One of the most common complaints with small business web sites is that they don’t get any traffic.
Some business owners I spoke with over the last few months have told me their web site has NEVER seen any significant amount of traffic, and they don’t know what to do about it.
Well I’ve spoken at length about using Google Adwords and other forms of online advertising, but there’s one tactic I haven’t covered much — certainly not in enough detail to do it justice.
So in this article I’m going to give you my number one strategy for getting massive traffic to any web site – within a week or less – and I’ll hedge a bet that hardly any of your competitors are doing this effectively… if at all.
Going offline to get people online.
One of the best ways of getting an almost guaranteed and quite sudden rush of traffic to your web site is to run print campaigns.
In my experience, print is one of the most underused medium for getting traffic to a web site — it’s probably a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped by you, starting today.
Step 1) Profile a very specific type of customer you want to attract
Step 2) Create something you can give away free – which your prospects can download or access online.
Write a 3 -5 page report in Word or your preferred document editor then turn it into a Adobe Acrobat PDF file — your computer may already be able to do that but if not a quick search on Google for the phrase “PDF converter” should give you links to software you can use.
It’s easy and shouldn’t take you more than a day to create a short report that has good information in it.
Step 3) Launch a lead page site — which is a special kind of web site that only has only a single page visitors see to start with.
That web page simply offers the freebie — but before it gives the visitor access to it they have to enter their name and email address in a form.
In return you say they’ll be sent (by email) a link to download whatever it is you’re offering for free.
This again may sound technical but it’s actually quiet easy – you can use starter email services like this one or more advanced services like this one.
Those services provide the mechanism that automatically sends an email to someone when they enter their name and email address in the form. That email contains a link to your free report or whitepaper.
It’s a simple exchange.
You write a valuable free report that contains good information — the visitor volunteers their name and email address in return for the free report, and also at the same time agrees to receive additional e-mails from you… although you also say (on the lead page) they can unsubscribe any time they want.
Step 4) Now this is the important step… promote that site in print. Write an advert that talks ONLY about the free gift you’re giving away.
Give them a link to the web site (your lead site, remember) — where they can go to get their hands on the valuable free information revealed in your report.
The result of that promotion should be instant massive traffic (depending on where and how much you promote the offer of course.
If you run only a tiny advert in the back of an obscure magazine then you obviously won’t get as much traffic as if it’s a full page advert in a magazine with large national or international readership.
The result of this activity will be not only traffic to your web site but also the generation of hundreds or even a thousand or more sales-leads… people who have expressed an interest in a report which relates directly to whatever it is you sell.
This means you can now…
Step 5) Use email marketing to communicate with the people whose names and emails you acquitted in step 4.
You can send them special offers and promotions, helpful hints and tips, recommend third party tools and resources and so much more.
In addition to this, your emails can contain links to pages on your main corporate or e-commerce website – and I can again guarantee that sending emails with links to your website will almost instantly increase the traffic on your main website too. (Chances are you’re reading this article because I sent you — and thousands of my other subscribers — an email with a link to it. While they’re reading this article a percentage of thise readers will ‘sidetrack’ onto other pages and buy from me. All it takes is sending emails.
It’s not rocket-science although some people make it sound like it is.
When you own a large database of active and interested e-mail subscribers you can use it to boost your sales and revenues substantially… and print advertisements is one of the fastest and more reliable ways of making this tactic work at the highest level.
Here are the steps again in brief…
1) Decide who you’re targeting (a specific type of customer or client).
2) Write a special report - something they’d find interesting and useful and which in their mind has a high perceived value.
3) Launch a lead page that captures names and emails in return for the report.
4) Promote it in print (and other places too — but I recommend give print a try).
5) Send emails to your new subscribers.
And of course… you can promote your lead pages in more than a hundred other ways too, not just in print but I can tell you from experience… print is a vastly underused way of getting website traffic, and may hold the key to you finally blowing the tumbleweed off your site!
Here’s to massive traffic on your site,
Ed.
