So you have a new product and a brand new website?
Brilliant!
But no one is visiting it. Why?
Well because digital marketing isn’t just about creating an engaging product and showcasing it well. It’s about finding interested customers and driving that traffic back to your website.
SEO (search engine optimization) is still the most popular way to attract a sustainable amount of traffic. However gaining traffic and any sort of search engine rankings from day one is not easy.
It requires work, skill and above all else – useful, engaging information.
For a new website or a business that are just getting started with internet marketing, SEO can be quite frustrating. Despite the recent changes to search engine algorithms and their now real-time approach to indexing, a new website still needs months – sometimes even more – before it can be fully SEO-optimized and get real traction from organic traffic.
So how do you drive traffic quick?
Gaining Traction Early with Pay Per Click Ads
It can be very frustrating to open Google Analytics and see only 1 or 2 visitors accessing the site, but almost all site owners have this experience when their now-successful websites were just a few days old.
What you need is a campaign that works with your SEO and content marketing efforts. Fortunately, internet marketing does offer a number of instruments that can produce instant results and give the site a nice boost of traffic early on.
For starters, you can use ads to promote the site. There are a lot of advertising networks you can now utilize, regardless of your budget. There are also PPC management services that will help you maximize the budget you have for advertising, allowing you to gain more for less.
Paid Ads are particularly effective for new sites. This is because it allows you to understand what the search traffic is out there around your chosen products as well as which search terms and content converts best, thereby allowing you to optimize your SEO efforts around these.
Adwords/Bing Ads still remains the fastest way to drive relevant traffic to a new website here in the UK. Be mindful though, you do have to pay for every click so make sure you have your KPI’s and budget clear from the start.
Social Media and Stories
Simply put – start sharing right away! You can tell behind-the- scene stories about how the products you will be selling are developed. You can even take the audience on a journey and let them be part of the experience of starting a new business and this can happen even before you launch your website.
This content is easy to produce.
Since it is packaged into stories that users can follow, it is also great for building hype and creating a buzz around an upcoming website or product. When the site is live, all you have to do is direct your followers to the new site.
Think about what people might find useful or engaging when using social media that fits with your products and services. Then use things like sponsored posts on Facebook and Sponsored Tweets on Twitter to reach audiences quicker.
Find authority figures in your industry and start sharing information with the people who can make a difference early.
What Next?
As mentioned before, attracting traffic is just the first step. Both paid ads and social media are great ways to promote your site, but you should never stop there.
The second part of the equation is retaining those visitors. You want them to return for more; you want visitors to convert into customers and make purchases or perform a different action.
How can we do that? We’ll save that discussion for another article. Be sure to subscribe and stay tuned for updates right here on my blog.
The post While You Wait: How to Gain Traction Early appeared first on Wade Harman.
