How Online Businesses Can Increase Their Website Traffic

On today's episode we talk about:

• Creating content, specifically blogging
• Optimizing content for discovery and shareability
• Growing and using your email list

Aaron: [00:00:16] Hey,guys. Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Natives. Today we're going totalk about online businesses, something that we're super passionate about, andhow to increase the website traffic. A few things we're going to cover arecontent, creating more content, and then throwing in some advertising or somepaid traffic to send traffic to that. That's a lot of traffic words, buttraffic to the website.

Christian: [00:00:41] Yeah.The main thing here is I feel like we're going to focus a lot on content, andwe feel like content plays a huge role in how much traffic you get on yourwebsite. And we have firsthand experience with this.

Aaron: [00:00:57] Iwas going to say we were just literally looking up our search rankings for thingsand where we were at before the beginning of this year to where we're at now. Ithink a big part of that has to do with the podcasts and us blogging too.

Christian: [00:01:11] Andthat brings us to our very first point which is blogging as part of ourcontent. Now we're going to talk about blogging, but we're also- Within thisnumber one point that we're going to talk about, it's also either creating apodcast. You know, if you have a newsletter, you can put your newsletter onyour website. Creating a forum on your website. I feel like the main thing hereis creating, you know, adding those words to your website in order to have morepeople find you.

Aaron: [00:01:44] Right.I think. I don't know. It's something that's so underrated. So we just had- justa little backstory. We just launched another website yesterday. We designwebsites for those who are new to listening to the podcast, and we launched.And I was telling Christian that she has a website, but I mean, she has-there's no way you just, like, launch a website and you get traffic there.We're currently not helping her with any, like, content strategies or, like,search engine strategies or anything like that. She has a website and herthought was, hey, I told my friends about this business, but they can't find meon Google. Why is that? So there's so much more out there, and a lot of peoplethink that you can just put something up there and you're just going to get abunch of traffic. And something that we hear from a lot of business owners rightnow is that, you know, I just don't have enough people coming to my site.

Christian: [00:02:36] Yep.And I think actually this just sparked another idea in my head because we just-last week's episode we were talking about reviews, and reviews also play a hugerole on your search rankings on your business. So on Google and Yahoo and allthat. So the more positive reviews that you have, the higher you're going to beon search rankings. So that also plays a huge role on your website traffic and,you know, how many visitors you get per month.

Aaron: [00:03:08] Allright. So jumping into the blogging part, we kind of took a, let's just say, aleft turn. We're going back right to the blog here. And this does seem obvious,but you have to have content on your website. Google searches, and they scroll,and you've heard the word crawl your website based off the content that youhave. So the more words, the more verbiage you have on a particular topic isgoing to help you, but you have to actually write it and you have to beconsistent about it. We suggest at least once a month, and most of the time,all you need to do is write natively. So what I mean by that is just write whatyou're passionate about, what you what your topics are depending on how bigyour business is. If you are the business owner and you're doing everything,you probably know what you need to talk about and just write about that.There's no reason to look for those keywords and all that stuff. We're justsaying to create content. That's it.

Christian: [00:04:07] Andthen yeah, going back, you know, we're talking about blogs, but if you thinkthat blogs are going to take you too long to write then create a podcast. Youdon't have to have super fancy equipment, but just, you know, sit down andstart talking about whatever topic you want to talk about. And then anothergreat way to have those keywords on your website with the podcast is to havethe transcriptions. Right now we're using a software called Trent. You cancheck them out at trent.com. No affiliation whatsoever, but hollah. And theyautomatically transcribe-

Aaron: [00:04:39] Ifeel like we should do hollahs like whenever we shout out to a business that'sa hollah.

Christian: [00:04:43] Yeah.We need a hollah button. But yeah, I mean, it automatically, you know,transcribes our podcast, and we add those to our website. And we've seen a hugeincrease on, you know, people- actually on keywords on search rankings forthings that we didn't even think were-

Aaron: [00:05:03] Yeah,we're ranking for pilot. Like people- I guess, people search seven hundredtimes a month for why is the first episode in something like a TV series or apodcast called a pilot? And we rank for that now. So sometimes it's notrelevant at all, but we are putting out a lot more content, and you've got tothink of the, like Christian said, the transcriptions. We consider that like ablog now. So each week that we're put out a podcast, we're basically writing ablog each week, and luckily we don't have to write it. We're just speaking it.

Christian: [00:05:34] Yep.Exactly. So there's blogs, there's podcasts, and then there's also videos. Youcan start doing just video vlogs on YouTube and then grabbing those YouTubevideos and embedding them on your website and then just have a little paragraphdescribing, you know, what you're talking about. You don't have to have a fulltranscription. If you can, you can do that, but just have a quick summary ofwhat you're talking about in that video and post it sort of as a blog post onyour website. And that will increase also your traffic.

Aaron: [00:06:03] SoI guess this first one is blog, but really we're saying find what you'repassionate about, so whether it's audio, whether it's video, whether it'swritten, that you can consistently keep up with and create content that youraudience wants to know about. This may sound completely obvious, but find themarket that you're in and then just ask those people if you can get in front ofthem like at Facebook group or something and asked them what do they want tosee more of? And then write content about that. It's very simple.

Christian: [00:06:36] Sothe next thing that we have here is, you know, once you figure out what exactlyyou want to do, then you want to optimize that content for one, share-abilityand two, discovery. So to some extent, you have to do a little bit of researchand figure out, you know, what are people searching for? What's going to makepeople share it on social media? Basically, those are the two main things, butright now I have a website and we're going to put this link in the description.So you have to go to our website, look for this podcast, and look in thedescription, and we'll have these links in there. One that we use for some ofour blog posts-

Aaron: [00:07:14] What'sthe website though? They may not know that.

Christian: [00:07:16] Yeah,I'm going to talk about it.

Aaron: [00:07:17] OK.Good.

Christian: [00:07:20] Onewebsite that we use for, you know, headlines for our blog posts and ourpodcast, it's from coschedule.com, and they have a headline analyzer. Andbasically, just, you know, you type in your headline and you analyze it, and itgives you sort of, you know, your word balance. It gives you the lengthanalysis, how many characters you're using, and how many words you are using.If it's a positive or it's a negative or if it's just a neutral headline, andit gives you sort of better ideas on how to write the best headlines.

Aaron: [00:07:54] WhatI like about it is that gives you percentages. So like you said, it tells youlike you're getting better, or like you know, you're getting worse. Whatever,and whether or not it's going to relate to your audience or, you know, issearchable.

Christian: [00:08:07] Yeah.Another another huge website, it's buzzsumo.com.

Aaron: [00:08:11] Iwas going to mention that one.

Christian: [00:08:12] Andwith BuzzSumo you can- this is more for, you know, to figure out what peopleare sharing, see what people are looking for, but I'm also going to put down alink for a blog post that they came up with. And the title of it is "WeAnalyzed 100 Million Headlines and Here's What We Learned," and it's justbasically straight up research on what makes people share on social media andall that. So a lot of the things has to do with emotional. Emotional contentmakes people just share things. Some of the most popular things or the topheadline phrases is "Will Make You." So something like "24Pictures That Will Make You Feel Better About the World." It's going tohave, you know, a 10x on share ability compared to something else.

Aaron: [00:09:06] Right.We could have done this one as "How Online Business Owners-" Well.Never mind. I can't think of it. I was trying to think of something off the topof my head. We'll say, "How We'll Make You the Best Online Business OwnerEver." I don't know. Anyway, that's good. I like the 24 pictures becauseit makes me really want to click on it now.

Christian: [00:09:23] Right.Yeah. And especially if they share just one or two images, and you're likeokay, I want to see more.

Aaron: [00:09:28] Right.Yeah. Or "Number Three is Insane."

Christian: [00:09:30] Right.Yeah.

Aaron: [00:09:32] SoI think that's a great segue into social media which is our next point which isto find a social platform. I guess we're speaking more to business owners whoare just starting up, but this is relevant for most businesses. And that is tofind a platform that your audience is on and create that great content that youhave on your website. Put it on social media as well and drive that traffic onyour social media platforms to your website. If you do a great job on socialmedia, it can be a good, I would say, 20 to 30 percent of your traffic sourcecoming from social media to your website if you do it correctly. What a badpractice is grabbing a blog post from somewhere else like Entrepreneur Magazineor Online Sales or something and sharing that two or three times a week andthinking that you're going to get traffic. So do some research on what's goodto post on social media. Be authentic, and when you do that you'll drive a lotof traffic to your website.

Christian: [00:10:29] Yep.Now speaking of social media, something that someone a long time ago put into perspectiveto me was that, you know, you don't own your social media pages. You don't ownyour Twitter account. You don't own LinkedIn. All of these things coulddisappear tomorrow, and you'll be left with absolutely nothing. Your website isthe only thing that you own, but besides that you also own your e-mail list.Your e-mail list is something that it's yours, and if you've worked hard ongrowing this organically and using the right methods, the email is somethingthat it's very powerful and it's probably one of the most important marketingassets that a company can have.

Aaron: [00:11:11] Right.I think what is the dollar amount to it? I think that each person on youre-mail list is worth at least a hundred dollars or something like that over thelifetime value of your customers. 100 dollars or a thousand. I don't remember,but either way you can see how having a thousand email subscribers, that easilyadds up and that's somebody who's dedicated. It's somebody who's going to go toyour website, somebody who's going to read your newsletter, and you controlwhen it goes out. So that's really valuable.

Christian: [00:11:38] Yeah.And I know Aaron just mentioned newsletter, but you know, doing a weeklynewsletter or a monthly newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with yourcurrent e-mail list. But there are numerous ways that, you know, you can reachout to your email list. You can do it even, you know, every time you send out anew blog post. You know, send out an e-mail. Maybe you haven't had a purchasefrom a certain group of clients, and you want them to make another purchase.Incentivize them to come back to your website and make a purchase.

Aaron: [00:12:14] Right.I was going off something else there, but the e-mail list, absolutelyimportant. And I think that these are all- we'll kind of separate these on ourshow notes here which is, you know, like the free options, content creation,going more the social route, and then our last thing here is to go the paidroute which is like ad campaigns and search engine optimization like SEO,paying services like that. Those are great routes to get traffic to yourwebsite, but the content, your social media, all of that needs to be goodbefore you go the ad platform route. Otherwise you're going to spend a lot moremoney. To tell you the difference between having, like, a good social platformand not having one is about 60 to 70 percent more in payment. So for example,the ad platform, something I understand pretty well, and when you're running acampaign, if somebody has a good following or a good amount of people whoengage with their audience, they're going to pay 70 percent less in advertisingthan somebody who doesn't. And that's just because they actually have a brand,and the platforms like to make sure that it's a good user experience. And so ifyou want to push out a bunch dollars, you can, but it's going to cost you a lotmore money to reach those people than if you had a good following already.

Christian: [00:13:35] Yeah.And going back to the content part, you know, you can spend all this moneytrying to get people to your website, but you know, if you don't have thecontent for it then people are just going to leave. I mean, they're not goingto stick around. They're not going to share your content because you don't haveanything on your website. So going back, content is king, and content, youknow, should be your number one priority when you're trying to increase yourwebsite traffic.

Aaron: [00:13:56] Yeah.It'll just make everything easier. All right. We dropped a lot of informationon this episode, probably more than we have on any other episode in the past.So make sure that you not only listen, but go over to our website. Check thatout and read through this because I think you can also learn a lot by readingthe transcriptions and what's going on and also check out those links thatChristian shared. But if you guys could do us a favor and make sure to clickthat subscribe button. If you're driving, don't do that while you're driving. Makesure you stop and click that subscribe button, and then click that button inthe right hand corner and click share. There's a ton of people startingbusinesses right now, and if you share this with somebody who's looking tostart a business or has already started one, this will help them. And as alwaysif you guys have any questions, we're over on Twitter @BitBranding, and we'llbe happy to answer them.

Christian:[00:14:46] Yep.Hollah