The 1st Thing You Need to do to Get Traffic to your Website

What is the 1st thing you need to do to get traffic to your website?  That’s a very important question.

If You Build it, Will They Come?

Abandoned Theme Park

Someone may have told you that “if you build it, they will come.”  How many times have you heard that?  Do  you know that advice is a disaster in the physical world?  I recall seeing a theme park that was built  to attract a ton of visitors and make the owner rich.  Today, that same park is all grown over as the forest creeps in, and few people even know where it is!

If you do a search of abandoned theme or amusement parks on DuckDuckGo, you will discover this has happened in many places on our planet.  Many beautiful or exciting developments have been built, only to fail for lack of traffic.

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Online Traffic

The same thing applies to online traffic as what applies offline.  Just building a gorgeous website will not bring you what you need – eyes on your site looking for what you’re offering.

I know the experts keep telling you your email list is the most important thing there is.  But before anything else will work, before you can even get your first lead on your email list, you have to get traffic to your website.

Free Traffic

You can still get free traffic to your website.  It won’t cost your any money, but it will cost your time.  If you consider time to be money, guess what?  Free traffic to your website isn’t really free.  But that’s up to you to decide.

Blogging & Social Media

The best way to get free traffic to your site initially is by creating a blog and sharing your posts on social media.  This requires two things:

1. You need to write regular blog posts.
2. You need to build your social media presence, especially on Twitter and Facebook.

There are other ways to get free traffic to your website, but they are not nearly as targeted as using social media.  These things are covered on our sister site.  You can use the traffic exchanges as explained on that site, but make sure you follow the instructions very carefully.

This kind of free traffic is not very targeted, unless your site is for people marketing or advertising online.  However, it will give your site a traffic boost that looks good to the search engines.  Combined with blogging and using social media, it works very well.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic can be an excellent way to get traffic to your website.  But you need to be careful.  There are lots of unscrupulous people out there selling really poor quality traffic or worse, bot traffic.  Bot traffic is basically a piece of software that fakes visitors to your website.  This can really hurt you on the search engines.  Google and other big search engines now have excellent AI (artificial intelligence) running constantly that can spot pretty much any kind of fake traffic (traffic that isn’t real people).

Be sure to check any paid traffic source very thoroughly before you make your purchase.  Check for bad reports on the search engines.  Remember that good reports are often written by the site owners or by affiliates.

The safest paid traffic, of course, is traffic you buy from the search engines.  You need to be very certain of your keywords before starting a campaign, or your money will be wasted.  Google is the most expensive source (that I know of), but if you have the right keywords, the visitors you get there will prove to be the best way to get traffic to your website, because it is very targeted.

Drawbacks of Paid Traffic

Unfortunately, even laser-targeted traffic can turn into a dud.  That’s because not only do you need to get traffic to your website; you also need those visitors to turn into buyers.  That’s why you have to do a lot of research before buying traffic on Google.

If you look around, you can find other good places to buy traffic at a lower cost. Try the other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.  They will also give you targeted traffic, but at a lower price than Google.

The Bottom Line

The 1st thing you need to do to get traffic to your website is simply to let the world know you exist. All the listed ideas will get you traffic.  But nothing will get you traffic until you start. So the 1st thing to do to get traffic to your website is to start! Everything after that is just… fine tuning!