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The million dollar question: How can I get more website traffic? If you are a website owner, traffic is one of the most important component to your online success!
There are many ways to get traffic to your site, there are paid traffic and there are free traffic.
I will concentrate on FREE traffic as everyone wants to know about that first!
For free traffic, I will go over these three ways:
- Website Content
- Forums/Communities
- Social Media
The three ways above will be covered in two parts: Here in Part 1, I will cover #1 Website Content and #2 Forums/Communities. In Part 2, I will cover #3 Social Media.
WEBSITE CONTENT
Did you know that activity on our website is a huge traffic grabber? Meaning, does your site produce well written, quality content?
Does it provide information that will help others? Are people engaging on your website? Do you consistently work on your website?
Okay, maybe I’m asking too many questions at once but what I’m trying to tell you is that if you have a website, you must have a blog attached to it.
Whether you have your blog as a separate page on your menu or as your main home page, it’s important to blog.
A static website will not rank well on search engines and you will not get any organic traffic that way.
Why? Because a blog is dynamic and it is the first step to free organic traffic!
You’ll be able to use keywords in your quality content that will be helpful to others and drive engagement with comments in your blog posts. If you work on it consistently, you will ensure regular activity on your site which search engines like.
Let’s take a look at each element a little closer:
KEYWORDS
There is definitely an art to using keywords and if you don’t have the right tools, you will not be able to find the good ones that will produce free organic traffic to your website!
Keywords are what people use to search on search engines like Google. There are many ways you can find keywords but what I’m going to tell you is the SURE way to get ranked easier on the search engines!
What you want is to use the keywords that are low in competition (meaning not a lot of websites are using those keywords), lower than 150 QSR score, and with monthly searches of over 50 per month.
Competition here is not the same as how much that keyword costs to use in ads, it’s more about how many pages are using the same keyword or keyword phrase.
Here’s a video that explains what keyword competition (QSR – Quoted Search Results) is in this case:
As mentioned in the video, it’s important to use low hanging fruit keywords, this will make your post rank easier and faster on search engines. When you have a bunch of these on your blob, your traffic can really add up in a month!
Using the keyword tool in Wealthy Affiliate is awesome because it’s already available in your free Starter and Premium memberships, sign up HERE, or you can read more about this Wealthy Affiliate platform HERE.
If you don’t want to join Wealthy Affiliate, this same keyword tool with a few more bells & whistles like more in depth keyword analysis and Site Rank, you can use Jaaxy instead.
Jaaxy is a stand alone keyword tool, it uses the same QSR scoring system but it’s much faster and gives you even more keyword results as it digs even deeper.
You can also check how your website is ranking for keywords like this:
You can sign up HERE for Jaaxy for FREE to try it out and upgrade later if you want to keep using it or you can read my full review about Jaaxy HERE first!
No credit card is needed in the sign up for Jaaxy or Wealthy Affiliate! 🙂
Try it here:
COMMENTS
Comments provide a couple important qualities to your blog: word count and engagement.
The more words you have in your blog posts, the better your post will rank and comments add to your word count!
Therefore, a 500 word post can turn into a 1000 word post if you have 10 comments with 50 words in each.
Where can you get comments if your blog is newer or don’t have a steady stream of traffic yet?
Well, you can comment on other blogs and hope they will return the favor or you can join Wealthy Affiliate and have a huge community behind you to offer you comments.
As of this post, I have almost 450 comments and majority of them come from members of Wealthy Affiliate! What a great perk!!
The other factor that comments add to your blog is engagement. The more people that come on your blog to leave comments, the more the search engines will know you have engaging content on your website! Search engines like Google want and favor websites with engaging content, and will rank them better.
CONSISTENCY
When you have a blog, you must stick to a consistent schedule. Whether you are doing this part time or full time, stick to a schedule.
The minimum is posting once a week, if you can do that, you will be able to grow your blog but at a slower pace. If you want to grow it faster and have the time to do it, then blog five times a week!
The more you blog, the more traffic you’ll get, it’s that simple. There’s no big secret to this but people easily give up if they don’t see results right away and that’s exactly the time to keep going!
If you can give yourself a few months, you will see the growth in your organic traffic.
If you check my third income report HERE and you’ll see in my Google Analytics that my web traffic is steadily picking up for the three months:
However much time you can dedicate to your blog, stick to it and you’ll see results! That’s the big secret! 😉
FORUMS / COMMUNITIES
Whatever your niche is, there are online forums or communities you can join to either help people or engage in conversation.
Usually when you comment in forums, you can leave your link in your signature. If you’re helpful enough and engaging enough, people will check out your link.
What’s important about being in forums are:
- Do not spam
- Be respectful to others
- Follow forum policies
- Be engaging and helpful
The most important of these is being engaging and helpful. You can answer questions people may have, or you can post a question yourself to start a conversation going.
It may not even be a question you need answering but want to see how others tackled that one thing.
You can also share a story of something that you experienced.
For instance, you can share how something went horribly wrong and how you were able to get out of it and solve your problem. Others may have the same problem and you can be the one providing them with the solution!
SUMMARY
If you can follow these pointers in this Part 1, you’ll be able to get some free traffic to your website. 🙂
The tools discussed here can also be found in my Best Tools page where I recommend the tools I use that have helped me along the way in my years of online experience!
Next up… Social Media! If you’re ready for Part 2 of “How Can I Get More Website Traffic?”, click HERE. Part 2 provides a lot of info on social media there so it needs to be in its own post.
Thanks so much for visiting, if you have any thoughts or questions regarding the content in this post, please leave a comment below and I will surely answer quickly!
Let’s make money online!
Great post here and well written! This definitely gives me an accurate rundown of what too expect axs a blogger. I like the way you broke the steps down and showed products that may help new bloggers. Well done!
Thanks David, appreciate you stopping by. I hope you liked the tips and yes any bloggers would get a tip out of this I hope. 🙂 It’s always great to find out new tools to use and how to use them to help with your blogging. Glad you liked the post, thanks so much!
Grace
Hi Grace, thanks for sharing this information! I actually didn’t know that comments added to your word count or that posts with higher word counts would rank better in search engines. Thanks for being a great teacher! I have learned about the importance of keyword research at Wealthy Affiliate, but I don’t use those tools nearly as much as I should. Thanks for the reminder!
Take care
Hi Briana, Yes it’s very important to use the tools offered at Wealthy Affiliate! 🙂 It’s part of the great benefits of having your membership there.
Thanks for your kind words about my post! I do write to help others and so glad I can do it for you. 🙂
Grace
Grace,
Thanks for this – especially the tip to join a community in order to create traffic for your website by contributing meaningfully to that community. That is something I had not thought about and I will try it.
Helpful post!
Adelaide
You’re so welcome Adelaide! Appreciate your thoughts on this. You just need to find communities in your niche and keep active on there. 🙂 You’ll also never know what you can learn from others, it’s really great to network!
Thanks for stopping by!
Grace
Thank you very much Grace. I am currently working on a website of mines and i have seen where using low hanging fruit keywords caused me to get rankings in Google. I use Jaaxy and the Keyword tool in Wealthy Affiliate and i get awesome keywords. Also in getting comments on my posts and all, my website is on its way. What i am about to work on is the social media aspect and i am waiting for your next post to guide me with this. Thank you.
Thanks so much Michael for letting me know your thoughts! I’m so glad to hear you are using the teachings of Wealthy Affiliate and getting some great low hanging fruit keywords! I’m also glad you can confirm that it works! Appreciate this. 🙂 Yes I should be working on Part 2 this week, I hope to get it done very soon.
You can subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss a post! 🙂
Grace
Hi Grace, just finished the read here, was a good one. I really enjoyed how you described how engagement works, and I was thinking about how I could increase my rate of traffic just from getting more comments on my site, that sounds excellent, I really think I could get more traffic just doing that alone, but don’t worry, I won’t forget about the power of keywords, I promise:)
I think I better start checking the search results though along with the keyword tool, because I would type the keywords I use and sometimes would actually find a huge difference in results in google.
Hi Jacob, Thanks for visiting and reading my article!
I’ve seen time and time again that comments work and allows your posts to rank better when you do use comments so I’m a strong believer in them. 🙂 I know your site will rank eventually even without checking for the first six months and you just concentrated on content creation with low hanging fruit keywords. 🙂 Sometimes the tools need to catch up with Google so it can be a timing issue how the data gets to the keyword tools.
Best of luck and hope you continue your working on your site consistently! 🙂
Grace
Thanks, Grace, I have a lot of time on my hands now as I have winter off from my job(hoping I can make it so I don’t have to go back within these months I have off).
Yeah, I believe in comments too haha, I’m about 148 strong in them over the course of 18 posts. Thanks for the encouragement and best of luck to you too 🙂
Thank you so much Jacob! I really hope your hard work will pay off soon so you can do this more full time. Just keep up your hard work!! I know you can do it. 🙂
Best,
Grace
Hi there
I must say this is very helpful. I am currently working on getting more traffic too, and its helping. The social networks is a huge payoff but also article marketing in google organic search. I think posting articles 3 times a week and having it be quality is extremely helpful in ranking in the search engines. Thanks for this.
AJ.
Thank you AJ for visiting! I’m happy to hear this was helpful to you. 🙂 Yes, I totally agree with you on all points! Appreciate your thoughts and I wish you much online success!!
Best to you,
Grace
Once again, some practical, valid and useful information here Grace, keep it up!
I certainly wasn’t aware that the comments section add to the post’s overall wordcount. Another reason to keep engaging, right?
Thank you!
Hi Andrea,
Thanks so much for your sweet words!! Yes always engaging will be great for your site. The more content, the more comment, the better traffic results for your blog! 🙂
Thanks a bunch for visiting again!
Grace
Good post and video, Grace. In the video you showed viewers that going to the end of the search results manually is time consuming. Ryan Stevenson on YouTube, suggested that if you use the string allintitle:”bread recipes” that this is a quicker way to find how many webpages use that specific title in their post.
Hi Dominic,
I just tried that and I can’t seem find how many pages use that keyword phrase any faster than what I showed in my video. I will go to YouTube and find that Ryan’s video then to see what he means. Also, QSR is not looking for that keyword phrase in just titles, we’re looking for web pages that use that keyword phrase, so would adding “allintitle:” be an accurate search? I’m not sure because if they use it in their post, I’d want to know too.
I much appreciate your thoughts here and I will dig deeper into this so I can find the answers and even update my post if need be.
Thanks so much!
Grace
Hi Grace, I think it’s better to try searching without the quotes. I have just done allintitle:niche website and it displays the search term “niche website” in the title, in the url, and where it can be found in the website’s text. When searching in quotes “niche website” this search returns every webpage that has mentioned either keyword “niche” or “website” or “niche website”. If this is the result you want then searching in quotes “niche website” is best.
Good article.
Hi again Dominic,
Thanks for the clarification. Using the example I had in the video, easy gluten free bread machine recipes, I used both ways of searching with quotes and with allintitle: no quotes, and the pages result was 3 pages difference. Either way, you still have to go to the last search page to find out how many pages there are.
QSR tells you how many pages there are for that keyword phrase, with all words in it, not just some. I think both ways of searching give similar results but my point is that you still have to go to the end of the results to see how many pages there are so having a keyword tool in Wealthy Affiliate makes this process much easier and faster.
Appreciate your insights here!
Grace
Hi Grace, website traffic is very important for any webmaster, you need to have loads and loads of traffic so a percentage of that would convert.
Comments are also considered content and yeah content is the kings! 🙂
I think the best traffic you can get to your website is the one from Google and PPC Marketing that traffic is targeted and converts like crazy!
Thanks for sharing this awesome post and have a great day! 🙂
Thank you Anis and appreciate your thoughts on how to get more traffic to your website. Google is the best targeted traffic with use of keywords, yes, but PPC marketing I find is much trickier at times as you gotta know what you’re doing or else you can waste a lot of money quickly (like I have). I hope to learn more about PPC marketing in the future, for now, free traffic for me is good enough. 🙂
Thanks for visiting!
Grace
Grace,
Great work website traffic! For some reasons, I did not think much about comments as another key source of traffic. The way you explained it above makes sense. Everyday is a learning day!
Thank you!
Hello Udoh, Thanks for your comment! Yes, all the words count even the comments. It also provides a great way for you to interact with our audience. I’m glad I can provide some clarity about comments! It’s great to be learning everyday, I do as well. 🙂
Wishing you much success!
Grace
Grace, this is an excellent piece of work from you. It is very informative, very simple and a unique presentation. My current problem is that I am part time blogger and hardly have time to blog that frequently as is endorsed in this post of yours. One more thing, I never knew that comments also add to your word count. Thanks for mentioning that point.
Regards
(Barnali)
Hi Barnali, Thanks for visiting my blog! 🙂 Part time blogging is okay too, you just need to stay consistent with it. It may take a bit longer than someone who has a more frequent schedule but you can definitely still build yours at a slower pace.
Comments can be very important to those who don’t blog a lot of words per post. My posts are generally over 1000 words, so I don’t have to worry much about it, but my comments can easily make this post 1500 words! The more words the merrier because it shows search engines that your audience is engaging in your content and they love that.
Best of luck to you!
Grace
Oh yes! Totally agree with you on all these points Grace. Consistent Content, Comments, Community… we could call it the 4 C’s of clever blogging – I’m sure somebody already has.:)
I have been focusing on all of these lately with my 40 Day Challenge to Drive Traffic to my site (Inspiring Mompreneurs). I’ve found some awesome communities in my niche. Have started connecting with Mom Bloggers via Mom Bloggers Club and Cafe Moms.
The trick seems to be balancing how much time to dedicate to each task: add content, give comments, connect with other bloggers, receive and reply to comments. Aah… and then building a Social Media presence also takes up heaps of time (on to your next post). How do you balance all these tasks? Do you schedule a certain amount of time each day for each activity?
Hi Lauren!
Thanks so much for your comment! I love that 4 C’s of Clever Blogging!! Man, that’s awesome! You should take that and run with it!
You’ve been doing great with your networking with other bloggers! I’ve got to do that too. Time is such a factor though. I always do social media at night right after my dinner duties, during the day, I do content and if there are comments, I get that done too. I’m kind of everywhere when I work, all I know is that I’m constantly doing something! Lol… I feel I need to be better at scheduling what to write as my blog posts have been coming at me spare of the moment or it develops as I write the current post.
I feel if I need to do a post, I do that first though, then comments, social media, and now, I’m adding videos too, so I do that after I have posted content. Content still remains number 1, then other things, then content again.
Not sure I gave you any advice here! LOL Sorry, I’m kind of all over the place when I’m at my computer as things come up and I get that done.
Thanks for stopping by!
Grace