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In this episode, we talk about how to drive more traffic to your website.
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
SHANE: Our question today comes from Lindsey from Melbourne, Australia. Lindsey, I could not pronounce your last name. I’m so sorry, but it will be in the show notes over at www.flippedlifestyle.com/QA03. Lindsey asks,
“How did you get people to find your website in the beginning?”
That is a great question that we probably get every single day because building traffic is very frustrating especially at the beginning when you don’t have an audience and you’re just starting out. But we did a few things at the beginning that really helped us kind of accelerate the process of getting traffic to our website. Jocelyn has got some great strategies and I’m going to turn it over to her first to let you know what she did with www.elementarylibrarian.com.
JOCELYN: When I started out with my website, I really didn’t know where people were going to find it. I started writing blog posts and there were a limited number of people that found me through the blog post, which is great, but of course, when you start your site, you want to have more people find you – the more people, the better. I just went out and I started searching. I had some particular keywords in mind that I wanted to rank for but I figured there was probably not a real good chance that I was going to rank there at the very beginning.
What I did is I just searched for my keyword and since I couldn’t be in the top 1, 2, or 3, I looked at the sites that were in those spots and if it was possible for me to do so, I would put a comment, like if it was a blog, I would put a comment with my URL. It wasn’t a spammy comment like, “Come check out my website now.” It wasn’t something like that. It was actually relevant to the content that was contained in that particular page and I just included my URL. You will be surprised at how much traffic came from just that strategy.
Also, I would look for things like wikis. I’m in the education field from a website and so there are a lot of wikis out. Basically, you can just add your information onto the wikis.
SHANE: And a wiki is like Wikipedia but they make them for all kinds of different topics. There are lots of different wikis like for libraries, social studies, or cars, whatever.
JOCELYN: Right and so I just went on there and I added my information where it was relevant. I got a ton of traffic off that. Another thing that I did really from the very beginning was I really used Pinterest to my advantage. My audience is largely female. I would say probably about 90-95%. Also, there are teachers. Teachers are really big into Pinterest and I just went on there, made some nice art, pinned it on Pinterest, and my thing spread like crazy from that. Those were just a few of the strategies that I used on my Elementary Librarian site.
SHANE: What I did on CoachXO to make my audience grow is we like to always tell people, like when they ask us, “How do you get traffic?” You go get it. You’re not just going to be able to create a blog post and all of a sudden, it organically becomes the most popular thing on earth. You have to go find your audience. Like Jocelyn just said, she recognized early on that her audience were using wikis and were using Pinterest. So she attacked those places.
On my side, I went to Facebook groups. There are a lot of Facebook groups about all kinds of different subjects but coaches tend to congregate around their topic so I found lots of Facebook groups. I’m a member of dozens and dozens of Facebook groups for coaches – Youth Football Coaches, Defensive Groups, Offensive Groups – whatever the subject is but I’m a member of a lot of those groups and I went in and I built relationships by joining the conversation on Facebook.
Just like Jocelyn found a lot of audience for females on Pinterest, I recognized that Twitter, Twitter is a very male-dominated audience. There are a lot more males on Twitter than there are females and I figured out that my audience was on Twitter. Coaches love Twitter so I went on Twitter and started looking at things like: football coach, #football, #coaching, # anything that had to do with my subject and I found all of these people that were engaged in a conversation about football or coaching.
People identify themselves on Twitter very easily because they might be like @coachjones or @coachsmith. So maybe there is a way that you can find a certain system that people are using to identify themselves and their interests on Twitter and you can go on there and connect with them so easily. You can follow them, you can send them a message, and they may follow you back. We were able to build thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter just by interacting with them.
Another thing that we did in the beginning, not right when we started but when we started to gain a little bit of traction, we paid to play. We started running some Facebook ads and Twitter ads. Not a lot. We don’t use them all the time. We don’t have ads running every single day but when we felt like we needed to promote something, the game is, right now, you have to pay to play, especially on Facebook.
We went out and we bought a little traffic. We paid for some Google Ads, got some of the search traffic, we built our likes up on Facebook a little bit with some Facebook Ads and Twitter has sponsored Twitter posts where you can go out and build a following base like that. If you’re really not gaining any traction at all, then you have to look at your message first to see if it’s what your audience wants to hear, but you may have to go pay to play a little bit.
We always tell people that are like, “Oh, I’m not paying for my likes. I’m not paying for my ads. I’m not going to give Facebook my money.”
Well, here’s the deal. If you won’t spend money on your product, then how can you ever expect anybody else to spend money on your product?
You’re already putting in all the time, effort, and work, and if that’s not working, you may have to throw a little bit of money at it to gain some traction, build an audience, and go at it that way.
JOCELYN: I would just say also, make sure that there is something for people to look at on your site. Don’t just have an empty site and expect people to go there and love it. You’re going to have to have some really good compelling content or people are not going to continue to come on to your site.
SHANE: Don’t just promote your first blog post and expect people to come back. You need 10, 20 blog posts. You need something there for them to be looking around at when they do find your site so that you can keep the traffic you get. What’s more important than getting a ton of people come into your site is getting the right people to come to your site and keeping them there, okay.
Alright, thanks, guys. I hope you enjoyed the answer to that question and if you have any questions, make sure you head over to www.facebook.com/flippedlifestyle and you can leave us a question every Sunday night and we may select yours for the show. Until next time, we will see you all later.
JOCELYN: See ya! Bye.
SHANE: Do you need step by step instruction? Do you need us to help you create your digital product and get your online business started? Well, you can do that. We actually now offer a course called the Flip Your Life e-course where we show you how to create your first digital product in 29 days or less.
All you have to do to get more information on this program is go to www.flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and that’s all one word, and you can check out everything that we do in that course to help you get your digital product created for sale online even if you don’t have a website.
That’s www.flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. You can check when our next session is starting at that link.
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