Last week I wrote about the importance of creating a website that will help you generate leads. This includes having a professional design, contact information such as your company phone number being highly visible, and offering information of highly perceived value to your targeted visitors which will invite them to give you permission to market to them. (More about email marketing later in this series.)

For part two of this series we address how to drive traffic to your professionally designed website. Having a website is one thing. Attracting visitors to it is another. Attracting visitors is important because in doing so, based on having your site built with proper conversions in mind, traffic becomes leads and paying customers. There is a point to all this effort and investment and it boils down to generating new business whether you are selling a service or products.
Before sharing the three broad categories of traffic to your site, it’s important to know that signing up for Google Analytics is our favorite way of tracking our progress when it comes to traffic.  The tool is free and you can sign up for it once you have an account with Google by going to Google Analytics.

When looking at your Google Analytics report you will see that there are three sources of traffic in the Traffic Sources Overview section of the report.

1. Referring Sites. People who learn about you by visiting other sites become interested enough to visit your site. Examples of this for us include Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, YoungEntrepreneur, and others where we publish our content such as blog posts, articles, forum posts, etc.

2. Direct Traffic. People who know about your site choose to visit it directly. They might see your site address on your business card, an advertisement, or anything that tells them your site address. Direct traffic can also be purchased through advertising campaigns such as Google Adwords.

3. Search Engine. People are searching for a business like yours on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Alta Vista and smaller search engines as well. Search engine traffic can come from organic rankings and also be purchased through advertising campaigns such as Google Adwords.

Knowing this the next question on your mind is how in the heck do you get people to find your website. Here are the primary strategies we use for our clients and ourselves.

1. We actively participate in communities that attract our ideal clients, namely entrepreneurs, professionals, and business owners. Yes, it’s is essential to identify your ideal client so that you do the same. We publish several blogs, we participate in web forums, we post comments on other people’s blogs, we publish and distribute articles of interest to our prospective clients, and we regularly participate in targeted social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

2. We network in the community, do some direct mail, make outbound sales calls to businesses and earn permission to send email follow up, and we conduct public relations campaigns. These activities let prospective clients know who we are and how to find out more about us. They learn about us and go to our website to find out more.

3. To get the search engines to find us we register our site with the search engines directly. First, we build our site leveraging the fundamentals of site design that many people miss such as correct title tags.  Most importantly, we craft our site to include the keyword phrases that will target the kinds of people we want to find our site, namely entrepreneurs and professionals. I could write for hours on the specifics of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Suffice it to say that this is part art and part science and a very specialized skill set we offer to our clients.

Many of you may be wondering where you will find the time to conduct all this activity. The short answer is that you need to start with a focused effort such as having a blog integrated with your site, one or two primary social networks in which to participate, and several online communities or publications to participate in that also attract your ideal client or customer. In this regard, you must block a certain amount of time each day or week to conduct these activities. Look at it like you would any other networking event such as chamber of commerce meetings and other community groups that you attend regularly.

It is also important to note that the more you give the more you get. You must actively participate and be consistent to get noticed and attract visitors to your site. Building traffic to your website won’t happen overnight unless you decide to invest in paid advertising such as Google Adwords. Even that requires testing and making adjustments based on results. Creating traffic takes time. It requires effective search engine marketing and search engine optimization. And you must measure results each week leveraging Google Analytics. Like any other form of marketing, converting visitors to leads and paying customers requires testing various offerings. We give away an eBook right now entitled, “The Art of Business Development.” This will change as we write new content and make it available in the form of white papers, special reports, etc. By offering free information of interest, we earn permission to follow up.

In closing, here’s an easy way to learn by doing. You will notice that you received our newsletter with only part of the article or blog post included. Our intention is to bring you to our blog. Now that you’ve read the blog you are participating in what is becoming a growing community of entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners. You’ve read the entire article. Now, please take a few minutes to post a thoughtful and relevant comment that would be useful for many of the readers in this community. We will approve your post and you will have left a “digital” imprint in an online community. Do this as much as you can to become visible online and draw traffic to your site.

Next week in Part 3 of this series we will address strategies that will help you convert more of your visitors to “opt in” to your world whereby you convert visitors to leads and paying customers.

Clifford Jones, Founder
WealthNet Partners, LLC
“Discover The Art of Business Development”
Scottsdale, Arizona
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