If you’re on top of online marketing for your business, then chances are you’ve put up a website, a blog, a Facebook business page, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, and you send out regular emails to your mailing list. Maybe you even do more than that!
Is it working? Are you driving lots of traffic your way and making lots of sales?
Or not so much?
It could be that you’ve bought the car, so to speak, but failed to keep air in the tires and oil in the crankcase. Periodically, you’ve got to take that machine in to check the tire pressure and give it a tune-up!
Here’s a 10-Point Checklist for tuning up your own web traffic-driving machine:
1. Simplicity of Home Page Design
The word in web design now is simplicity. Make sure your home page is super clear and leads to one Call to Action, such as signing up for your mailing list. Don’t try to cram lots of pictures and text here – make it easy for your first-time visitor to understand the product or benefit you provide, who you are, and what’s special about you.
2. Blogging – Regularly
Blogging is more important than ever in driving traffic to your website. If you don’t blog at least once a week, step it up. If you have trouble coming up with content, google your most relevant keywords, find articles that would be of interest to your followers, and use them as resources for your own posts – or mention the articles and give hotlinks.
3. Facebook Business Page Activity Level
You should post an update to your Facebook business page at least weekly. The easiest way to do this is to post an excerpt or teaser for your latest blog post. You can even install an application that will post an excerpt for you, whenever you blog.
4. Facebook “Like” Builders
An alternate reveal tab with an inducement to “Like” your page in order to see the alternate view, or a Facebook ad campaign can both drive up Likers for your Facebook page, giving you a wider audience to promote your blog and website and drive traffic your way.
5. Twitter Action
You should be tweeting regularly – at least twice a day. Learn and use scheduling tools such as Twaitter or Hootsuite to help streamline this task.
6. Back-End Web Stuff
Check the “back end” of your website to make sure that search engine optimization best practices are being followed. Does every image have alt text? Have you customized meta data for each page? Does your site use “pretty permalinks?” If you don’t understand how to do these things, find a service that will check and correct these items for you. (Publicity Pros does a Website Analysis for $295, and will custom-quote you on fixes that are needed. Or, you can learn how to do scores of checks and fixes at WebTraffic-123 for a one-time lifetime membership fee of $297.)
7. LinkedIn Action
LinkedIn has been a powerful online networking presence for quite awhile, and you should have a profile posted on this free service. But don’t stop there. Search out groups that appeal to your potential customer or client, join up, and participate in discussions to make yourself known. We’ve seen a lot of new movement on this site, most likely in an effort to compete with Facebook. Lots of new features have cropped up. Check them out and take advantage of them.
8. Email – Do You Do It Regularly?
Email is a great way to communicate in a more modest, calm, and personal way than some of the other outreach methods available. Make sure you’re doing all you can to collect new subscribers to your mailing list, and reach out to them once or twice a month with valuable information and/or offers. Oh, and the word these days is that plain-looking emails have better open and click-through rates than fancy designed ones, so tone down your design if it’s been really splashy, and see if you get better open rates.
9. Two-Way Communication
This is perhaps the trickiest part of outreach, because two-way communication such as sending and responding to Twitter direct messages, blog comments, and visitor’s updates on your Facebook pages takes diligence and a willingness to listen. You can’t automate this feature. The great thing is, it’s real communication, and can be the most satisfying aspect of social media activities, once you get the hang of it.
10. Guest Blogging
As with blogging, guest blogging is a great driver of web traffic, both for the organic “drive” that happens when someone reads your blog and clicks through to your site, and for the enhanced site ranking that Alexa and Google and other rating systems give your site when you have more backlinks. Search out and contribute to blogs that relate to your business or market.
Good one Ann. I’m about to do a redesign of my web site.