There are quick ways to get visitors to your website (see our Media Kit for paid advertising methods), and there are long-term ways to increase website traffic with content marketing ideas. These approaches don’t have a direct cost, but they do take time and can involve paying someone for the initial work.
There are lots of effective content strategies, but for this email we’re going to go over a few unique approaches that can help you stand out from the crowd and that are simple enough for the smallest of small businesses to create.
The greatest benefit to these content strategies is that you create engaging content once, and it continues to draw interest for years. Consistency is important to really gain momentum, but if you create high-quality content that provides value to your audience, even a single project in one of these areas will still be fruitful over time.
Ideas to Increase Website Traffic
I’ll break this down into three main categories with one method for each. Your plan should be to pick one method that appeals to you, perhaps one that you have already made progress in, and put lots of effort into it. Then when you’ve mastered that as a regular content activity, add another one.
Video: Personal Story
One video marketing approach is to record personalized videos for specific situations, like giving your email subscribers a face behind the business.
You may want to share a story about the creation of one of your products or services, personally answer a frequently asked question, or share your heart about why you’re in business. Then add these videos to your new subscriber email campaign. You can upload that video to YouTube and provide an image link in the email, but you may want to look into video hosting platforms with additional features for businesses, like VidYard or Spotlightr. Embedding these videos on your website is ideal to get more traffic and show off the other great things you have to offer.
Here is an article from the Schoolhouse Marketing blog that expands on this concept of reaching your audience on a personal note, and here are a few other unexpected ways you can use video marketing from Lemonlight.
Email: Segmenting for Custom Care
I’m sure you are using email to reach your audience, but if you’re not sure it’s worth the effort then take a read of our article Why Email Marketing is Important, which includes small business statistics.
If you want to grow your business, you should have an email strategy, but not just any boring strategy where you send out random emails about your business. Think of ways you can create community and engagement with your emails and more importantly, how you can get those special subscribers to visit your website.
The email technology of today may be a bit daunting to master, but don’t think that you have to know everything. However, you will greatly benefit from knowing how to segment your subscriber list and when to send custom emails to certain segments of your list. Since there are different methods of using this feature for the different email marketing platforms, I won’t get into specifics, but you should find detailed training on how to use this from the platform you’re on or a search online.
You can also get more details on this and other email best practices in our article Build Rapport with These Email Marketing Tips.
Website: Cornerstone Content
Whether you’ve got a blog on your site or just create pages that have informative content, you will want to make some of those pages cornerstone content. Here’s a simple description from Yoast:
Cornerstone content is the core of your website. It consists of the best, most important articles on your site; the pages or posts you want to rank highest in the search engines. Cornerstone articles are usually relatively long informative articles, combining insights from different blog posts and covering everything that’s important about a certain topic.
Their focus is to provide the best and most complete information on a particular topic, rather than to sell products. Still, they should reflect your business or communicate your mission perfectly.
Cornerstone content can be either a blog post or a page. But whichever they are, you should make sure they’re very well written, update them often, and aim to get them to rank for your most competitive keywords.
Go to Yoast and read the whole article, which provides insight on the benefits of this type of content and how to structure pages to be most effective for SEO. We also have a collection of helpful articles with SEO tips on our Schoolhouse Marketing blog.
Start using one of these selected content marketing ideas today to build a steady process of increasing traffic to your website. Remember these are long-term approaches and require regular effort, but no matter how much time you have to invest you will see an increase in website visitors over time if you make a plan and stay the course.
Have these marketing tips sent right to your inbox by signing up in the sidebar form.
