3 Ways to Drive Organic (As In FREE) Traffic to Your Business
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Here’s the sad truth: we could write the best blog post ever written, but if nobody sees it, it won’t do your business any good.
Every business needs traffic that it can convert to leads, which can be converted to sales.
Creating amazing content is step one, but you need to be able to use that content to drive traffic in order to drive leads and sales.
And there are two kinds of traffic: free and paid.
Which one should you use? They both have their place and can play well together. To overly simplify things:
Paid traffic is a topic I’m not an expert in (and frankly, don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole), so let’s focus for the moment on how to drive organic traffic to your website. First and foremost, you want to have something to drive people to. A great home page or brilliant sales page will do you well for specific calls to action, but it also benefits you to have some valuable content that people want to consume — like blog posts.
There are three main ways we can help drive free, organic traffic to blog posts:
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the art and science of writing your blog post for humans and the Google (or other search engines). If you want to be the answer when someone types a question or query into a search engine, then SEO is where you need to be.
We start with an SEO report from our favorite guru, Meg Casebolt of Love at First Search. She determines what you’re already ranking for, what your competitors are ranking for, and what people are actually searching for, and then turns that into an actionable list of topics we can turn into blog posts on your behalf.
Because here’s the thing: What you THINK people are searching for, and what they’re actually typing in may be two different things.
Now, SEO isn’t a great fit for every business, but most businesses can benefit from doing some basic SEO research and optimizing their posts to what people are actually searching for.
The second way we can drive free traffic to your website is via social media.
But not just any social media.
We’re not talking about cat memes and photos of what you had for lunch. Those have their place, but they’re not going to drive traffic to your website.
Instead, we start with a valuable piece of content, like a blog post, and repurpose it into smaller bites for social media.
It’s easy to take a juicy blog post and slice and dice it up into 5, 10, 15 — even 30 separate social media posts. (I’ve come up with a list of 30 social posts you can generate from one good blog. Would you like to see it in a future post? Comment below and let me know.) Add some pretty graphics and BAM. You’ve got a bunch of opportunities to send warm traffic to your blog post — which could turn them into a lead.
If you’re doing the work to grow your social media following, then those people who follow you go from being cold to warm leads, and then when they land on your blog, they’re primed to become smokin’ hot email leads or buy your low-end offer.
Both of the previous two strategies have been about getting cold (SEO) or warm (social media) leads to your website, but you can also use content to heat those warm leads up to boiling.
Your hottest leads at any given time are probably sitting on your email list — but you have to nurture them to prevent them from cooling off.
Whether you send your entire blog post to your list in the body of an email, or repurpose part of it to entice them into clicking thru and reading it on your website, getting that engagement is turning up the heat on your leads.
And, better still, you can include a more direct call to action in your emails. For example, if your blog post call to action is to sign up for the email list, your email could instead say something like, “If this resonates with you, click here to learn how we can work together.”
The point is, getting that amazing, valuable blog post out into the world is only the first step; you also have to do the work to promote it so that the right people see it and act on it.
