You create a website to share your knowledge and experience. You develop great content for it. Traffic trickles in but you expected a lot more. Where are all the people and why aren’t they coming to the site? Don’t be discouraged. You just entered a new stage of your business development.
It’s time to direct and drive traffic to your site. However, you don’t want just any traffic. You want targeted traffic.
What is targeted traffic? Targeted traffic is the portion of traffic that is a part of your target market and arrives at your site due to marketing strategies and offers crafted specifically to grab their attention. These pre-qualified visitors can turn into leads, which can turn into buyers, then become repeat buyers, and ultimately turn into loyal customers.
With millions of websites on the internet vying for your target market’s attention, you need to actively attract and convert your ideal buyers. Of course, before you started your online business venture, you created a persona of your ideal customer and developed a niche and perhaps a sub-niche, as well.
To refresh your memory a little, an example of a broad target audience could be women.
Niching that down further, an example could be middle-aged women. Going one step further, you could target single, middle-aged, women. As you can see, you can continue niching your audience down as needed. When you know your target audience well, you can successfully market to them by providing the information and solutions they need.
While knowledge of online technology and marketing is very helpful, you don’t have to be an expert. You can learn as you go. Implementing what you learn, as you learn it, can make a real difference to your bottom line.
Consider beginning with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
It’s not as scary as it sounds. In fact, it’s one of the easiest technology/marketing strategies to learn and implement. With a little knowledge about how to use keywords and a keyword research tool, you can get started right away. Just place the keywords in prominent places such as in your headlines, links, categories, descriptions, etc., in order to encourage your viewers to click, read more, and take action.
Once you have keywords in place throughout your site, make certain you create engaging content, including posts, images, and other items. Ask pertinent questions in the title or in the first paragraph to keep your audience engaged. Learn the difference between writing for your audience and writing at them.
It isn’t enough to have great website content and targeted traffic.
If you want to make money, you need to sell something, whether it is something of your own or an affiliate item. While your website draws in traffic, it’s up to you to make the experience personal for your readers and profitable for your business.
The best way to do both of those is by creating an email list where you can get to know your readers better and promote items they want and need. Once you have your mailing list set up, you’ll need to convert website visitors into email subscribers.
How do you get visitors to become email subscribers? Offer visitors something they just can’t turn down, in exchange for joining your list. This is often efficiently done with a “pop-up” reminder, which offers the reader something that is free only when they join by adding their
email address in the email capture portion, below the offer. An email capture, marketing strategy works well on your site as well as on many social media platforms.