How I Increased My Web Traffic by 533% For Less than $10 a Month?
If you are looking for a significant and long-term increase in web traffic then you will want to read every word of this post. If you are reading this blog post then it was the following strategy that brought you here!
My website is a typical website.
I have tried to do the right SEO things and have written quite a bit of original content – about 8 blog posts a month on average – in order to attract visitors and get them to stick around. I have tried a few tricks that have generated huge short-term spikes in traffic but generally the visits to my website are consistent at about 183 visitors a day.
However, I made one simple but significant adjustment a couple of months ago that increased that 183 to 975 visitors a day – instantly!
It was all done using my social media networks.
I have put some energy into building a decent sized social media:
- 9784 LinkedIn Connections
- 11654 Twitter Followers (on two accounts)
- 1068 Friends on my personal Facebook page
- 1532 Followers on my Business Facebook page
- Plus a Google + page and a LinkedIn Company Page
This may seem like a lot and it has taken some time, however, there are some serious shortcuts and anyone can build a similar network in 2-3 months – really!
I have also made use of Hootsuite to automatically schedule my posts. In the past, I would use the auto-post feature to schedule about 8 posts a day (most containing a link to a blog post on my website] on each of five social networks. The free version of Hootsuite allows posting automatically to maximum of 5 social media accounts. Basically, I used and reused my content to drive traffic to my website.
Now, here is the big change that increased web traffic.
I upgraded from a free Hootsuite account to a paid account (US$9.99 month) and connected 11 Networks (up from 5). Then I used the bulk upload feature to increase the number of posts from about 8 a day to 3 every hour – 24 hours a day. This is an increase from 8 posts a day to 72 posts per day – spread evenly throughout the day.
In addition to my main business of sales recruitment, I sell self-study sales programs on my website with an international market it made sense to post 24 hours a day. Also, research suggests that although fewer people are on the web in the early hours of the morning and late at night that those who are tend to click-through at a higher rate making them a good audience. I tested different levels of postings but 6 per hour (every 20 minutes) got the best and most consistent results.
Did this take a lot of time?
Not really, with Hootsuite’s bulk upload tool I spent a few hours setting it up and then just reload the content, which takes about 10 minutes a day.
Wallpaper!
Remember all social media feeds are like wallpaper – they just move along in the background and people pay attention to what they want, when they want. It is because of this that getting noticed requires a lot more activity than most would imagine. If someone spends 20 minutes a day on Twitter or LinkedIn what is your chance of even getting on the radar?
Risk?
Of course, depending on the size of my connection’s network the number of posts may overwhelm so it is important to monitor overall activity and changes in followers and of course changes to website hits. Just like paid advertising – too much is a bad as too little.
Testing
I tested a progressive number of posts and for my network posting every twenty minutes seems to be optimum. This will, I expect, change overtime but the main lesson for me here was that social media activity had to been significantly higher than I ever imagined in order to get the kind of results I wanted. I would recommend that you steadily increase the volume until you begin to see diminishing returns.
Results
Of course traffic is not just traffic for traffic sake but with the hope of increasing business. To date the number of inquiries and number of courses sold have about doubled. This is not equivalent to the increase in traffic but that may come in time. Also, it may mean that my website needs to become more ‘sticky’ or that I need to create more compelling ‘call to action.’
Overall, I am pleased!
If you want some of my real secrets on how to build a powerful social media network take a look here!
Web traffic Increase