There’s never been a more exciting — and confusing — time to be a digital marketer.
The overarching goals of a digital marketer all concern business growth via online properties; generating traffic, inciting engagement, winning conversions, building loyalty and achieving favorable ROI—all matter.
But with hundreds of options with the potential to do these things, some marketers get paralysis and limit their scope to only the most commonly practiced strategies.
To inject new life into your digital marketing efforts, consider these six ways to generate traffic that you may not have thought about.
6 Ways to Generate Traffic
1. Get Backlinks from Resource/Directory Sites
You can improve your organic rankings by gaining more dofollow links.
These give specific pages more credibility in Google’s algorithm and help increase your overall domain authority — a key metric in gauging the quality of a website.
Backlinks are often earned when a great piece of content is linked from external sites. That strategy is worthwhile, but it also takes a lot of time.
Instead, look for backlink opportunities via directories and associations related to your business niche.
When you’ve assembled a list of relevant directories, email the site owner with a short pitch stating why including your site link will improve their resource page.
E-commerce stores can target additional low-hanging fruit by asking their manufacturers and partners to include a text or logo link to their store.
2. Start a Referral Program
You can buy all the ads you want. It may even bring you traffic, potentially, conversions. But it’s highly unlikely it will be at a sustainable ROI.
In most cases, your money can be better spent through a referral program, which is yet another one of the ways to generate traffic.
By offering a small slice of your revenue to your trusted customers and buyers, you can gain additional loyal customers.
Before starting a referral program, it’s key to have heavily segmented email lists.
For example, you wouldn’t want to ask an inactive customer or a frequently dissatisfied customer to spread the word like you would a frequent buyer.
3. Spruce Up and Repurpose Stale Content
You’d be surprised what improved and updated content can do for your organic search engine rankings.
In some cases, you may even want to go a step further by re-considering your brand’s colors, and even your logo.
You can use something like Hatchful, a brand-new logo maker tool from e-commerce platform provider Shopify, to brainstorm different color palettes and image concepts.
When it comes to actually repurposing stale content, look no further than your blog.
Evaluate your evergreen content for everything from formatting and image choices to quality and accuracy of information.
For annual round-up pieces, ensure you have only one URL that you’ll update each year to reduce the number of future 301 redirects.
4. Start a User Forum
Is your niche a highly specialized one? Do your regular customers know enough collectively to be a valuable resource to online knowledge seekers?
If you’re still nodding your head yes, establishing a user forum on your site might end up being one of your most reliable traffic avenues.
Take for instance Moz, the SEO software company, who over the years has built an active hub of organic-search enthusiasts ranging from beginner to advanced.
Anyone can search for — and find — answers on the Moz Community. Discussion threads often rank extremely well for long-tail keywords, and align well with the user intents behind those long-tail queries.
Moz gives anyone free access to this archived goldmine of information, however, a MozPro account is required to post questions.
This strategy not only gives Moz a steady source of organic traffic, but is also a full-blown lead-generation asset.
5. Hire a Witty Twitter Manager
Most companies’ social media efforts end up being a huge waste of time.
It’s hard enough to be featured organically on a platform without brand-first unoriginal content hindering the messaging. But unlike Facebook, companies can still net organic impressions on a platform like Twitter if they’re tweeting compelling stuff.
The beauty of such a minimal but far-reaching platform is that it only requires one employee to pull off. An ideal hire is clever, responsive, empathetic and pays close attention to the details.
From responding to customer tweets, starting hashtag communities, curating a tasteful selection of retweets and tweeting unique, media-inclusive content, a savvy Twitter manager can increase followers, engagement, and most importantly, referral traffic to your site.
6. Start a Podcast
It’s not unusual for business owners to be experts in their business’ niche. If this is you, your expertise is a deep pool of knowledge that’s worth sharing.
Hosting a weekly or monthly podcast can spread brand awareness, build social proof, and when you promote via all the podcast directories, bring in extra traffic.
Be sure to convert your audio podcasts to video and post on YouTube.
If your podcast gains popularity and the demand is there, you could even record videos of your podcasts for increased engagement and sharing.
Also read: How to Start a Podcast: A Step-by-Step Guide from Concept to Launch
Brainstorming ways to generate traffic to your site is no small task. An array of options doesn’t mean you need to be doing everything, but experimentation and branching out is integral to finding the right marketing balance.
With a whirlwind of options, though, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. Let these six ways to generate traffic — however applicable to your website — illuminate other traffic-boosting ideas that you may not have thought about.
