4 Ways of Building Traffic with Useful Tools

Building traffic for a website is something everyone who owns one is interested in, but not everyone knows how to do. If you don’t want to outsource this task and wish to get your hands dirty, I will provide you with a bit of insight that I hope ends up helping you in the long run.

Today we are going to have a look at a few tools that every website owner should be using to increase traffic on their site.

1

1. Website Optimization

You can optimize your website in order to increase traffic by using A/B testing to test changes to your webpage against the current design to determine which one yields the best results.

Content Experiments, formerly known as Google Website Optimizer (before it was integrated into Google Analytics) is a free tool for optimizing conversions on your website. It allows you to set up simple A/B or more complex (multivariate) tests by inserting a little script on your website.

Optimizely is a bit easier to use than Content Experiments, but it’s a paid solution.

2. Keyword Research

A good place to start researching keywords is actually looking at your own website and seeing the ranks for some of the keywords you use. This is especially efficient if you have focused content and your keywords aren’t entirely random and all over the place. Keep in mind that it’s easier to create content and rank for keywords you already are using than starting to use new ones. Another thing to consider is the usage of keyword modifiers to match natural language. Try using verbs instead of nouns and make good use of adjectives.

2

Here are a few good tools to get you started on researching keywords.

Keyword Planner, that has recently replaced Keyword Tools and Traffic Estimator, is powered by Google and is free. It’s fairly easy to use, it has a “wizard” that takes you through the steps required to search for keywords, get estimate for uploaded data and multiply keyword lists to get estimates. Keyword planner is a very powerful tool, suited for both beginner and advanced SEO. There is a good number of tutorials online offering to teach you to use it and Google themselves provide very comprehensive documentation.

Wordtracker free keywords is a free tool that suggests popular keywords. It also comes in paid version, with top keywords reports.

Keyword Discovery is a free keyword tool from Trellian. Just like Wordtracker, this tool also comes in paid version, that offers compiled keyword search statistic for all major search engines.

3. Email Marketing

Email campaigns are a great way to increase traffic. Communicating with your users through email implies that your emails should not only have interesting content and look good, but they should also be error free. Make sure you build trust by displaying your contact information and unsubscribe options in every email. Group your users by preference, if possible and create groups to send out personalized emails.

3

Technically, you could send out large amounts of emails using email providers like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo by utilizing email templates and contact lists. However, the existence of marketing email solution software makes your job much easier so you should take advantage of it. Bulk email solutions have the unsubscribe link in every email as sign of adherence to privacy laws.

Let’s take a look at some popular email marketing tools available to you.

MailChimp one of the advantages of using MailChimp is the fact that it’s an approved bulk mailer and will not results in your account being locked when sending out a large number of emails (This can often happen when using normal email providers). They offer a wide variety of customizable templates for designing good looking emails.

AWeber is an email marketing program I’ve worked with in the past that I’ve been very pleased with. They offer templates for professional looking newsletters, HTML email templates, email marketing tracking, autoresponder follow-ups and much more.

iContact allows you to publish content directly to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and track the popularity of your posts in addition to providing you with very good email marketing solutions. Their Message Builder is great for those with no design experience or HTML knowledge and will allow you to create a good looking email within minutes by using their drag- and-drop tool.

4. Social Media

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. As social media has become a platform easily accessible to anyone with access to the internet, both freelancers and companies find themselves in need of a good marketing plan to make best use of this opportunity that is being presented to them.

Social media marketing is a great way to attract traffic to your website. However, with the increasing amount of content that’s being posted on these sites, getting users to like and share your content is becoming harder every day.

4

When engaging in social media activity, you want your content to be appealing. Of course original content is preferred, but you might not always have the time, energy or other resources to produce and post such content. Staying tuned to the latest trends and hot pages will allow you to find out what “sells” in your niche, what kind of content attracts viewers.

A very important thing to keep in mind when marketing through social media is that you need to be active. That doesn’t mean you need to spam. Being active means interacting with your fans on a daily basis, posting questions and content that encourages communication.

The world of social media sites is quite vast so you need to find the right ones to promote your website. Having accounts on every single site does not guarantee success. What matters is that you have accounts and are active on those social media sites on which people in your niche are present and that you find a way to engage them.

Here are a few software solutions that you should consider checking out if you are interested in marketing on social media sites.

Facebook Analyzer, this is a tool from Meltwater Group that helps you measure and analyze the potential success rate of your Facebook Page and allows you to explore all possibilities of your presence by evaluating your activity and dialogue. This service is free. You can get daily statistics and lets you compare them with those of world’s biggest brands. This social marketing solution offers a complete analysis and comprehensive report and tips to improve your interactions with current and potential fans or clients.

5

Hootsuite, this is an amazing tool that I found very useful, even if I don’t use all its features to their max potential. It’s available for both your computer and your mobile phone. This great software allows you to manage multiple social network accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, LikedIn, Google+, Fourquare and WordPress!

You can get custom analytics offering you Facebook insights, monitor your fans, likes and comments. You can view historical comparisons that allow you to see trends over time.  For Twitter, they offer an overview of your Twitter account, tracking followers, following, mentions, and many more.

If you are managing your website’s social media accounts, Hootsuite is definitely a tool you should try out. It’s a paid service, but they offer a 30-day trial and sign-up process is very easy and fast.

PostPlanner, if you are looking to save time and at the same time make good quality Facebook posts without worrying too much, this tool might be one you should check out.

You can add keywords and the software will automatically find and post trending content in your niche. They also provide you with pre-written status updates. You can queue stuff be autoposted through ought the day and go about your business.

Mention, is a media monitoring tool. As the name suggests, this software picks up mentions in social media. It will monitor any keyword you want it to and track it on blog posts forums, Twitter and Facebook. It’s compatible with all devices and comes in both paid and free version.

Now that you have your tools ready, get to work! Let me know what other tools you use to build traffic for your website and which ones of the above proved most useful to you. Comment and share your thoughts below. Until next time, may your journey bring many, many new visitors to your website!