Part of growing your funnel could be growing the traffic to your website but for many people that could be on the decline. There could be numerous reasons for that but I wanted to write about a few and come up with some solutions to help increase website traffic and increase the funnel.
Earlier this weekend I received an email from a client I just started to work with that said that traffic has gradually decreased over the last few years an to give any tips on how to get it back to how it was.
The first thing to remember is that traffic has to some degree decreased for everyone (or at least how people are consuming content). This could be because people are natively reading content on different platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Medium) and their goal is to keep people their (especially Facebook). This alone has made it more difficult to get and keep people on your website. Generally speaking, the thing to keep in mind is that you want to build and grow your audience and not be as focused on your your traffic.
The next thing to remember is that people's attention spans have decreased dramatically to the point where you must provide tremendous value within the first 3-5 seconds to get people to take action. That value must be demonstrated again and again and again… Remember, why am I going to spend time doing this when I can literally do anything else.
Lastly, remember how much more crowded it is online. There are so many more Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for business owners than there were 4-5 years ago. This is part of the reason for the change in organic outreach for business pages. It's simply more crowded online. What you want to keep in mind is that those keywords that you were targeting are not probably being competed on by 10 times the domains (because businesses can have more than one) than they were in the past. Also, going back to the attention span, people largely don't have the attention they used to because their is so much competition for that time.
How to combat some of these things…
- Simply stated increase your activity. Blog more, repurpose your content, use social media more, send out a newsletter, engage with people more–online and offline. I'm very bullish on blogging because I think it's one of the best ways to draw people to your website (or domain). If your traffic is down, take a look at how much or how often you are blogging. Also, look to attack the long tail ferociously because chances are on a local level, most people aren't and that's an opportunity. Not to mention it helps with SEO.
- Provide tremendous value. Value can be within these categories – making someone laugh, escape or improve their efficiency.
- Build that list – This overlaps with number 1 but if you don't have people you can reach out to and engage with (in other words your funnel is tiny) how do you expect to get a lot of traffic. Focus on growing that list. This could be your Facebook likes, e-mail list (I think this is most important) or mailing list but build your opportunities (right hook) and have a good process and everything will rise.
- Be different – Sometimes breaking through the noise is as simple as doing something different. Take a look at your competition. Don't mimick them or copy them. Blaze your own trail. I'm real bullish on Media Companies (one of the reasons for Blue 16 Media). it's the way that everything is headed. Take a look at Open Forum. I think they did it the best. They created so much content and an entire community around business owners and entrepreneurs. Think about your target market and create that same community. But don't just post expect people to come through the door. Engage and provide tremendous value.
Basically remember that it's a privilege to have people come to your site and engage with what you are creating or posting. It's the same as someone coming to your house, you clean up, you ask them if they are okay 100 times, you might cook (or order out) or clean because you want to make sure it is a good experience. You website is the same. How are you improving someone's life and how are you showing them that? It doesn't just happen. It takes work and takes time.