Getting website traffic to your site is difficult. Further more, you need to retain that traffic and ensure that it converts into actions.
A difficult task, yes, but not an impossible one. The answer lies somewhere between persistence, and diversification.
Here are a couple of ideas to create traffic to your website from some lesser known sources:
1. Inbound Links
People listing your web address on their own website, while the 2 sites share some kind of relevance for a user, is your biggest friend. People will not only click-through directly to your site, but Google will also reward you with organic search engine traffic.
2. Directories
Directory sites such as Browzit, Hotfrog and DMoz provide quick and cost-effective ways to list your business with a link to your website.
3. Email Newsletters
It takes time to build up a solid list of people interested in your products or services; it is however, a great way to generate traffic quickly. For instance, if you’re running a promotion for a limited period of time.
4. Other Search Engines
It costs almost nothing to submit yourself to DuckDuckGo, Bing or Yahoo, and in the future, Google might be challenged by one of them, so why not start early with indexing.
5. Google Places
Google places are those very location / map based search results you get when searching for e.g. ‘website design cape town’. At the time of writing this Google’s protocol is to send you a verification code through the post, so it does take some time to finalise such a listing. With the expansion into location based information and augmented reality in the very near future, you can bet your bottom dollar that these types of listings will pay dividents in the future.
The above should be done concurrently to the more common traffic-generating methods:
1. Google Organic Search
A very cost-effective way to get found, however getting harder and harder to list for quality keywords.
2. Google Paid for Search
Costly, but provides near-instant traffic with very measurable ROI.
3. Social Media
Cheap to set up from a broad range, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest. It does however, need continuous management, as you have to engage with your users and keep your presence lively and current.