Website traffic basics

This post is an introduction to some website traffic basics.  If you are already working to generate and measure your traffic, this will be a refresher for you.  If you aren’t doing any traffic generation, you’ll learn what you need to do and one place to get started.

First, one of the biggest things to learn about having a website is that you have to work to generate traffic.  Before you have your own site, it’s easy to assume that visitors are automatically finding your site.  In fact, it’s easy not to think about website traffic at all and just put a site up. However without an active plan to generate traffic, it’s likely that your site will get few if any visitors other than those who you refer.  This means that unless people are typing in your site address from a business card or perhaps following a link you posted somewhere like on social media, on a personal blog or in a forum, they probably won’t find your site.  You have to take specific steps to get people other than those you refer to find and visit your site.  This is called traffic generation. Generating traffic is a big topic, and in fact there are people whose expertise is nothing but traffic generation.  You don’t need that level of expertise, but I do recommend that you have a basic understanding of the concept of generating and measuring your website traffic.  Some methods of generating traffic include:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is making your site more likely to be displayed by search engines
• Social media – you can post links and small bits of information that encourage people to visit your site and work to get those links shared
• Paid advertising – you can pay to advertise your site to encourage people to visit

There’s a lot more to be said on the topic of generating traffic, but the main point is that this is something you need to be doing if you want visitors to your site.  If you want a simple way to start getting traffic, I recommend Pinterest right now.  It’s my single biggest source of referral traffic (i.e. people who have gotten to my site by being referred or clicking a link) and it’s not complicated or time-consuming to use.  You do, however, have to use Pinterest correctly to get a good volume of quality traffic.  You can’t just randomly post things and expect results.  If you want to get started with Pinterest, I recommend you watch this webinar I did with Becky Sangha, creator of Business Marketing with Pinterest, and my personal go-to person for Pinterest questions.

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