Your startup website has launched!
It’s an exciting time, but now you need traffic to the site.
This is where the work begins. Traffic brings in potential customers and your website has everything it needs to convert visitors into customers, but getting that traffic can be difficult.
Advertising with a platform like Adwords can bring in instant traffic, but it can be expensive.
And organic search traffic takes time to start coming in; at least at a level that matters.
So how do you get instant traffic to your startup website?
Here are 5 ways…
1. Write About Complementary Businesses Or Products
This is one of the strategies that has worked really well for GBW to bring in both traffic and new customers.
In this post we wrote about 10 Great Online Tools For Startups.
The post accomplishes a couple things.
First, and most importantly, it’s useful to readers. They get ideas for tools that can help them with their business.
Second, the tools included were happy to be featured in a post like this.
The trick here is that when you share the post on social media like Twitter or Google+ that you mention the tools or brands you included in the post. You don’t even need a single follower for this to work.
You mention the brand, they see it and likely check out your post and re-share the post with their followers sending you tons of new traffic.
The trick here is to find brands that have large followings of people that fit the description of your target customer.
2. Create A Guide Or Study And Feature Industry Influencers
Next, create a guide or a study.
This has multiple purposes or uses too.
First, you can use this to convert traffic to your site into email subscribers by offering the guide or study as a free download.
Second, you can feature industry influencers or experts in the guide. Use their ideas and build on those ideas with more research and detail. This adds value so your guide will be seen as worthwhile.
And when you publish the guide, you can reach out to the influencers on social media or even via email letting them know that you included their quotes in the guide or that you referenced and linked to their work.
They will usually be curious and they’ll check out your guide. If you did a good job they’ll share it on social media sending you instant traffic from their established following.
3. Guest Post On Popular Industry Websites
Guest posting has a bad reputation these days and for good reason. Many people have abused guest posting. Website owners are now pretty leery of accepting posts.
But guest posting can still be a viable marketing tool and website owners still want great content.
Locate what you consider the top 5 websites in your industry that have readerships consisting of your target customer. Analyze their popular articles. Some sites have “Popular Posts” widgets. But you can also look at social share counts or even comments to see the popular articles.
Find articles that have done the best and create your own titles using your research.
Send the article ideas to the editor or by using the contact form. You might not hear from all the sites, but one or two would be great.
Then write the post, revise if you get feedback and wait for it to be published.
The site already has tons of traffic and they can send some of that to you when those readers see who you are.
Bit note – you’re looking to write an article that helps the readers. You’re not promoting yourself. It’s enough to have your name and description in a byline. If you get promotional your article will be turned away.
To really supercharge your guest post, link to other posts on the site (website owners love this) and use Strategies #1 and #2 on this list by writing about products or influencers. When the post publishes, let those people know it’s live.
4. Co-Host A Webinar
Webinars are popular ways for experts to present helpful and entertaining information to a target audience.
Since your site has zero visitors right now it really won’t work to host a webinar on your site. You could do that and co-host with a big industry superstar. They could send traffic to your site that way, but a better strategy when starting out is to host it on a popular person’s website.
Reach out to an industry influencer. It could be a colleague; someone you know and trust.
You’ll need to do the research for a killer topic. You’ll need to setup the presentation and all the logistics. Make it really easy for the person to say ‘yes’ when you ask them to co-host with you.
Leading up to the webinar, have the influencer email their list alerting their followers to the webinar.
Then, when people signup, have people added to the influencer’s email list and to yours.
At the end of the webinar give your information including your website.
You can repeat this strategy next time and host the webinar on your site once you start building traffic.
5. Start A YouTube Video Series
YouTube is one of the biggest sites in the world.
What most people don’t realize is that this fact makes YouTube one of the biggest search engines in the world.
You might not be able to rank well immediately for your own website, but you can get videos on YouTube to rank well on YouTube shortly after publishing.
You could create a brand new video where you provide great information that teaches your target audience something they want to know.
But you could also double up and publish your webinar as a video on YouTube.
Either way, make sure to include a great description. This is where YouTube’s internal search engine can really dig into the content so it knows when to show your video in the results. Your title and tags also matter.
For your title and content in the description, use words your target audience is likely to use. When you use industry terms that you know you limit the people that can find your video to only people that know those terms.
Finally, include a link to your website in the description, at the beginning, so viewers can visit your site.
Hopefully these strategies can help your startup get some traffic going right out of the gate. Don’t sit around and wait for traffic to come to you. Go out and take it!