In fact, one of the most common problems that online business owners, sales teams, and marketers have is turning their website visitors into customers.

Many years ago, back when I started my online marketing career, I never had any case study, portfolio, or testimonials to help my services sell. So, what I did was learn more about consumer behavior and put an inbound marketing methodology in place for my own business.

The strategies alone helped me to work with the most amazing start-ups and businesses in the world. This also led me to earn a five-figure income during my first year.

In this article, I will tell you the modern steps that you can take to help you get more leads and customers for your own business or clients. Below are 10 steps on how you can convert website visitors into customers.

How to Convert Website Visitors into Customers

1. Make your website fast

If you’ve been on my blog and following me on social media for quite some time, you’ll determine that I heavily encourage you to increase your website performance.

Why? Because it’s very important, and I bet you have left tons of websites before because they took forever to load.

According to a case study from Radware, 51% of online shoppers in the U.S. claimed that they do not complete a purchase if a website is too slow. Whereas, Strange Loop has stated that “a one-second delay can cost you 7 percent of sales.”

One of the easiest ways to increase your website performance is by installing a content delivery network (CDN).

Making your website fast not only helps your site’s ranking on Google but also improves the user experience of your visitors, increases your page views, and increases your conversions. Make your website fast; it’s the first step and a big deal to converting visitors to customers.

2. Create engaging content

Notice closely the wording I’ve used—create engaging content—not just creating content.

Most website owners create content with the sole purpose of ranking and getting website traffic from search engines. Although optimizing your content for search engines is important, you need to remember that search engines aren’t the one who buys products or services from you—the searcher or person does.

Related article: How to Get 1,000 Visitors Per Day To Your Website or Blog

So, you need to determine if your content is also engaging for “humans” to consume. You can personally read and look at your contents and ask the following:

• Are the content and tone engaging?
• Do you like the content layout and structure?
• Is the content easy to read?
• Is it helpful and informative?
• Did you enjoy reading it?
• Are you going to take action, such as sharing or clicking the call-to-action (CTA) buttons after you read the content? (the most important one)

Present your content with the highest quality possible. Don’t bore your website visitors and keep them interested. Below are some ideas you can do to make your content engaging.

• Add videos, data, infographics, images, or slide presentations
• Write as if you are talking to a single person
• Encourage comments and respond to them

3. Create marketing offers

Marketing offers are pieces of content that you offer to your prospects, which become free in exchange for information about themselves, as defined by Nectafy.

Offers play a vital role not only in converting your visitors into leads but also in nurturing your existing leads. Some examples of offers are e-books, white papers, guides, videos, webinars, industry case studies, templates, free tools, and coupons.

Personally, I create e-books as my offers for new visitors and exclusive courses for my subscribers.

One of my offers is an e-book dedicated to freelancers (yes, you can download it for free). In this e-book, I have summarized 20 of the most common mistakes made by freelancers, and one of them is mismanaging their income.

Now, if you are a freelancer who experiences this problem and looks for a solution, then I’ll present you with a solution. The probability for you to purchase my product or service is higher due to your needs.

So, here’s what you need to remember. Whenever you create an offer, make sure that it is related to the solution (your products or services) that you are trying to sell.

4. Create a landing page

Once you created your offer, it’s time to create a landing page where your visitors can sign up in order for them to access it.

A landing page is any web page that a visitor can arrive at. It has a form and exists solely to capture a visitor’s information through that form. In other words, all landing pages are web pages, but not all web pages are landing pages.

The image below is an example of a landing page for the e-book offer I’ve created.

Before you start creating and designing your landing page, here are the best practices that you should consider implementing and testing:

• Write a detailed and actionable headline
• Explain the offer clearly and place visual emphasis on the value. It is important to write more benefits rather than features.
• Remove the navigation menu or links
• Form length should mirror the value of the offer
• Include a relevant image, animation, or short video
• Add social sharing buttons

When you start promoting your landing page with various CTAs or marketing campaigns, you should aim for at least a 20% landing page conversion rate goal.

5. Use high-converting elements

High-converting elements are things that can help you to convert your visitors into customers better.

Some examples are case studies, logos of companies that have trusted you, and other trust signals, such as testimonials, social shares, and guarantee seals.

Adding these elements to your landing pages or even to your thank-you pages can increase your conversion rates, which can also help you get more customers.

6. Use forms

Forms are part of converting visitors to leads and are often available on landing pages. You’ll see an example of a form I created for the landing page image I’ve shown above.

The landing page form is where your visitors give you certain information about themselves so that you can give them something back in return, or what we call offers.

You need to make it as easy as possible for a website visitor to become a lead. However, if you make your form too short, you may not know if the lead quality is high or low. Don’t take forms for granted and make sure to test different form lengths that could work best for you and your prospects.

For most B2B companies, your form should include at least three main pieces of information:

• Name
• E-mail Address
• Job Title

7. Design a thank-you page

A thank-you page is a place where your visitors go after they have converted into a lead or customer. You can create a thank-you page that could confirm their purchase and can successfully sign up for your newsletter or any other conversion actions they do.

Thank-you pages are very effective in keeping your leads engaged, plus you can use them for secondary conversion opportunities.

Depending on your goals and how far you would like to move your leads into a buyer’s journey, align them when you create your thank-you page.

Here’s the thank-you page that I used for the e-book offer sample above.

8. Create high-converting CTAs

A CTA or “call-to-action” is literally the action that you want people to take. This could be “call now,” “learn more,” or “download an e-book.” You can place a CTA anywhere in your marketing in the form of wording or graphics.

CTAs are important in starting the funnel that will convert your visitors into leads.

In my previous posts on how we increase our e-mail sign-ups and sales on Facebook, you’ll find out that our first CTA is placed on a Facebook post that we run on paid advertisement.

Once you click that post, it redirects you to a landing page that has another CTA. This CTA asks a visitor to get the coupon code or the marketing offer by subscribing. This is the phase where we turn visitors into a lead.

Once you get the coupon code, either you use it or we trigger our sales workflows through e-mail or other sales tools. This is clearly the phase in how you can turn leads into paying customers.

CTA can be seen and used anywhere on your marketing funnel.

The easiest way to start and create CTAs is by answering the “why” question. For example, why should your visitor buy your new product? If you know the answer, you can use a CTA “Buy 1, Get 2 Free!” or “Get 10% Discount Now.”

9. Execute sales processes

This step is mostly handled by the sales team, and the job is to turn leads into customers. Of course, depending on your industry or offers, the marketing team and sales team can work together to turn those leads into a customer using only the above steps or even without going to this step.

However, some industries, such as my inbound marketing company, need to educate or qualify visitors first before they become customers. Executing smart sales workflows or processes after a visitor turns into a lead is the solution to convert them into paying customers.

Let’s take for example a visitor who arrives at your blog, and let me tell you first how the previous steps work together.

1. A stranger has arrived at one of your blog posts (the stranger is now a “visitor”)
2. The visitor has read the blog post, has seen a free download of an e-book through a CTA, and has clicked it because it can potentially solve the problem he or she is looking for
3. The visitor goes to the landing page and gives information in exchange for the e-book
4. The visitor has downloaded the free e-book and goes to the thank-you page (the visitor is now a “lead”)

Now that the stranger has been turned into a lead, it’s time to make him or her one of your customers.

A few strategies that you can do are the following:

• An e-mail autoresponder with a good sequence (this works extremely well in the affiliate marketing industry).

• Traditional sales strategies, such as cold-calling or e-mail follow-ups

Another thing that you need to remember in selling is that the most common problem why a customer doesn‘t buy from you and stops you from selling is due to several objections. You need to learn how to recognize these objections and to deal with them effectively for you to close a deal or a sale.

10. Use remarketing

Remarketing has been proven effective in the past few years since it helps you to connect with visitors or leads from your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or inquiry.

Using remarketing, you can create targeted ads in front of these people so that they can finish the actions they’ve left. For example, you can use remarketing to the people who have visited your blog post or landing page but didn’t download your free e-book.

According to eMarketer, nearly three out of five U.S. online buyers said they notice ads for products they looked up on other sites. They also found out that 30% of consumers have a positive or very positive reaction to retargeted ads versus 11% who feel negatively about them. The greatest percentage though—59 percent—had a neutral reaction.

One of my favorite retargeting strategies is using Facebook, which I discussed in one of my case studies where I helped a client increase his e-mail subscribers on Facebook by 47%. We only spent $56.23 for this Facebook ad campaign, and the revenue produced ranged from $6,500 to $11,000.

Conclusion

The steps you’ve read above and (hopefully) followed will give you a lift on converting your website visitors to customers.

Sure, there are more ways to utilize and improve each of these steps but they are enough as starting points. At the end of the day for entrepreneurs and marketers like me, the most important metric we track is profit.

The post 10 Steps on How to Convert Website Visitors to Customers appeared first on Workroom.

I know you do!

In reality, getting a large number of visitors is one of the most common goals of many online businesses for their websites. Sadly, not everyone has the time and marketing budget to get thousands of visitors per day for their blogs and websites.

Four months ago, I conducted an experiment on the new website, Tycoon Philippines, to determine if getting a large number of visitors is attainable without spending too much money on advertising and by just using content, research, and optimization.

Here are the steps I’ve taken to perform this experiment.

First, I created, designed, and launched the new website. Second, I spent time researching for article topics that my target audience would search or would love to read. Third, I had been active on the website for two weeks and posted articles. Last, I stopped posting and updating the website for up to four months.

Those steps were made to know the answers to the following:

1. Will the traffic drop during inactivity?
2. Will this new website get sustainable traffic in the future through the things I’ve done in just two weeks of being active? If yes, why and how?

The result will surely surprise you.

The new website, which started from scratch and was inactive for four months, is now receiving almost thousands of visitors per day. It has also generated leads, radio guesting, interview proposals, and advertising opportunities.

The site is now also included in the top blogs in business and finance in the Philippines. Moreover, it has also generated a minimum of $80 USD per month from Google AdSense.

Do you want to know how I did it?

Of course, you do, and I am more than pleased to show you the exact strategies and things I’ve done to make this possible. So, let’s get started.

How to Get 1,000 Website Visitors per Day

1. Configure website technicalities

The website was created through WordPress, and when I built it, four things were prioritized: website speed, meta tags, design, and site architecture.

Website Speed

Optimizing speed on a website is one of my favorites, and I usually do this with the help of a content delivery network (CDN). Optimizing website speed has been proven to increase the website traffic of other websites that I handled and tested.

CDN delivers webpages and other web content to a user based on his/her geographic location. I use MaxCDN, which is inexpensive and easy to integrate into WordPress websites.

I’ve also installed WordPress plug-ins, which are free, to increase website speed.

The following are the WordPress plug-ins that I’ve installed and used:

• Lazy Load
  This plug-in loads images to improve page load times. It uses jQuery.sonar to load an image only when it’s visible in the viewport. Note: This plug-in doesn’t work on all themes, and it’s fine if you can’t use it.

• W3 Total Cache
  You can easily add a CDN, such as MaxCDN, through W3 Total Cache. This plug-in improves the speed and user experience of your site.

• Use Google Libraries
  This plug-in allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s Ajax Library application program interface (API), instead of directly serving these files from your WordPress installation.

• WP Smush.it
  This plug-in reduces image file sizes and improves performance by using its API within WordPress.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are snippets of code on a web page that provides structured metadata about a web page. I’ve written a long article about meta tags from my previous posts, which you can check here and here. I strongly recommend that you read them.

For all of my WordPress websites, I only choose one of the two plug-ins to help me configure the meta title, meta description, and social meta tags. These two plug-ins are All in One SEO Pack or WordPress Yoast. I’ve found out that some people use both, and it’s okay.

Design

I love beautiful designs, and I know that you love them, too. I choose and buy WordPress themes at ThemeForest, which I then customize.

During customization, although I’ve planned to serve ads from Google AdSense, I always make sure that the site will still look professional and beautiful in the eyes of my readers. To do this, I ask for feedback from some of my friends regarding the designs I’ve made.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is how a website is laid out and how the pages are interconnected with one another. According to him, site architecture has three criteria: technical, aesthetic, and functionality.

To keep the description simple and to give you an idea, I’ve described in the following how I structured Tycoon.ph site architecture for functionality so that my readers can easily navigate the website.

For Tycoon.ph, I had planned to use three main initial topics: business, marketing, and entrepreneurship. I made these three main topics as post categories. Each of these main categories has five subcategories.

I had to create articles that were related and based on those subcategories. Let’s take the subcategory “productivity” as an exampleofm the main category of “entrepreneurship.” However, before we even begin creating an article about this subcategory, you should follow the second step below.

2. Assess top-ranking articles on the search engine result page (SERP) for ideas

You need to follow these two steps so that the top-ranking articles on SERP can give you ideas for your content creation process:

• Simplify the keyword research process
• Generate topic ideas from SERP

Simplify the keyword research process

The first thing you may want to do is to go to Google Keyword Planner, which is free.

In this tool, you can search for the main keywords that you will use for your article topic or the keywords that you wish to rank on the search engines. To do this, simply type all the keywords, and then you should see a result like this:

Since we are simplifying the process, the rule of thumb is simple: A keyword will remain a good investment for content production as long as there is a search count on it. You will still get rankings and searches from long-tail keywords anyway.

Generate topic ideas from SERP

In creating article topics, I’ve learned that few types of headlines stand out from the others, both on search engines and users. One of these types implies a “numbered list,” which is the easiest to create and outdo.

Here are a few examples of numbered-list posts:

• 10 Tips on How to Be Awesome
• 3,050 Digital Marketing Strategies that You’ll Love
• 100 Benefits of Coffee for Hardworking Entrepreneurs
• 5 Steps on How to Get 1,000 Visitors Per Day

You will notice that the first element on the title is a number.

Since we are trying to rank on SERP, we need to do a little Google search based on the simplified keyword research process. Here’s the result from the keyword “productivity tips”:

See? I’ve told you that numbered list posts rank well. We’ll then proceed to Step 3.

3. Produce better content

You need to produce content based on the research you have made from Step 2. Your content should outperform—both in quality and in quantity—the content that you’ve found.

There are different factors in measuring quantity and quality, but I’ll mention a few things that I consider important:

• Quantity – Total number of the list created and article length
• Quality – Flesch Reading Ease score, readability, grammatical error–free sentences, internal links, and external links

Outperform through Quantity

You should see from the result that we obtained by searching the keyword “productivity tips” that the highest tips generated are “30.” So in this case, if you want to compete with these already ranked articles, you should outperform them by providing more tips compared with the number of tips they have written and by presenting effective article length.

You may want to create 50, 70, or even 100 tips! You may also check the average length of their articles for comparison.

To give you an idea, the most recommended word count for articles that rank so well, which also worked for this experiment, is a minimum of 1,800.

Outperform through Quality

In addition to the originality or uniqueness of an article, that is, it shouldn’t be found anywhere else, the following are the things that you should keep in mind:

• The fonts and font sizes used in your website can affect readability.
• Having grammatical error–free sentences doesn’t equate to having a perfectly written article. In addition, the articles should be checked by an experienced editor. Alternatively, your users should at least easily understand your point.
• Make sure to link your past articles that are related to your current article. You may also want to link to other websites to support your idea and refer to related topics.
• Check your Flesch Reading Ease score or readability level, and make sure that it matches your readers’ grade level. I always aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score of 60% and above.

Once you are done creating the article, compare it to the high-ranking articles that you’ve seen from Step 2 and see if you outperformed them in terms of quality and quantity. You should also return to Step 1 and optimize the technicalities, particularly the meta tag.

4. Get Social

Since the website is new and I only have a limited time to manage the distribution process, I’ve decided to utilize the top-ranking social media website in my target country.

To determine this social media website, I went to Alexa and browsed the top sites in the Philippines. I’ve found out that Facebook is ranked as the number one most visited site in the Philippines. Thus, I’ve decided to choose it as the platform for sharing and building my audience.

Fortunately, Tycoon.ph managed to get 2,000 targeted likes in just two weeks!

Here are the steps on how I did this:

• Make the page simple and interesting through designs
• Invite your friends to like your page by using the Facebook page feature
• Invest $20 USD on Facebook ads to get an initial core audience

When the new article was ready for publishing, I simply scheduled its posting on the page based on the time my audience was online. You can easily determine the best time to post on your Facebook page by checking Facebook Insights.

To access Facebook Insights: Go to your Facebook Page > Click Insights > Click Posts.

I also ensured that I shared the new article on my profile so my friends would see it and probably share it, too.

5. Encourage contributions

Tycoon.ph has encouraged other people to submit unique articles in exchange for a link going back to their website, thereby improving their site’s SEO, that is, search engine optimization, and branding. But, it wasn’t the main reason why I did this.

Encouraging contributions not only helped my website obtain fresh and unique articles that can potentially rank on search engines but also enabled me to build relationships with blog contributors and receive free marketing services.

How? Whenever the article they submitted was approved and published, I notified them. Then, they shared this posting with their friends and audience, thereby making some of their active audience my audience.

Some lessons I’ve learned from this experiment

The preceding steps are the things I’ve done to generate thousands (and increase) of visitors with minimal effort, which are almost free. During this experiment, I’ve learned a few things:

1. Consistent article posting doesn’t mean that you’ll get tons of visitors. Optimization, research, and distribution are the keys.
2. You don’t need to complete all search engine ranking factors to get results and rank on search engines. Sometimes, minimal effort is enough as long as it is carefully planned and executed.
3. Spending some money to get an initial core audience isn’t a negative move. It has been always helpful to build a large audience.
4. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
5. The “Give-to-receive” approach works.

So, there you go. I hope that you’ve found this post very useful since I spent more than four months delivering this to you.

Is your website or blog already getting 1,000 website visitors per day? If yes, how did you do it? Are there other steps, not mentioned above, that you’ve made? Let me know by following me on Twitter.

The post How to Get 1,000 Visitors Per Day To Your Website or Blog appeared first on Workroom.

Some businesses think that spending lots of money on advertising is necessary to get consistent website traffic. Surprisingly, you don’t need to spend lots of money just to increase your website traffic. You could just be doing something wrong or missing something in your marketing strategies.

Three months ago, I experimented on my new website Northsocialmedia.com (which is Enamtila.com today) to see if minimal paid advertising would work and if pure business development, including optimization, is enough to see a consistent increase in website traffic. Hell yes, it did.

Since the experiment’s end–date is reached, I will exactly tell you the Internet marketing strategies and detailed steps I’ve used to increase blog or website traffic as seen on the graph above in this case study.

10 Marketing Strategies on How to Increase Website Traffic

1. Improve Site Load Times for Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A 2010 study from Akamai Technologies found that 57% of online shoppers would wait 3 seconds or less before abandoning a site. Meanwhile, 65% of 18- to 24-year-olds expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less.

Besides the fact that search engines favor faster websites for rankings and proper SEO and that they increase website traffic and conversions, I have also considered the study conducted above and hence, act on it to improve my website load times through optimization and using a content delivery network (CDN).

A CDN allows your website to serve pages depending on where the user is located.

Neil Patel also explains more steps that still work on how to make your website insanely fast by minimizing your load times to maximize your revenue.

Tools for Testing Website Speed

• Google PageSpeed Insights
  Google PageSpeed Insights is a free, open-source web page service that analyzes how your website pages are running and offers guidelines to improve website performance and load time.

• Pingdom Tools
  Pingdom Tools helps you analyze the load speed of your website and helps you learn how to make it faster. It offers different features such as examining all parts of a web page, performance overview, performance grade, and tips, tracing your performance history, testing from multiple locations, and sharing your results. You may find my website load time and grade below using this tool.

• GTmetrix
  GTmetrix uses Google PageSpeed Insights and Yahoo! YSlow to grade your site’s performance and provides actionable recommendations to fix website speed issues. You may also find my website load time and grade below using this tool.

After making my website faster, it added more conversions, consistent visitor flow, and a major increase in website traffic from organic search results. I have also managed to lessen my bounce rate and increase the average duration of sessions from my visitors.

2. Meta Tags Optimization

Meta tags are snippets of code on a web page that provide structured metadata about a web page. Meta tag optimization is an important Internet marketing strategy that I do. In my experiment, I’ve focused on two important meta tags to optimize each web page on my website—page title and meta description.

• Page Title
  A page title is considered to be one of the most important on-page ranking factors that show up in the search engine results pages or SERPs. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing use the title tag of your web page as the search results title. Page title optimization should be done with care and thorough keyword research and analysis for better results and to increase website traffic coming from the search engines. The length of a title shouldn’t be longer than 70 characters. The page title should always be unique for each web page you have on your website.

• Meta Description
  A meta description tag usually provides a summary of web page content that also shows up in the SERPs. Better meta-description tags, especially those that are well-composed, informative, and compelling, tend to have higher chances of gaining clicks from the SERPs and website visits. The meta description should be at least below 160 characters so that search engines can display it in full. Just like the page title, meta descriptions should also be unique for each web page you have on your website.

Using important meta tags for social and search is not limited to title and description only.

For WordPress users, some plug-ins that I recommend and personally use are WordPress SEO by Yoast and All in One SEO Pack, which allows me to easily create custom page titles and meta descriptions for each web page that I have on my website.

Below is a graph that shows the time when one of my clients accidentally deleted the plug-in I used to activate the optimized meta tag on his website.

You will see that a big drop in traffic could happen if meta tags aren’t visible or created on your website whereas a smart and well-planned meta tag optimization can dramatically increase your website traffic fast.

3. Optimize Website for Mobile Users

One-fifth of Americans access the mobile web each day and according to a 2009 Pew Research Center report, that number is on the rise.

In addition, according to ComScore in 2010, nearly 73 million Americans accessed the web via a mobile browser, with a 31% increase compared to the data from 2009.

There are lots of advantages that you could gain from having a mobile-optimized website—improved user experience, improved SEO performance, competitive advantage, new advertising opportunities, and more.

The best way to get a mobile-optimized website is to choose a responsive theme that you can use when building your website. Elegant Themes and ThemeForest are great marketplaces for finding website themes and templates that you can use.

No matter what device your users are on, website optimization for mobile users is critical for all types of businesses. Tim Ash shares seven tools for creating a conversion-optimized mobile website to help you get started in improving the mobile experience you shouldn’t miss.

4. Eliminate Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is described as content that appears on more than one web page. It can be content that is either the exact duplicate of or closely similar to another content.

Search engines such as Google can penalize displaying your website on search results when multiple pages from your website have the same content, which means you could lose points to a chance of increasing website traffic.

There are different causes and solutions for duplicated content from your website. Kieran Flanagan shared easy steps on how to identify and remedy duplicated issues on your website.

You can use a few of the free tools available that can help you identify duplicate content on your websites such as Virante Duplicate Content Tool, Google Webmaster Tools, and Xenu.

5. Site Crawling and Indexing: Sitemap Creation and Robots.txt

Sitemap Creation

A sitemap is a list of the URLs on your website that informs the search engines that the pages listed are available for crawling. Although it does not guarantee that web pages listed on your sitemap will be included in search indexes, search engines use the data in your sitemap to learn about your site’s structure, which allows them to improve crawling.

There are more resources available on Google Webmaster Tools for help with sitemaps that you can check.

Using the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in for WordPress users easily helps you generate a special XML sitemap that will help search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com to better index your blog or website.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file that can restrict access to your site by search engine robots that crawl the web.

You only need robots.txt if your website includes pages or contents that you don’t want search engines to index. While if you want to index everything on your site, you don’t need it.

You need to make sure that your robots.txt file doesn’t block your important pages from being crawled. You can create a robots.txt file manually or use robots.txt generation tools.

More details about robots.txt can be found on robotstxt.org, which explains what robots.txt is and how to use it.

6. Increase Search Traffic through Image Results

Optimized images can drive tons of traffic to your websites from image-based search engines like Yahoo! and Google Image Search.

3 Most Important Things to Optimize for Search Image Results

• Alt Tags
  The search engine uses the alt text or alt tag to easily recognize and understand the image used on your web page. Adding alt text is simple, you just need to add alt=“your alt text” to your image tag.

• Title/File Name
  Image file name or title attributes are important just like the alt tags and page title of a web page because they will help your search engine rankings.

• File Size
  As mentioned in #1 in this article, website speed is important for any type of website. Making your image file size as small as possible is better. JPEG image format usually works best since it offers a small file size without sacrificing quality. Online tools like Online Image Optimizer or editing software like Adobe Photoshop could be handy.

Using WordPress plug-ins like WP Smush.it and Lazy Load are also very helpful in optimizing images for your website and making your website fast.

WP Smush.it helps reduce image file sizes and improve performance, whereas Lazy Load helps improve page load times and server bandwidth and it only loads images when visible to the user viewport.

7. Blogging and Content Marketing

Blogging and content marketing are probably some of the best Internet marketing strategies I have used to increase website traffic.

Here are a few statistics on why you must consider blogging according to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing Report (2012) and Science of blogging (2010):

• About 57% of marketers acquired customers from blogging.
• Blog frequency impacts customer acquisition. The 92% of companies who blogged multiple times a day acquired a customer through their blog.
• About 46% of people read blogs more than once a day.
• 81% of marketers rated their blog as useful or better.

Since the website is new, I did not post daily; instead, I write less and promote as much as I can. I also made sure that the contents were updated, helpful to my audience, and high quality as possible.

Meanwhile, content helps you:

• how to get traffic
• keep loyal readers
• make your prospects find your business
• make a personal connection
• close sales
• … and more.

However, you only have seconds to grab someone’s attention before he/she can read your content. So, the best way to grab someone’s attention is by creating persuasive headlines.

I’ve found out that the headlines that work better are the following:

• Starts with “why,” “how to,” or “what”
• Numbered List
• Statistics
• Headlines that raise curiosity, which can also act as link bait

Another thing that you need aside from having persuasive and killer headlines is an enticing website design.

Elizabeth Sillence conducted a study where they asked people to find websites about hypertension. According to the study, 94% cited that design problems were the main reason why they mistrust a website.

The bottom line: Your design can trigger immediate trust and distrust.

In case you are offering professional services or have a company website, this deck, which I discussed in one of my speaking gigs, will surely help you get started.

8. Influencer/Blogger Targeting through Content

One of the best ways to increase your website or blog traffic fast is to target influencers or other bloggers from your industry that produce high-quality resources or at least with a high following.

Influencers are people who have high authority and a huge network in a certain industry.

Once you link to other resources, especially from their blogs, chances are they will share it with their network, which can also give you tons of following and website traffic. Don’t forget to build a relationship with them and inform them once you link to them.

BuzzStream is a great tool for managing influencers painlessly and easily helps you create blogger outreach campaigns. It features contact information research, social influencer discovery, and more.

BuzzSumo also helps us find influencers who can help us promote my content or people who could be interested in the topics I create. I also recommend using this tool on doing competitive analysis and finding topics that work, and that you can write about in your industry.

9. Boost Traffic from Social Media

To increase our traffic using social media, I have done five things:

• building a fan base
• social media management
• website social media optimization
• social media sharing
• and social media paid advertisement.

Building a Fan Base, Social Media Management, and Social Media Paid Advertisement

I have used social media, especially Facebook to target the right audience for my industry, and it has been possible by using Facebook Ads. I have managed to build more than 12,000 fans by allocating 50 USD per month.

Using Google Analytics demographic and interest data, I created a remarketing and targeting campaign for the right audience, and visitors I’ve received to my website.

Facebook Ads’ custom audience feature also helps me target the most valuable customers and prospects on Facebook by uploading a contact list from my MailChimp account.

Building a huge fan base on social media networking websites such as Pinterest and Facebook allows you to build loyalty and acquire returning visits from your users.

Once your followers see an update or announcement from your social media profile and click it, especially if it has a link, then you have just gained traffic.

Now imagine publishing updates from your social media sites daily, which could transform into daily website visits.

Website Social Media Optimization and Social Media Sharing

Optimizing your website for better social media sharing can also help your website traffic increase significantly. Integrating social media sharing plug-ins on your blog makes your readers easily share your content.

10. E-mail List Building and Marketing

E-mail marketing is using e-mail to distribute your marketing message or to build relationships. It is used in several ways by organizations and marketers for brand loyalty, acquisition, conversions, advertisements, communication, support, and more.

E-mail is still one of the most preferred modes of communication for the majority of consumers. To better convince you, Paul Jorgensen shared 33 mind-shattering marketing statistics that you should know.

However, before you even start doing e-mail marketing campaigns to increase your website traffic, sales, and conversions, you need to first build an e-mail list.

Derek Halpern said, “If you’re not building an email list, you’re an idiot.” And, he’s correct.

One thing that I would add is creating a list-building page.

A list-building page is a page designed to capture e-mail addresses. Here’s an example of a list building page that I have created for North Social Media:

I’ve offered a list of resources on a particular topic I write for my users and added an opt-in form to let them stay updated on future posts, which I will be sending directly to their inboxes.

Looking for an e-mail marketing tool?

MailChimp allows you to send 12,000 e-mails to 2,000 subscribers for free. MailChimp for WP Plugin also lets you easily connect your MailChimp account and put it on your website widget area.

I also recommend Aweber as an affordable alternative option in case you want to set up an autoresponder that converts extremely well.

Conclusion

To summarize, here are some proven Internet marketing strategies that you might want to consider to gain a consistent increase in website traffic:

1. Faster website load speed helps your SEO.
2. The page title and meta descriptions are important on-page ranking factors.
3. A mobile-optimized website offers advantages no matter what type of business you have.
4. Eliminating duplicate content from your website can prevent your website from being penalized by search engines such as Google.
5. Sitemap creation can help you improve web page crawling and indexing.
6. Optimized images can drive tons of traffic to your website from image-based search engines.
7. Blogging and content marketing are vital in Internet marketing, as well as having persuasive headlines and enticing designs.
8. Reaching out to or targeting bloggers and influencers in your industry can help increase website traffic quickly and build relationships.
9. Running different methods of boosting traffic from your social media helps you maintain consistent traffic, gain visitors, and build loyalty.
10. E-mail list building and marketing provide huge benefits and advantages.

Your Ideas and Thoughts

Share a tip: Do you have Internet marketing strategies that help you increase your website traffic that is not listed above?

If you have friends or business partners that you know would love this article, feel free to share it and I’ll be forever humbled.

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