The Fastest Way to Build Traffic and an Audience for Your New Website

Starting a new website is a lot of work. Trust me, I know. Writing content can take a lot of time and energy but the most difficult process of all is to actually build a regular audience.

We all want visitors streaming into the site from early on but unfortunately, things don’t always unfold according to our expectations.

Traffic building can take a tremendous amount of effort but you should know that whatever traffic building efforts you’ve done serves as a foundation for future marketing or monetization plans.

When building traffic, you can learn from your personal experiences and discern what’s works or what doesn’t. Every single visitor to your website at this stage is likely to become a part of your regular audience.

People are by far the most valuable assets you can accumulate.

3 Step Traffic Building Tactic for New Websites

I’m quite familiar with the process of building traffic for new websites as I’ve recently launched quite a few of them myself. Having experimented with a fairly large number of marketing tactics, I’ve finally settled upon a formula which I’ve been using rather consistently.

In my opinion, this is the fastest and most powerful way to build a new website from the ground up. There are plenty of ways to generate traffic but it’s important to develop a streamlined process that gives you the maximum amount of returns for your efforts.

Ideally, you want a method that you not only get you some traffic but links as well. Traffic can be converted in regular visitors and links are absolutely necessary to tell Google or other search engines that your new website exists or is important.

The following three steps are intended for new web sites but they can be just as effectively used for more established sites.

Step One: Set up a Bait.

Think of a bait as an attractive value proposition. One that that appeals to your target audience and is unique enough to stand out. A bait can also take the form of some incentive for the new visitor and should be concurrently intriguing or tempting. The bait should also represent your site in the best possible light.

Your bait should not be a one-off deal as you don’t want visitors disappearing and not coming back. At the very least, you should promote some recurring behavior on their end. This can take the form of a feed or email subscription or an introduction to other products/content/webpages of your website.

Here are some examples of bait you can set up for your website:

• Well written and original article
• Contests or Awards
• On-site web tool or application
• An interview with a notable personality
• An industry-specific ranking list
• Free items and resources
• Free gifts, discount bundles or deals
• Widgets for a community

Step Two: Send traffic towards the bait.

After you’ve set up the bait, you’ll need to promote it extensively. The aim here is to get as many people to view your bait as possible through a variety of marketing methods. The ultimate purpose of this is to spread awareness of your website and achieve your specific goals.

Before you start to generate any traffic to your bait, you’ll need to first decide what you want to gain from the traffic. Do you want to build your email or subscriber list? Or are you primarily looking to build links above everything else? You’ll need to optimize your website so that the traffic you receive will help you achieve your goals.

Here are some ways and sources you can use to send traffic towards your bait:

• Social media websites (networking/voting/news community sites)
• Niche forums and bulletin boards
• Emails to bloggers or webmasters in your niche.
• Payperclick advertising for your website
• Purchasing ads on well-trafficked and relevant websites
• Submission of articles to article directories and industry journals/other blogs

Step Three: Build a Community and Repeat.

After you’ve sufficiently promoted your bait, allocate some time to interact with your audience and produce follow-up content that fits their expectations and needs.

Write specific articles or produce content that is similar to your bait. The goal here is to immediately build a community around your website. It doesn’t matter how small your community is at this initial stage.

Analyze how your audience interacts with your site and responds to your bait. After a period of time, create a new piece of bait and try to target new audiences through the two steps above.

In my opinion, the development ratio for a new blog should be a 30% focus on content with a 70% focus on marketing and traffic growth. You can write your heart out and create a stunning masterpiece but if no one is going to see it, it is virtually impotent. You’re not making money nor building an readership.

Understanding the Value of Traffic for New Websites

Most sites have slow growth rates and some of them end up languishing in the sewers of the internet, abandoned by their exasperated owners. Know very clearly that a regular audience and web traffic not only allows you to make money from your website/business but motivates you to keep it alive.

Don’t underestimate the tangible pressure you feel when hundreds or thousands of visitors expect to read a new blog post or see a new website update. It makes it so very much harder to go bust and much easier to succeed.

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