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Episode 153: How To Get Website Traffic Quickly
761 Plays2 years ago
Is there a way to build website traffic quickly? We think so! In this episode, you will learn how to gain traffic to your website quickly by leveraging other people's audiences through collaborations. We share the best practices for you and your business to authentically grow an audience.
4:40 - Long term play - show up consistently
6:10 - Repurposing your content
7:22 - Leverage other people’s audiences
9:05 - Collaborations with other businesses
17:45 - Best methods for your business
19:11 - How to ask for a collaboration
Recommended
Transcript
Leveraging Other Audiences
00:00:05
Speaker
There's one tried-and-true way of building quick traffic for your website, and that's thinking through how you can leverage other people's audiences. So when I talk about thinking through ways that you can leverage other people's audiences, basically the problem, right, is that you don't have an audience, right? And since you don't have an audience, you can build an audience, which takes time, or you can go to places where others have an audience that you can already get in front of.
Introduction to Traffic Building
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:43
Speaker
Is there a way to build website traffic quickly? We think so. And that's what we're discussing on the podcast today. Specifically, we're chatting about ways one can leverage other people's audiences in order to build their own.
Website Template Sale Announcement
00:00:56
Speaker
And speaking of websites, our Memorial Day weekend website sale, that's a mouthful, is coming up and you won't want to miss it. Be sure to join our email community if you want to be the first to know when that sale drops. All of our full website templates and add-on pages will be on sale for the week.
00:01:13
Speaker
As always, be sure to check out our show notes at dvandchrista.com for the resources that we mentioned during the episode, and we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands That Book podcast as we move forward.
Challenges in Gaining Traffic and Audience Building
00:01:24
Speaker
To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram at dvandchrista. All right, we are back for another episode of the Brands That Book podcast. I'm here with Christa, and today we are chatting about getting traffic to your website quickly.
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to be back and talking about this topic because I feel like especially working one-on-one with clients, it's something that we get asked about so frequently.
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a natural question too after somebody has a website built for them or maybe you've just built your website. Part two of that is, okay, well, how do I get people to this website? How do we get this website found? How do I start increasing my website traffic? So definitely something that we're asked about a lot. And at the end of the day, building an audience is going to take some time. There are very few situations where I think people can build a loyal audience overnight.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, especially if you're launching a brand new website, it's not likely, even if your website's amazing and beautiful and has really great content, that it's just gonna be found by tons and tons of people
Long-term SEO Strategy and Trust Building
00:02:30
Speaker
overnight. You definitely have to put some work into getting an audience in traffic there.
00:02:34
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, even when we're talking about like search engine optimization, I mean, even if you check all of the boxes, you know, great content, great website structure, so on and so forth, but your business is new and your domain is new. It's unlikely that you're going to start ranking for competitive searches in the first six months, right? You have to build trust with search engines like Google and people for that matter. But exciting topic. I'm also excited the fact that we're going to be into May here and it's warm. I love the spring.
00:03:02
Speaker
You do. You're spending a lot of time outside these days, which is great because you're helping with the gardens. And if you don't follow us on social media, we now have 31 birds. Like, I don't know why we have so many. We get so many eggs a day that we can't even use them. The duck eggs are so worth it.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yes, all of our friends and family in Lexington are the recipients of all these eggs because we just have so many. Yeah, yeah, it's all good. Anyways, all right, back to getting website traffic quickly.
Strategic Platform Use: Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok
00:03:30
Speaker
We'll record another podcast maybe on some of our gardening projects and the farm. The farm, yeah. I've also recently been playing around with a quote unquote dumb phone, right? So something that's trying to limit screen time that it's been an interesting adventure.
00:03:46
Speaker
It's not super fruitful. No, not super. I was gonna, like this morning when I woke up, I was thinking, oh, we should do a podcast on Davey giving up his iPhone. But that's, I mean, you haven't, you didn't. It's yet to happen. The dumb phone that he bought did not work out. So it's going back. I have very much decreased my screen time.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yes. But anyways, we should record another podcast. If that's something that interests you trying to disconnect, trying to manage a business and disconnect, that's I think a challenge. I think for so many entrepreneurs too, it's like your life and business are so wrapped up in a lot of ways. I mean, heck, I run businesses with some of my closest friends. Yes. But that's a whole other topic. Okay. Back to getting website, traffic to your website quickly.
00:04:30
Speaker
Yes, exactly. All right. So I think that there's a few different ways that we can think through trying to get traffic to our website. All right. And obviously the whole, the gist of today's episode is really focusing on how we do
Content Repurposing Across Platforms
00:04:42
Speaker
that quickly. Right? Because there are all sorts of things that we should be doing that are more long-term plays.
00:04:47
Speaker
And a lot of the long-term play is just showing up consistently. So picking the channels that you want to focus on and making sure that you're showing up there consistently, you're utilizing best practices for those channels. And over time, if your content's good, theoretically, you should continue building an audience.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yes, and I think we've definitely seen that on Pinterest. Pinterest takes some time, I think, to get traffic to your pins. If you look at your analytics there, it takes maybe weeks, months, whereas something like Instagram or TikTok, you might see the traffic right away, the engagement right away. But it's definitely worth on all of those platforms posting consistently.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, we're not saying to do these things at the expense of those things that you should be doing consistently. And in our opinion, showing up on social media is a good thing. I know that there's people out there that run businesses without social media presence. So, of course, it's possible to run a business without social media presence, not something that I would typically recommend that people do. It's possible to run a successful business without focusing on SEO at all. But I think focusing on SEO in particular, longer play
00:05:53
Speaker
but there's fruits beyond just ranking on Google. I think in many ways it teaches you how to produce really good content and that content that you produce for search engines and ultimately people of course, but that content you produce for to optimize for search
Collaborations for Audience Leveraging
00:06:09
Speaker
engines. It can be repurposed in all sorts of different ways.
00:06:12
Speaker
Right. We take a lot of our content and share it in different bits and pieces across social media platforms. And so like if you write one, I don't know how long your articles are, some of them are like 3000 words, if you're getting really wordy, we can take bits of that and turn them into different real videos that we share on all links.
00:06:31
Speaker
on tiktok and instagram and pinterest and youtube shorts now we're experimenting with that or we could turn some of those words into image graphics that we share on all of those channels so you can repurpose something a lot of different ways or if it's doing really well you could take that content and turn it into a guide that someone downloads to in exchange for an email list.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, and so as we move into getting website traffic quickly, I think what we just want to emphasize is we're not suggesting that you do this at the expense of some of these things that you should be doing as longer term plays, right? And also go back and listen to some of our other episodes about content in particular and about repurposing content because I think it's going to make content just feel more manageable. But since we're talking about getting website traffic quickly, I think that there's one tried and true way of building
00:07:21
Speaker
quick traffic for your website. And that's thinking through how you can leverage other people's audiences.
00:07:28
Speaker
Okay, so can you elaborate on how you would leverage other people's audiences? Yeah, absolutely. Because when you first say it's like, well, I don't know if I should ask people to piggyback off of their audiences. Sure, sure. So maybe it has like maybe people feel like maybe it has a little bit of a negative connotation. Yeah. And I don't think that's that's certainly not the way in which I'm thinking about it. So when I when I talk about thinking through or thinking through ways that you can leverage other people's audiences.
00:07:51
Speaker
Basically, the problem is that you don't have an audience. And since you don't have an audience, you can build an audience, which takes time, or you can go to places where others have an audience that you can already get in front of.
Examples of Effective Collaborations
00:08:07
Speaker
There are a few places that you can do this. I broke them down into really two different categories here, just for simplicity. The first place is going to include places that already aggregate audiences.
00:08:17
Speaker
So I'm thinking social media here, like there is an audience on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, you know, so on and so forth, right? So just showing up on those platforms. There is an audience for Google, right? People use Google to find answers to the questions and things like that, right? A lot of what we're doing there, though, fits more into that longer term play that we're talking about.
00:08:40
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So the other way that we can think about this is leveraging specific businesses or individuals audiences. And the way we can do this is, well, there's a variety of ways that we can do this. Primarily, we're thinking through ways that we can collaborate with others in order to get in front of their audience. Okay. Does that make sense? It does. So can you give a few examples of what you mean by collaborations?
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And this is not an exhaustive list of examples. And there's going to be a corresponding blog post with this episode that might lay out more examples than what we'll go over in the episode. But hopefully just so people, you know, to get the wheels turning for people and to give people an idea of what I'm talking about.
00:09:20
Speaker
Collaboration i think is anything where both parties get something out of it okay right now if you don't have an audience obviously that's not something that you can offer up. Right where is if you do have an audience that's great you know somebody can get in front of your audience you get somebody else's audience win win right since you don't have an audience if that's the problem we're trying to solve right.
00:09:41
Speaker
We're trying to think through, okay, what is it that I can offer this person in a collaboration? It might just be
Industry-specific Collaboration Strategies
00:09:48
Speaker
great content, all right? So I'm thinking about guest posts or being a podcast guest for somebody where you can share your expertise with somebody else's audience. And that's a win-win, right? I mean, the person who you're sharing to their audience, they get access to some great content that they don't have to think up.
00:10:09
Speaker
And in return, you get to be in front of their audience. So really anything I think where you can work something out where both parties get something out of it.
00:10:19
Speaker
Okay, so is this kind of like where lovevery sends me baby toys in exchange for sharing about them on Pinterest? Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we've got some of our favorite things for Bennett. Yes. And in return, you take some great photos of it and create some great content for social media, right? And you share.
00:10:39
Speaker
I mean, so just if you're looking for ways to get in front of people, think about that because you don't always have to pay people a ton of money to get in front of their audiences. You could give them something that you already create or let them use one of your products.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so doing things like giveaways, for instance, if you have a product to give away, and then there's a business that has some sort of complimentary product, you know, that might be a great opportunity for a collaboration where you can give stuff away from both businesses, getting in front of both businesses' audiences. Right. Right. So another example of a collaboration. So to kind of work in reverse, though, to something that I think is great for new businesses in particular.
00:11:19
Speaker
Like for instance, Love Every sends you stuff in part because we have a lot of people viewing our stuff on Pinterest. That's true. But like if I was making cake decorator box kits, I could send them to a bunch of people who also have an audience. So it doesn't, like I'm thinking that like that, like in the example, Love Every is the business and like you should put yourself in their shoes.
00:11:44
Speaker
Oh no, absolutely. But what I'm saying is that in a situation where you're trying to catch the attention of a bigger business like Love Every, so let's say you provide some product for kids that's different from Love Every, but it kind of fits with what you're doing. I don't know off the top of my head what that example would be. Maybe you sell baby activity stuff and play guides or something, I don't know.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yeah, something that doesn't compete with Love Every but fits well with their general mission, right? You can create content that features some Love Every stuff in addition to your own, right? And when you share about it, you're sure to tag Love Every in that. You know, maybe write a blog post about some of your favorite Love Every toys and how it complements whatever it is that you're doing. Maybe you're a child development specialist of some sort, right? And you have some sort of course.
00:12:35
Speaker
And you talk about how these are great toys, you know, for that, right? By sharing that kind of stuff, you're building goodwill with that company. And certainly as you grow, that might catch the attention of that company. I mean, think about even if they just re-shared it. On social media, yeah. And I forget how many followers they have on Instagram, but it's sizable. I mean, probably like a million or close to it.
00:12:55
Speaker
And so you're not even necessarily asking that company for a collaboration, but if they re-share your post, if they re-share your, you know, whatever, you're going to get some traffic from that share, right? And so that's a really easy way. That's what I would call a kind gesture post, right? You're not necessarily doing it for anything in return. You might not get anything out of it.
00:13:16
Speaker
but likely companies as long as they look at your profile and it looks legit, they're most likely going to at least reshare that on Instagram stories or something like that. I think they've reshared some of our stuff of Bennett playing with the toys or Jack. They have some older kids toys too that Jack has played with.
00:13:32
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so that's an easy way to start getting traffic from maybe some of these bigger communities. Whereas if you had no audience and you email love every right, then it's probably it's less likely that they're going to be willing to collaborate.
Finding Ecosystem Collaborations
00:13:47
Speaker
Right. Right. So that's an idea for people who maybe you're just trying to build your audience and doesn't have to be super big businesses like love every pretty much anyone in between.
00:13:58
Speaker
So what if you're in the wedding industry? Do you have some ideas for ways that wedding industry pros could collaborate?
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, wedding industry pros, I think, first of all, I'd say photographers have it easy, right? And, you know, if you're a photographer and you're feeling frustrated, I don't mean to say, oh, no, things are easy for you, all right? There's all sorts of difficulties, right, in building a business, even for photographers, but everybody needs good imagery, right? And so photographers can reach out to wedding venues and offer to take updated images of the venue in exchange maybe for a link back to their website.
00:14:29
Speaker
which I will tell you that as someone who designs a lot of venue sites and sites for other vendors, so many of them need good, consistent images. They might like, especially venues, I've worked on so many sites where they just piece together little bits of images that they get from photographers from weddings, but they don't always have a consistent set of on-brand images that they can use throughout their entire time. They don't have watermarks. They don't have watermarks. So many people still send watermarks and I'm like, I'm not putting that on your website.
00:14:57
Speaker
Exactly. So, if you're a photographer, right? But even if you're not a photographer, you're a planner, right? There's all sorts of ways that you can benefit photographers, right? It may be guest posting on their blog about 10 ways to make sure that you have a stress-free wedding day, something like that, right? And that benefits a photographer. They have great content to share with their audience, right? It probably also benefits that photographer because as former photographers ourselves, the best weddings that we worked were generally weddings with planners.
00:15:23
Speaker
You can see how you can easily think up ways where getting in front of each other's audiences is going to be mutually beneficial. We worked with a planner back in Maryland when we were photographers who had us do a lot of styled shoot type photos for her.
00:15:39
Speaker
Even many style shoots that she would just share on her blog or submit for publication. Probably once a month we went out to her studio and we just photographed bits and pieces of stuff for her and we built a great relationship with her. We shot several weddings with her a year and they were always really beautiful. They almost always got published and they sent us so much more traffic.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah. I think if you take a minute and you sit down and you start thinking about your business type and then, you know, things that make other things that make your business successful, right? And all of us work in an ecosystem like for us as website designers, like it makes a difference when our clients have good copy, right? Yes.
00:16:17
Speaker
And some of our clients are really good copywriters. I mean, they're not copywriters, but they write really good copy. Most of them, though, probably need to work with a copywriter in order to get really good copy. That makes a big difference. So, we love building relationships with copywriters like Jessica Janana, who's been on the podcast a number of times. That's mutually beneficial. So, I think every business is part of an ecosystem.
00:16:42
Speaker
where even your client experience, your customer experience can be improved with the help of another business. So thinking through those things, I know our friend, Becca Campbell, who I'm excited to see this weekend. Not good with barring no children get sick overnight. That's been what's holding us back lately. But for her, for instance, there are all sorts of other businesses that are within her ecosystem. So she's a child sleep coach, right?
Tailoring Collaborations to Business Types
00:17:07
Speaker
That's how you would put it.
00:17:08
Speaker
sleep consultant and then she also teaches other people how to run sleep consultant businesses and then she has another new company too. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But just in the sleep world, right? You have people who are teaching, you know, how to potty train your kids. Right. And how to get your kids to eat. Exactly. And like physical therapy kind of stuff for kids like torticollis and there's a million things. Yeah. Yeah. So start thinking about that. There are things out there. There are opportunities out there for sure. Right. All right. So what else should we cover here?
00:17:38
Speaker
We talked about social media aren't organic. So what kind of methods do you think work best for different businesses?
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I would say any of these methods can work for any business, you know, and even if you're an established business and you're just looking for, you know, a boost of website traffic, I mean, you're in an even better spot because again, you can offer your audience up to whoever it is that you're trying to collaborate with, right? So any of these things I think can work. I think it depends a little bit on personality, right? So, you know, if you don't feel like podcasting is the like best medium for you to share your expertise,
00:18:14
Speaker
Then maybe podcasting is not the type of collaboration that you go after. Maybe it's a shared YouTube Live or it's a blog post or something else altogether. I think it does depend a little bit on the personality, maybe the business type, but any of these ideas can work for any business. I'll say for Till Agency, one thing that we've been trying to do is more podcast interviews.
00:18:37
Speaker
Because especially podcasts that have a good audience, there always seems to be an uptick in traffic after we're featured on a
Approaching Collaborators Genuinely
00:18:45
Speaker
podcast. More so than if, let's say, we write a guest post. And guest posts have been great. But typically, we see, I'd say the lifespan of a guest post is longer in the sense that we still get traffic from guest posts we've written, I guess, years ago at this point. But we see a faster bump in traffic from something like podcast interviews.
00:19:05
Speaker
Okay, that's helpful. Yeah. So if you're going to reach out to somebody either to do a podcast interview or a guest post or some sort of collaboration, do you have tips for not coming across as sketchy, especially if you don't know a person?
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, this is why when you're first getting started, kind gesture posts are an easy way to start catching the attention of people without coming across as just wanting something. If I'm a photographer, I could write a blog post sharing about my favorite florists in the Baltimore region and then maybe email them and tell them that I feature them.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Same thing with your favorite venues or something like that. So there are all sorts of things that you can do there, especially if you want to catch the attention of one person in particular, then featuring them in a big way in that blog post, it doesn't necessarily have to be a blog post totally dedicated to that one business. But if they do hold substance in that blog post, then letting them know like, hey, I wrote a blog post about my favorite copywriting strategies and I quoted you in this article or something like that.
00:20:09
Speaker
But kind gestures like that, I think they go a long way, they catch people's attention. I mean, there's people who've come on our podcast basically from posts like that. And maybe not even immediately, but that started the relationship. Okay.
00:20:23
Speaker
So kind gesture posts, I think a good way to get started. Sending emails, I think are good too. I think one of the things that you want to pay attention to is like, if people have guidelines, you know, like we have guidelines for applying to be on the podcast and we've done less interviews lately in general.
Product Samples and Influencer Collaborations
00:20:38
Speaker
But if you want to be interviewed, there's a way that we have set up for people to do that. And so often I get emails to the wrong email asking their canned emails.
00:20:49
Speaker
You know right so you don't even they don't know who we are or maybe they just like pick one of our latest blog posts are coming out and we could tell that they don't do it and so there's things like that that you just want to make sure you follow guidelines the other great way to get in front of people
00:21:05
Speaker
I think goes alongside the kind gesture idea, which is just sending people samples of your work or freebies. And so if you're a product-based business, we're doing this a lot with FarmFedbox. So FarmFedbox is our farm business product. And with FarmFedbox, every month we're sending boxes just for people to try. Not everybody shares about it when they get a box. A lot of people do. A lot of people like it. Some people I have signed up from that.
00:21:32
Speaker
You know, that's just an easy way to get in front of people. No pressure. You're not really expecting anything in return. But oftentimes, especially if your product's good, you're going to get at least pension on social media. Yeah. That's a fun thing to get in the mail to a box of meat, at least. Yeah, absolutely.
Pros and Cons of Paid Ads
00:21:50
Speaker
So we've talked a lot about collaboration as a way to get traffic to your website. Just because I know you also work in the advertising world, but tell what about traffic, like running ads to get traffic to your website.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, and so this goes back to that first tip that I was talking about, or kind of that first principle I was talking about, is when we're talking about getting traffic quickly to our website, this is kind of where we'll wrap up here. You know, we can go to places where they aggregate audiences, right? Creating our social media accounts, that sort of thing. Or we can go to specific people's audiences on those different channels.
00:22:20
Speaker
Paid traffic is interesting because you can get a bump in traffic quickly, right? But as you're first getting started, unless you have a budget for paid advertising, then it's not necessarily the route that I would suggest off the bat.
00:22:36
Speaker
Right. I think that it also helps, especially if your website is brand new, there may not be as much content for them to dig into. You may not have systems in place to capture their emails and deliver them quality content and keep following up with them. So I think it's also helpful to have all of those things in place too, before you start spending money to send people your way.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah, I would agree. And it's just more of a risk, right? I mean, when you start trying to – when you're doing collaborations to start in some more organic marketing, then you can test out and tease out kind of the problems, I guess, maybe with your content or your product before you're spending a lot of money sending traffic to that product, not really understanding what the return
Starting Small with Ad Budgets
00:23:19
Speaker
is going to be. But I mean, if you have the money to do it, then certainly buying traffic is one way to go.
00:23:26
Speaker
And it can be an effective way to build traffic. Yeah, that's helpful. Yeah. I wanted to save that towards the end because again, for a lot of us just getting started, we don't have just thousands of dollars sitting around to throw at something like Facebook or Instagram ads or TikTok ads. And do you think it takes thousands of dollars to get real results or do you think that people could also start small?
00:23:47
Speaker
I think in general, people should start smaller if they haven't run ads in general, right? Because you want, you can test out a smaller budget and understand and get maybe an idea of what the results are going to be before you throw, again, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in a month at ads, right?
00:24:07
Speaker
So we typically say, you know, being able to spend $50 a day is a good starting point at least, right? Just to really get an understanding of results and then to scale from there. Okay. So we have other episodes on Facebook ads. So feel free to check those out. I think it might be time to just because the advertising landscape has changed so much. Even in the last six months, they have maybe Ryan or Jesse or somebody from Tillon to chat more about that.
00:24:34
Speaker
Anything else you want to mention about getting traffic your way before we wrap up?
Listener Engagement and Episode Wrap-up
00:24:38
Speaker
No, I think that's it. We're about at the 25 minute mark here. So I think for this episode, that's where we should cap it. But if you have questions about this, feel free to send them to us either via email or one of the best ways to get in touch with us is just to send us DM on Instagram. And yeah, this is the boy who doesn't use his phone.
00:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, right. I mean, I won't actually be the one to respond, but Krista and other members of our team will definitely respond. He says this, I'm actually not the best at responding either, but the rest of our team normally sees. Yeah, it will get to us. It will get to us. I think email is always best. Email for sure. Anyways, I hope everybody's doing well. And like I said, feel free to send us your questions. Thanks, guys.
00:25:24
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.