Here is, by far, one of the most common questions I get:Short of me saying "Just hire Me"
"I just started a new business. How do I get people to my site?"
Another great question from our community... because it's true -- the hardest part about traffic building is getting to your first 1,000 visitors and keeping the momentum going after that.
Today you get your answer. If I started a new site, here's exactly what I would do to get my first 1,000 visitors:
The first thing to understand is there's an easy way and a hard way to jump-start your traffic.
In the old days, your only choice was to take the slow route: build links to get search rankings, grow your prominence on forums, and other things like that. These were and still are good, but they take time.
And I find that, when you're just starting, the key to keeping motivated is to see quick results. And today that is much easier because you've got sites like Facebook and Twitter with millions and MILLIONs of users on them every day.
(Plus, as an added bonus, it is easy to find people in your target market on them, too. Jackpot.)
So the easiest way to 1,000 visitors is by focusing time and energy into building your Twitter and Facebook profile.
With Twitter do the following:
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1. After you create your profile start following other people and companies in your industry.
2. Perform keyword searches on Twitter for keywords related to what you do. Also start following 100 to 200 of those people each day.
3. Start tweeting about topics related to your industry (don't just tweet about things on your website).
4. You'll notice that after a few days 20 to 30% of the people you follow will follow you back. You can start manually unfollowing the people who don't follow you back or if you don't have the time you can use a service like Tweet Adder which can do this for you in an automated fashion.
5. Start participating on Twitter by tweeting at people in your industry and retweeting some of their tweets.
6. At this point you should have been on Twitter for more than 5 days and now you can start tweeting about your company and content. Make sure you aren't doing a hard sell and that 80% of the time you are still tweeting about stuff that isn't related to your company.
FaceBook
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1. Friend thought leaders in your industry. Although a large percentage of the people will not accept your friend request, at least 10% of the thought leaders should.
2. Start engaging with your audience by posting stuff on your wall. The stuff shouldn't be about your company, but more so about industry news and events related to your sector.
3. To create the most engagement post things that are short and during times you think your "target friends" are online.
4. Start commenting on your friends' wall and like messages that you like within your feed.
5. Start asking questions on your wall. These questions should be related to your industry. By asking questions you'll start to see more engagement from your "target friends".
6. After a week of engaging more heavily on Facebook you should start seeing more friend requests. Instead of turning away people you don't know, accept them as they could be a reader or your website or a potential customer of your product/service.
7. At this point you should be posting information about your company 30% of the time. But, again, don't hard sell your product... only do soft pitches.
8. After you spend a month or so building up your Facebook and Twitter presence it shouldn't be hard to get at least a few thousand visitors to your website just from these 2 traffic sources.
And that's all there is to it. It's not rocket science (anyone telling you otherwise is trying real hard to sell you something).
Building on that, the REAL key is to understand how social media fits into your overall traffic strategy.
And that's what I will explain tomorrow.
And let's not forget, If you'd like to be considered to hire me to help you with your online marketing, apply at http://wordofmouyhmarketting.com I'll be selecting a company shortly.
CraigWSeaton@yahoo.com
