content.
For example, here’s a video I recently posted on LinkedIn:
2 weeks later, my video has:
634 likes
106 comments
31 THOUSAND views
Try getting that kind of engagement on Facebook 🙂
And now it’s time for me to show you another cool way to people to visit your site…
11. Host a Giveaway Contest
People love free stuff.
(No surprise there)
But what might surprise you is: you can use free stuff to get more traffic.
How?
Host a giveaway contest.
Here’s an example of a contest my friend Noah Kagan recently put together:
See how that works?
To enter the contest, people need to give you their email address (you then add them to your email list).
It gets better:
You can get incentivize people to share your contest with their friends:
(And those shares will drive more traffic to your website and grow your email list)
Now:
This contest was done with KingSumo. But if you have the technical know-how, you can set this up yourself.
12. Add “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.
What are Share Triggers?
They’re things you include in your content that push people to share it on social media.
A lot of these principles were first discovered by behavioral scientists like Dr. Jonah Berger, Dr. Katherine Milkman and Jure Leskovec.
And they’ve proven in the lab what I discovered through trial-and-error:
When you include Share Triggers in your content, people are significantly more likely to link and share it.
For example:
One of the most powerful Share Triggers is Social Currency.
Social Currency is the idea that we share things that make us look good. And this Share Trigger is a large part of the reason that The Shrinking Dollar infographic I mentioned earlier did so well.
Specifically, this infographic confirmed what influencers were already saying: inflation is a big problem.
And my content backed up their rants with meaty data:
Every time an influencer shared my infographic with their audience, it boosted their Social Currency.
So they shared it… again and again.
It even got included in Google News thanks to a feature in The Christian Post.
All because I strategically added the “Social Currency” Share Trigger into my content.
Very cool.
13. Retarget Visitors With Facebook Ads
Let’s face it:
Facebook ads can be EXPENSIVE.
Fortunately, I found a little “loophole” that’s helped me get laser-targeted visitors for pennies:
Retargeting.
Here’s how it works:
First, create a Facebook ad that sends people to a blog post.
Here’s a real-life example:
Next, target people that have visited your site in the last month or two:
Finally, run the ad.
And you’ll probably find that your CPC is dirt cheap vs. most other types of advertising (like Google Adwords).
Nice.
14. Reduce Your Bounce Rate
A high bounce rate damages your site’s pageviews, conversions… and it can even hurt your SEO.
(In fact, thanks to Google’s RankBrain algorithm, bounce rate is now a super important ranking signal).
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that improving your bounce rate is insanely easy.
I walk you through the entire process in this short video:
Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that gives you keyword ideas, well…everywhere.
For example…
The next time you do a Google search, you’ll see search volume and CPC data on that keyword:
Or the next time you’re shopping for a toothbrush on Amazon — BOOM — you see keyword data on the terms that Amazon suggests:
Now It’s Your Turn
I hope this post showed you how to increase website traffic using some cool, untapped strategies.
Now I’d like to hear your take:
Which technique from this post are you ready to try first?
Are you going to start syndicating your content on Medium?
Or
Maybe want to publish an awesome list post.
Either way, let me know in the comments section below.
Finally, I've just released a brand new guide that's going to help you get more traffic to your website!. It's Called: Traffic Machine - 5 Powerful Strategies to Increase Website Traffic!!
This is a huge problem.
If people don’t see your link in your author bio, they’re not gonna visit your site.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to this problem: The “Upside Down” Guest Post.
Here’s the step-by-step process:
1. First, write a guest post just like you normally would.
2. Next, include “helpful resource” sections throughout your guest post.
These sections link to 2-3 helpful resources on the topic you just covered.
Here’s an example:
3. Finally, include YOUR content as one of the “helpful resources”.
For example, here’s a guest post I published a while back:
And I strategically linked to my content as one of the “resources to check out”:
And that link brought in 78% more traffic than my author bio link.
Here’s exactly how I did it:
1. First, I found a post on my site that was out of date.
As it turned out, my guide to YouTube SEO was insanely outdated:
2. Next, I updated and improved the post.
Specifically, I added new screenshots:
Sprinkled in new strategies and techniques:
And eliminated old strategies that didn’t work anymore:
And just like that, traffic to that page shot up like a rocket ship.
(Because this was an old post, as you can see here in my Google Analytics, most of that increase was organic traffic from Google)
This entire process took about an hour.
And I got WAY more SEO traffic than I would from publishing a new post.
With that, it’s time for our third strategy…
With that, let me show you how Click To Tweet links work:
1. Find something “tweetable” in your content.
This can be a bite-sized tip, strategy, quote or statistic.
For example, my post listed a bunch of list building strategies.
So I considered each strategy on my list “tweetable”.
2. Create a Click To Tweet link.
Head over to ClickToTweet.com and write your tweet:
And the tool will generate a special link for you:
3. Finally, include that link in your content.
Whenever someone clicks on the link…
…they get a pre-written tweet for easy sharing:
It’s that easy.
Instead of ONLY looking at keywords, Google now understands topics.
(How big of a change was this update? Google said that: “Hummingbird affects 90% of all searches…”. Wow).
The question is:
How do you make sure that Google understands your content’s topic?
LSI Keywords.
LSI keywords are words and phrases related to your target keyword.
For example, let’s say you just wrote a post about social media.
LSI keywords would be words and phrases like:
Then, just sprinkle these LSI keywords into your post…
…and you’re set.
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 turned that post into a YouTube Video:
That single video has generated over 50k views… and hundreds of website visitors.
(All from a piece of content that I published YEARS ago)
That’s the power of Content Transformation.
As a bonus, you usually get at least one backlink in the show notes, which can help your search engine rankings:
And now it’s time for…
The question is…
How?
All you need to do is find bloggers that share content on your topic…
…and send them a non-pushy email.
Here’s a real life example of this process in action:
First, I sent a personalized email to a blogger that’s already shared content on my topic:
(That way, I knew she’d want to read my post… before I hit “send”)
When she got back to me, I sent her a link:
That’s all there is to it.
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 5k visitors in one day):
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 appealed to the influencers in the personal finance space.
I’ll explain.
I noticed that, at the time, a lot of high-powered financial bloggers were up in arms about inflation:
So I decided to create an infographic that highlighted the problem they cared so much about.
And this led to shares and mentions on several authority sites…
…and a boatload of traffic.
That’s great and all. But HOW do you use LinkedIn to increase traffic to your website?
Post video content.
For example, here’s a video I recently posted on LinkedIn:
2 weeks later, my video has:
See how that works?
To enter the contest, people need to give you their email address (you then add them to your email list).
It gets better:
You can get incentivize people to share your contest with their friends:
(And those shares will drive more traffic to your website and grow your email list)
Now:
This contest was done with KingSumo. But if you have the technical know-how, you can set this up yourself.
And they’ve proven in the lab what I discovered through trial-and-error:
When you include Share Triggers in your content, people are significantly more likely to link and share it.
For example:
One of the most powerful Share Triggers is Social Currency.
Social Currency is the idea that we share things that make us look good. And this Share Trigger is a large part of the reason that The Shrinking Dollar infographic I mentioned earlier did so well.
Specifically, this infographic confirmed what influencers were already saying: inflation is a big problem.
And my content backed up their rants with meaty data:
Every time an influencer shared my infographic with their audience, it boosted their Social Currency.
So they shared it… again and again.
It even got included in Google News thanks to a feature in The Christian Post.
All because I strategically added the “Social Currency” Share Trigger into my content.
Very cool.
Next, target people that have visited your site in the last month or two:
Finally, run the ad.
And you’ll probably find that your CPC is dirt cheap vs. most other types of advertising (like Google Adwords).
Nice.
In fact, as you can see in the chart above, long content (>3k words) gets 208% more shares than short articles.
I’ve noticed this myself.
For example, here’s a long-form blog post from my blog (a giant list of SEO techniques):
This guide weighs in at a staggering 6,525 words.
And the simple fact that my post is insanely long is a big reason why it’s been shared 11,748 times:
(And those shares have sent over 50,000 visitors to my website)
This update means that Google now counts the mobile version of your site FIRST.
(It also means that Google largely ignores the desktop version of your site)
So:
How do you know if your site is mobile optimized?
Well, Google created a free tool for doing just that: The Mobile-Friendly Test.
This nifty tool tells you if your site is optimized properly for mobile devices…
… and gives you specific recommendations to make your site better:
In fact, YouTube is one of my top 5 traffic sources (along with Google, Facebook and referral traffic from blogs).
That said:
Getting views on your YouTube videos is HARD.
But it doesn’t have to be.
That’s why I’m going to point you to two resources that will help you get more views on your videos.
Resource #1: Video SEO: The Definitive Guide
This guide shows you EVERYTHING you need to know about ranking your videos in YouTube and Google.
It covers keyword research, video tags and more.
Resource #2: YouTube SEO: 9 Actionable Tips for Ranking Videos (2018)
This video will show you 9 tips that helped me rank #1 in YouTube for competitive keywords (like “SEO tutorial”):
2. Second, viral content tends to have a high “Utility”.
This simply means that your content is super useful in some way.
Maybe you show people how to steam broccoli.
Or you teach them to nail their job interview.
Either way, research shows that extremely practical content has a very high chance of going viral.
3. Lastly, viral content needs an initial “push” to get going.
For example, Chris Gimmer got over 17k visitors to his site in one day (thanks to a blog post that went viral):
Not bad.
This post did well. Lots of people read my post and shared it on social media.
But I KNEW that there were thousands of people that could benefit from my content… but hadn’t seen it yet.
So I republished my content as a LinkedIn article:
Which (along with my other LinkedIn posts) led to a decent chunk of targeted traffic:
Then, either create entire posts to answer these questions…
…or incorporate the answers into your content.
Simple.
Sweet.
As you can see the chart, list posts got 6x more shares than how-to posts (and 40x more shares than infographics).
And when I look at my own content, I notice the same thing.
For example, this mega list of SEO tools is one of my most shared pieces of content I’ve ever written.
It’s got 18.4k shares and almost 900 comments:
![147 Best Ways to Increase Website Traffic [Follow This Step by Step 2018 Guide!]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vM2zVAfVWeEuHczHwq7gefYew6fJDq_qKUt9ZIJLgLPqvZRJjVofDeNHyQkTw96YRZdtZ8IoiFm_BD9tf6dY7eceHMw2n88wgx7TTCGikJ25o)
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