Tomorrow I’m giving a talk entitled 25 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website at a Center for Nonprofit Success workshop here in Seattle. I have the privilege to give the presentation alongside Jen Travis, the VP of Online Brand Experience at Parker LePla. I’ve given this same talk several times. I didn’t pick the title, but I see how conference organizers like this title. Everyone wants to improve traffic to their website and a list is a tempting way to present the information. Just follow these 25 steps for increasing website traffic. Of course when you look at it that way there are twice as many steps to increasing web traffic as there are to recovering from alcoholism. Twelve Steps is hard enough, forget about 25. The problem is that I can give a list of tips like “Use Key Words in Blog Posts,” or “Include a short URL to your website in Tweets.” I can come up with a list of one hundred and twenty-five tips like that. Or I can give a list like:
- Write a blog
- Key Word Strategy
- SEO
- Inbound Links
- Valuable Content…etc.
This is pretty much what I did in the past but each point is kind of broad. If you want to see the list read the blog 25 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website or you can download the slides here. The problem with this approach is that you really don’t have an opportunity to do more then give the list. I usually have about two minutes per item and I could spend hours on each topic. A list like this also tends to spread out the importance of each item. In this way “setting up your Twitter account” gets the same emphasis as “developing your SEO strategy.” It also tends to overwhelm some people who look at a list like this and think, “I don’t even know what an SEO is and that’s at the top of the list. Why even bother tweeting with bad SEO?”
The Umbrella of Online Marketing Tips
Lists also give the impression that items are separate. On the TV Series Mad Men someone could say, “Let’s concentrate on TV ads,” or “Let’s put everything into radio.” For online marketing you really cannot say, “Let’s put all our efforts into Twitter and not bother about landing pages.” Everything is so interrelated that a lot of effort in Twitter will have little effect if your website does not have a landing page. It does not mean that everything is equal, just that everything is related. What is done in one area will have an effect in another area. Online marketing is like an umbrella that covers a lot of different activities. Some activities are more important and will have a greater value than others, but they are all covered and all related.
For some statistics on what does drive web traffic download my newest eBook based on studies done by HubSpot: Lead Generation Lessons eBook
For a detailed guide on internet marketing download my eBook: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing.
photo credit: Heart Unlimited
