We’re at the end of this blog series, and where better to end than sharing some of my top traffic sources with you. There have been countless times in my own history of trying to grow an online business where I’ve fallen down flat because – despite all the great opt-in pages, sales pages, blog posts, web design – I just wasn’t getting any traffic. It’s a huge frustration, and if that’s you, then read on. I’ll tell you what has personally worked for me, and what hasn’t worked.
Traffic sources that worked for me
Please note this post may contain affiliate links. Please refer to my disclosure for more information.
Before we start, this is part of my full list building series. If you haven’t done so already, you can read the first 4 blog posts below:
Start with part 1: How to start an email list on your brand new blog
Part 2: How to easily get blog visitors to sign up to your email list
Part 3: How to copy the experts and grow your list twice as fast
And finally, part 4: The best content upgrades for getting new email subscribers
Email list
Ok, so admittedly I told you in my first post that the purpose of an email list is to promote your products and services to that list. Whilst that is your primary purpose, you shouldn’t be selling to your email list all the time. The great thing about promoting a new blog post to your existing audience via email is that these are people who are already fans of your work – that means they are more likely to spend a long time on your site, click onto other pages, and share the content. Google loves that and will reward you for it.
At the time of writing, Pinterest is responsible for about 70-80% of my traffic. It’s that good! Many people mistakingly think Pinterest is a social media platform but it isn’t. It’s a search engine. And once you’ve mastered how to pin consistently and with quality graphics, it’s a really reliable source of high quality traffic.
Organic google traffic
When I first started blogging, I spent a lot of time concentrating on trying to get organic traffic. I built up backlinks, shared my content, optimized my posts and the result was disappointing. I didn’t seem to be making much impact on Google at all. However, traffic started to gradually creep up after about a year. I had thousands of visitors a month to one old post that I had almost forgotten about, and that taught me the key to SEO: patience. It does work, and it’s great at bringing you long term, quality traffic. But you have to give it time and definitely don’t expect overnight results.
Writing high quality posts
Writing high quality posts is without doubt the biggest indicator of whether or not you will get traffic to your blog. I will admit that in the past not all of my posts on this site were great, so I went through the entire site to revamp them. And I can tell you this: when the quality slips, so does the traffic. When you improve the quality of your posts, the traffic goes through the roof.
Twitter has long been a loyal friend when it comes to bringing me traffic, and the great thing about Twitter is that the more you grow your following, the more of an impact your account is going to have on your website in terms of traffic. It’s is also great at helping me to grow my list. I post my landing page on my profile, and direct people to download my freebie. That along brings me consistent sign ups.
I don’t use Instagram to get traffic to my blog, but I use it heavily to drive traffic to my landing page, and to help build my email list. Instagram is fantastic for that. When posting, tell people to go and check out your freebie listed on your profile page, and as your account grows, so will your email sign ups.
Paid traffic (to optin pages)
Paid traffic is in the good and bad column. There’s a reason for that! It has it’s good and bad points, and certainly one of the ways paid traffic has been very good for me is when I’ve used it to build my email list by promoting my freebie and landing page.
Traffic sources that haven’t worked for me
Writing a lot and hoping
I went through a phase of rapid blogging, where I produced endless blog posts that certainly suit the phrase “quantity over quality”. I guess I thought that the more posts I had, the more opportunity people would have to find my blog. It turned out that it did very little. I’ve had far more success when I’ve written one really good post that has gained a lot of traction and a lot of shares.
Posting randomly on social media
You need to be strategic on social media. I do promote my blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, but I also promote other people’s content heavily. If you try and use social media to constantly bombard your audience with links to your blog posts, your success is going to be very limited.
Paid traffic (to blog posts)
Some people swear by using paid traffic (mainly blog posts) to get people to their website, but I have had limited success here. I find it’s much easier to drive people to my blog posts using free traffic and use a retargeting pixel to promote my landing page and get them to sign up to my list.
Guest posting
Well this one is probably controversial, as a lot of people love guest posts. The problem I had with it is that it was a huge amount of effort for very small return. It’s good in the sense that it helps you to build up some nice backlinks (great for SEO) and gives you the opportunity to say you were “featured in” these publications but in terms of traffic? It’s never been great, even when I’ve blogged on really high traffic sites.
Next Steps To Building Your Email List
Sadly, we have come to the end of our 5 part blog series! If you enjoyed it I’d love you to take a few seconds of your time to comment below and tell me what you found useful. If there is something you’d really like to know more about then I’m open to hearing it as I may blog about that in future.
And don’t forget to download your free access to my membership area to get all the free goodies I’ve put together to go with this blog series. There are some great resources in there, such as a fill-in-the-blank landing page, content upgrade ideas, and so much more. Access it here:
Grab Free Access To The List Building Private Members Area>>
Guided article.
I suggest considering affiliate networks, because if you set a suitable budget and add your offer/product in a suitable affiliate network like:
clickdealer, mostcpa,….etc
you will boost your revenue of course.