We all know that a great looking website that converts easily only needs a good amount of web traffic to do what it was made to do. However, with the millions upon millions of websites out there on the Internet, how will you drive traffic to your website?
In 2016, the competition will be even bigger as more and more businesses refine their methods and strategies, so you will also need to expand your knowledge in order to keep those top position or get to those top positions in the SERPs. Well, to help you with that, I decided to ask nine marketing experts for their number one traffic generation tool. Here’s what they had to say.
2016 Website Traffic Tool #1: Edgar
Jessica Freeman, Owner of Jess Creatives, is extremely happy with how much traffic Edgar has brought in for her business:
Edgar has been the biggest asset to driving business to my website as an entrepreneur. I’m a one-woman shop, so my time is limited. I outsource or automate what I can with my budget.
Edgar is an online social media scheduler, mainly used for Facebook and Twitter. Each user has a library of categorized posts, and the library is constantly recycled and pushed out according to the schedule you set.
Many of my blog posts are evergreen content, and using Edgar has been great for continually getting eyes on those posts. I signed up for Edgar in February 2015, so I took a look at my analytics from February to December [2015], and these were the results:
- 267 new likes on Facebook
- 843 new followers on Twitter
- 134 new email subscribers
- 48% of my clients found me on social media in all of 2015
2016 Website Traffic Tool #2: Medium
Chad Reid, Director of Communications at JotForm, said that, surprisingly, their company Medium account has been one of the best tools they have used:
It may sound unorthodox, but one of the best tools we have at JotForm is our company Medium account. We encourage every staff member to share stories about their areas of expertise, and it introduces a lot of new users to our brand.
It takes some time to craft meaningful content, but the platform has great reach, and medium’s article distribution is terrific.
2016 Website Traffic Tool #3: ShortStack
Sara Piccola, Mistress of Propaganda at ShortStack, showed me, in a case study, how one of their clients managed to increase website traffic by 288%:
Star Fine Foods, a manufacturer of a variety of Mediterranean food products, grew their website traffic by 288% using an integrated marketing campaign they built with ShortStack. They used a marketing campaign to collect user-generated content in exchange for some large cash and product prizes.
They were able to increase their website traffic by embedding the campaign on their website, so they were driving visitors to their web page in order to enter. After entering their promotion, many visitors went on to continue searching around the website.
As a result website traffic was up 288% from the same time the previous year.
2016 Website Traffic Tool #4: Reddit
Tami Brehse, a self-employed Digital Marketing Consultant at TamiBrehse.com, swears by Reddit’s traffic generation powers:
The single best tool that has helped me drive traffic to my website is Reddit. For those unfamiliar, Reddit is a forum where users share photos and links to interesting content in various subject areas.
The first time I used Reddit to promote a blog post, my traffic for that day was three times the normal amount.
Sam Williamson, Owner of SEO Fife, also uses Reddit for quick and targeted website traffic:
Reddit is my go-to source for instant traffic. Spend a few hours writing an engaging piece of content for your blog, post it to a relevant subreddit at the right time, then watch it fly.
We recently had one of our posts reach the top of the /r/technology subreddit, which generated over 5,000 targeted visitors to a brand new site in one day. Not bad for a few hours work.
2016 Website Traffic Tool #5: Events
Beth Bridges, Vice President of Digital Identity at J – I.T. Outsource, said that in-person events have been the one thing driving the most traffic to their website:
We have a very focused target market with a specific product, so traffic isn’t constantly huge anyways. So the one thing that drove the most volume of traffic to our site in 2015 was our big, in-person events including a massive Christmas party where we made a huge announcement.
Then we compiled the tweets, Facebook posts, and a photo-montage video into a blog post which was the second most popular landing page on our site in all of December, second only to the home page, and got 11% of the total page views.
2016 Website Traffic Tool #6: Buffer
Julie Graff, the Social Content Liaison at Pole Position Marketing, loves using Buffer to web traffic:
By far, the best tool in my web marketing arsenal is Buffer, which allows me to schedule posts to social media. Social media accounts for approximately 12 percent of the traffic to our website, and it would be impossible to post at the frequency we do without this automation tool.
When we post a new blog, it allows us to schedule several posts at one time to several different social networks in advance. We also use it to help manage social media for our clients.
Siobhan O’Rorke, the Marketing & Communications Manager at Lookeen, also loves using Buffer for social media traffic generation:
My favorite marketing tool is Buffer. We use it daily to create, track and analyze our social media posts. You can integrate multiple channels and tweak your posting schedule to match your peak engagement hours.
There are a million well-thought-out features that make it an indispensable tool. The browser extension lets you share content from other sites, if content curation is part of your strategy. It predicts Twitter handles so you don’t have to type them out.
It automatically shortens URLs so you have more space to tweet. I could go on. The best thing is that the Buffer team is constantly developing connections to even more channels and improving their sharing capabilities – a recent example being their new video support.
2016 Website Traffic Tool #7: SEMrush
Jordan Kasteler, a Digital Marketing Strategist at mwi.com, basically said that SEMrush helps them “uncover” a site’s traffic data and then improve on that current situation:
SEMrush is invaluable to use when we don’t have access to a site’s analytics. We can quickly look at the activity of any lead, or competitors of any lead, and quickly be able to see the history of their rankings and estimated traffic.
Visual graphs of a site’s ranking helps us quickly identify any past Google penalties as well.
Summary
While there are a million ways to drive traffic to your website nowadays, these seven tools that we mentioned in this article will help get you on the right path. I have personally seen the power of all of them, especially Reddit, so I know for a fact that these are the real deal.
One thing’s for sure though, you need to have a solid page that you are driving this traffic to. High quality content is the thing that will engage with your visitors otherwise they will just pass on by your website and hurt your user signals data. Bottom line is you can drive all the traffic you want to your website, but your main focus should be on creating valuable content.