Do you have the traffic you would like to your business blog and business website?
Most people would answer “no” to that question.
We can always use more traffic especially if that traffic is nearly all potential clients.
Many articles, good articles discuss the main ways you can build traffic to your site. A couple main ways include social media, direct traffic, email and organic search traffic (SEO).
These should all be on your radar. You can also use paid channels like Google AdWords, which can be a great way to bring in instant (if expensive) traffic.
You want to build traffic in those ways. SEO, email and social media can all take time, but it’s worth the investment.
Here’s a good example of the long-term investment of organic traffic.
But you can also build traffic in other, more uncommon ways that can build the broadness and variation of your traffic. That’s good because you don’t ever want to rely too heavily on one traffic source in case that source dries up.
But an uncommon source can become a big time source and lead to great traffic and leads.
Here are some of those uncommon sources of business blog and business website traffic.
1. Guesting On Podcasts
One of the great sources of traffic both for our website and blog has been being a guest on podcasts. It’s tricky to find the right match of podcasts that aren’t too popular and ones that aren’t too unpopular.
You need podcasts that have listeners (your target audience) and ones that aren’t so big that they’re actively looking for potential guests.
My start is always to examine podcasts and look at who their potential audience is. I want the audience to at least have a good chance of matching who our target clients are. Then I look to see if they’ve had guests on in the past.
If they have then I’ll listen to a few and get a feel for the podcast and who the host is and what they do. Then I’ll look at popular podcasts (social shares is a good indicator). From there I’ll formulate a pitch based on the popular topics, but as something that hasn’t been specifically talked about before in a previous episode.
During the podcast you can often talk about your business, website and blog among other things. Those links will often be included especially if you mention a specific post.
And one trick is after you get on one podcast to ask if they know of any other podcasts that might be looking for guests.
2. List Inclusion, Outreach
This one involves a little bit of work and you’ll probably get a lot of quiet responses (you won’t hear back), but it’s like with sales. If you get a few you’re doing really good and one can turn out to be a good source of traffic to your blog.
The idea is to look for list posts on other blogs that mention great blog posts or businesses like yours. You want to find ones that don’t currently include you, but perhaps include a competitor or complementary post or business.
Then reach out to the blog through their contact form mentioning the post and saying that you think their readers would be interested in your post or business.
You have to be honest with yourself that your content belongs, but if you’re confident there is no reason to not reach out and see if they would be willing to include you.
Most blog owners want their posts to have the best content. If your content is in fact the best then blog owners will be excited to include you.
3. Partner Directories
Building on the last strategy is partner directories. These are directories on business websites where they list services that they themselves don’t provide, but that partners do or services they recommend.
An example might be Ghost Blog Writers listing a social media agency on a partner page or maybe a design agency listing our service on their partner page.
You can reach out cold to businesses and ask to be included, but it’s good to build the relationship. Reach out and introduce yourself. Let them know what you do and if they have ever had clients interested in what you do.
Get to know one another and build the relationship from there.
4. Partner Guides, White Papers, Videos
When you’re starting out with a blog you’re going to likely have very little audience. You have to go where the audience is if you want to get traffic right away (while you build SEO, social, etc.).
A great way to do that is to find blogs and businesses that are established and work to an agreement where you create content to publish on their site as partners. You both are the authors. You might offer to do the most work on the content and they publish it for their audience.
You can exposure to that audience and the partner gets great content for their website. It’s a good tradeoff and in the content you can maybe link to your best two posts and at least to your website.
5. Forum Participation
Finally we have one that probably involves the most work. Each of these involve work or at least putting yourself out there for some denial, but they can all work and this one can as well.
This one is finding your industry forums. Perhaps the top 1-3 forums for your industry.
It’s crazy, but nearly every industry seems to have a forum that’s been around for 15-20 years. Forums are old school on the web, but people still love them. They’re the original online communities where people go to discuss similar interests.
Becoming part of that community by answering questions and participating is a great way to build your profile. You go to where your audience is and provide them with valuable content (answer their questions).
Add your basic website link to your signature and maybe occasionally link to your best blog posts.
It can turn into great and ongoing traffic over time.
Conclusion
It’s tough to build traffic. If you’re counting on waiting for SEO traffic to kick in you’ll often be disappointed especially if you’re starting out from scratch. You want to build that traffic while working on other traffic sources in the meantime.
Use the strategies above to build traffic and in time you’ll have multiple sources of traffic to your site. Your competitors might not have the commitment to it, but let them pay high PPC prices while you build long-term traffic from multiple sources that you can turn into new clients.