1. Identify and leverage social influencers
Influencers, those who carry clout and influence in a particular industry, come in many forms these days. Bloggers, social media icons, YouTube sensations, and even micro-influencers can work to generate positive word-of-mouth for your business, sometimes at little to no cost.
How do you leverage them to drive traffic to your landing page or website, you ask? Incentivize them. Give them your products or ask them to try out your service for free. If they have a good experience, they will broadcast it to their social network or promote it on their own website.
Here are additional strategies to ride on their coattails:
- Invite them to guest post/ or write for them
- Ask them to co-host a webinar or podcast
- Suggest that they add a link to your blog inside a relevant article on their website
2. Blog
Now it’s time to add side dishes to your strategy with value-based content marketing. Providing value and personally engaging your audience are two ways you will have true success with blogging.
So, where do you start?
Write with a purpose of increasing value (e.g., How does your post solve a problem or ignite action in the reader?), and not for the purpose of SEO or promotion. The underlying necessity to create high-quality content remains the same, according to PR Daily:
- Gives a unique angle to a told story
- Shares new information
- Has a backbone of a strong intro, body, and conclusion
- Is not thin content
- Is newsworthy: creates a stir, is tied to a current event, and doesn’t cover stale news
- Is backed up by research
- Offers a solution
- Has a clear audience in mind
- Demonstrates why the topic is important and whom it affects
- Passes the “So what?” test
Before you embark on any content marketing conquest, you must have a plan in place to create content consistently. If you want to ruin your credibility fast, start blogging then abandon your efforts. Take it from Dan Stasiewski, an author at Content Marketing Institute:
“With content marketing, you’re creating an ecosystem that organically develops over time. The more blog posts you have, especially evergreen ones, the more you can share on social networks and, in turn, the more those posts can be shared by others.”
RULE OF THUMB: Spend twice as long as promoting your post as writing your post! You can’t rely only on organic search traffic for people to see your post…
3. Social bookmarking sites
Heard of social bookmarking? If not, LifeWire perfectly describes it:
“You can think of social bookmarking like this: simply tagging a web page with a web-based tool so you can easily access it later. Instead of saving them to your web browser, you are saving them to the web. And, because your bookmarks are online, you can easily access them anywhere you have an internet connection and share them with friends.”
Submit your website or a particular page to a social bookmarking site. In doing this, you circulate content to a targeted audience and drive traffic to your website, while also boosting your SEO by connecting your links to textual descriptive content. Here are a few social bookmarking sites we suggest using:
These sites are free to submit to, but you can even boost posts with a paid component to increase the likelihood of being discovered.
4. Location-based sites
Did you know 84% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation and 68% form an opinion after reading between one and six online reviews according to a study conducted by Bright Local?
Because of this, it’s critical to optimize location-based review sites. For example, Yelp is a huge traffic driver. It’s essential to maintain as much detail as possible, like:
- Hours
- Location
- Additional features
- Website
- Pictures
- Video
Similar to Yelp, your business’ Google page will drive online traffic.https://www.google.com/business/Google My Business feeds the map information you see on Google. When searching for a business, a map or multimedia content appears on the first page of Google.
Create a Google My Business page to populate important information about your business so it will be prominently displayed not only in the standard search engine result page, but also in Google’s rich snippets. Some other review sites worth trying to get traffic to your landing page or website are:
5. Collaborate with big names
Create major content assets — like ebooks, long-form blog posts, and white papers — and ask for a quote from prolific industry leaders with sizable social followings, and you may lure their fans to your site. Once the asset is published, let them know, and you may get a digital shoutout. Give the experts a social soundbite so they can easily copy and paste it to their own social channels. This strategy helps socially “viralize” content and it’s also a strong play to generate more backlinks.
LeadPages contributor and founder of Huntley Wealth Insurance Services, Chris Huntley, recounted what he learned from his first million visitors: among the tips provided was creating major content assets and collaborating with industry movers and shakers. He says:
“I had spent a lot of time and resources building ‘epic content’ and ‘power pages’ over the years without much success, so this year, I founded the Whole Life Insurance Rebellion.
I collaborated with dozens of personal finance and insurance bloggers who all agreed to write a post on their sites. All these bloggers mentioned me, and many of them linked to me as well.
My “rebellion” was a tremendous success!
It got picked up by Nasdaq, NerdWallet, and Forbes, and landed me a total of 24 backlinks.
The lesson I learned here was that it’s a lot easier to promote and get backlinks to a major collaborative project than my own awesome resource that I developed internally."
6. Community management and social engagement
Social media isn’t an outlet for endless self-promotion. With social media marketing, you must be a master of community management. You can do this by:
- Personally engaging your fans — If you ignore them, then they will ignore you.
- Responding when they speak, and thank them for their interactions with you.
- Proving that you’re a human they can relate to, and not just a corporate entity.
Want an example? Wendy’s jumps on any opportunity to engage with the public on social media:
Think of social media not only as a broadcasting channel but also a listening tool. Use social listening platforms like HootSuite or SproutSocial; or do keyword searches to hunt for conversations about your brand and competitors. Then, engage with the discussions! If people see your brand is accessible and friendly, they will be more apt to buy from you.
7. Video marketing
Video marketing is a favorite content marketing strategy because you can easily repurpose content for bootstrapped video content creation. Plus, some people simply prefer to digest certain types of content via video.
To make sure your video is a traffic generator, optimize your YouTube listings by adding a keyword-rich title, description, and tags; then link back to your landing page or website!
“Creating videos and uploading them to YouTube can spread your content (and links to your website) around YouTube itself — and from there, Google will index and make searchable your content,” notes DreamHost.
8. Q&A sites
Millions of people Google questions each day, seeking the most relevant answer. Enter question-answer sites, commonly the first to appear in Google search results.
Websites like Answerbag, Quora, Yahoo Answers, and WikiAnswers all unite question askers and answerers together. Answer questions about your business’ subject matter expertise and make sure to include the address of your website in your profile and answer credentials to draw free landing page traffic. Just remember to include links in answers as you write.
9. Publish on LinkedIn
If you’ve been a LinkedIn pro for some time, surely you’ve seen the value of marketing on it because it aids in sending traffic to landing pages or websites. So here’s how to get free traffic to a landing page: LinkedIn publishing.
Leadpages contributor, LinkedIn expert, and founder of Linkfluencer Alex Pirouz offers a few LinkedIn traffic hacks:
LinkedIn allows you to publish articles within the platform (just like a blog). This feature was rolled out in 2014 and has been a game-changer.
Some of these posts from users get hundreds or thousands of impressions in a short space of time.
To add to that, they can potentially rank really well in Google searches.
Finally, they can get you even more than great traffic, because you can place links throughout and at the end of the post promoting your landing page—so your article can turn into leads or sales.
Here are a few tips to create LinkedIn posts that will be found by most people:
- Be strategic with your keywords.
- Include pictures and videos to break up your text.
- Create a ton of value within the post.
- Include a call to action in your bio.
- Choose your topic wisely, and it can presell your prospect on what you have to offer before they even get to your landing page.
10. Paid advertising
If you’re questioning how to get traffic to feed your lead generation system, look no further than paid advertising. And, believe it or not, you can do it for pretty cheap. It encompasses a number of strategies, like:
- (PPC) Pay Per Click – (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads)
- (PPV) Pay Per View – (TrafficVance.com, MediaTraffic.com)
- Display Advertising – (BuySellAds.com, BuyAds.com, Pulse360.com)
- Solo Ads – (DedicatedEmails.com)
It’s imperative that you can “turn on the faucet of traffic” anytime you need to in your business. This will offer instant access to the data you need to plug any holes in your sales funnel before you branch out to the other traffic stages. And, these methods can be less expensive than you’d think.
For example…
A one to one ratio means that you make $1 for every $1 spent, and this is considered a successful campaign by many marketers who understands the lifetime value of a lead.
You can grow your business by thousands of leads per day by breaking even on lead acquisition, and then you can generate a profit for your business every time you hit send on an email.
But, there’s a golden ratio in paid advertising, and that’s the two to one ratio: you make $2 for every $1 of ad spend, or a $1 profit.
That may not seem like a lot, but in paid traffic scalability is the name of the game.
All in all paid advertising can be an inexpensive way to learn how to promote your landing page or website.
Pro Tip: Create unique landing pages to squeeze more from every visitor
A golden rule to running any marketing campaign is to segment your traffic with strategic, custom landing pages. Never send a visitor to a homepage if you’re hoping to get them to take an action.
Instead, send visitors to a page specially crafted to match the content of the marketing message and measure landing page traffic.
Set up a landing page for every single type of marketing campaign you’re running. Choose a landing page builder that makes it easy to track the conversion rate of your page and A/B test variations. If you’re using Google Analytics to track goal conversions (such as sales or sign-ups), you’ll also want to include your Google Analytics tracking codes, so you can measure and assess traffic by channel. And if you’re a Leadpages customer, we make it (super) easy to add your tracking code to your landing pages.
Need some guidance? Give our landing page builder a try.
Heard of the 80/20 rule?
Most of the time, all that is needed to transform a struggling website into a highly profitable one is to start chipping away at 80% of the activities that produce minimal or no results. This “chipping away” will free up 80% more time, energy, and resources to allocate towards 20% of the highest yielding actions.
Flipping your traffic strategy upside down could be all that’s needed to get traffic to your landing page or website.
Remember: you don’t have to use every strategy listed above to drum up new, high-quality leads. Select a few ideas that make sense to start, see how they move the dial on your business. While site visitors and traffic is excellent - it’s the quality that counts. As you embark on the following activities watch your conversion rate on landing pages to ensure that you’re reaching people who are truly interested in what you have to share.
