We all follow very successful blogs and YouTube channels, sites with such a large audience that they have been able to make a living from this activity; in some cases, even become millionaires.
It’s no wonder that nowadays young people dream of becoming successful YouTubers and many others of making a living from online entrepreneurship.
It’s fun, it has a certain “glamour”, it gives you independence, you can start from home, with practically no money, without having to quit your job and you can make a lot of money, as evidenced by the numerous success stories we already have in Spain and Latin America.
How can something like this not be really attractive?
But in the vast majority of cases, the initial enthusiasm quickly gives way to growing frustration when these young (and not so young) online entrepreneurs, after months and months, come face to face with the reality that they don’t even get visits to their website.
Is it too late to start? Is there already too much competition?
Many of them hastily reach the erroneous conclusion that yes, they believe that the cake has already been eaten by others and they abandon prematurely a good project that could have been very successful, if they had taken the right steps.
Yes, there are more and more websites and yes, it is increasingly difficult to get visibility. But that does not mean that it is not possible to create a project from scratch and, after a reasonable time, have a great visibility.
The crux of the matter, once again, is to know what strategies and techniques are necessary to achieve it.
These strategies and techniques exist and work and in this post I will show you which ones and how to use them.
3 Previous “basic hygiene” measures without which you will go nowhere
Before going into these strategies and techniques I’m referring to, we have to lay some foundations that you need to be crystal clear about.
Create quality content
One of the consequences of the creation of so many websites in recent years is that in almost every subject there is competition and, in many of them, a lot of competition.
Years ago, there was so much demand and so little supply of good content that it was easy to get by with low-quality content to gain visibility.
This is no longer the case today. Forget about getting visibility and success with bad or mediocre content. You’re not going to get it.
People are used to quickly get some quality content about almost anything with a simple click of a mouse, and they leave the content that is not up to par.
Offering a good user experience on your website
Google has also improved so much in recent years that it knows how to detect and interpret user behavior. Or what amounts to the same thing: it knows how to understand the user experience offered by a given web page.
Keep in mind that Google seeks to offer the best results to its users. For this reason, user experience has become a fundamental web positioning factor. For this same reason, bad contents, normally, are no longer positioned.
In any case, it is important to understand that the concept of user experience goes beyond content quality. Everything that negatively influences this experience counts.
For example: if a website has a horrible design or is very slow and this ends up scaring users away, it will have similar negative effects as bad content in search results.
Always keep this in mind.
Create a mailing list and capture subscribers
As we already know, it costs a lot to get visits for a website, even more so when it comes to young websites that Google still considers unreliable (technically, with little authority).
Therefore, you should try to get the most out of these valuable visits and the best way to do this is to get them on a mailing list.
Then, a little further down, we will come back to the subject, see why this is so and how to implement this issue.
Getting web traffic: What are the ways to attract visitors and how do they differ?
There are many strategies to attract traffic to a website, some at no cost, others require some investment. On the other hand, not all of them work the same for all types of websites.
Below, I will summarize the most important ones. I will even go deeper into some of them with their own section.
- Getting web visitors with organic traffic
The biggest source of web traffic in the world is Google, a massive traffic for which, in addition, you do not have to pay, it is 100% free.
To get a more concrete idea of what we are talking about, let’s make a small estimate of the economic value of this traffic for a website:
Nowadays, there are already not few websites that exceed 100,000 visits from search engines per month (Citizen 2.0, for example, here you have the figures).
In these ranges of traffic, normally, we are talking about sites well positioned in Google where it is quite common that 80% or more of that traffic comes from searches.
Let’s now make a comparison with what it would cost to get this traffic through online advertising:
For this I am going to use cost per click (CPC), the most common formula. A reasonable average cost for this exercise (it varies a lot depending on the niche in question) can be 10 euro cents. It is a fairly cheap cost for the prices that, depending on the niche, can be managed.
With this average cost, obtaining 100,000 visits would cost us 10,000€. Therefore, if you manage to position yourself well in Google reaching these levels of traffic, Google would be “giving you in kind” a traffic worth 10.000€, month after month, every month!
Almost nothing, right?
I hope that with this any doubts about the importance of learning how to rank in Google have been dispelled. We will go deeper into SEO in a section of our own a little further down in this post.
- Attracting visitors to your website with email marketing (getting subscribers)
It has already been repeated ad nauseam, but it is so important that I never tire of repeating it: a good mailing list is essential to have a quality audience and grow your blog.
The reason is simple: the highest quality readers, the ones who share your content the most, the ones most likely to buy a product from you, etc. will come from your mailing list.
In addition, you have their contact (their “lead” in marketing jargon). And that means that now you can contact them whenever you want, with all that this also means for possible commercial actions that you want to carry out.
But be careful, the latter will only work under two fundamental conditions:
That you work on a good relationship with them (via the contents of your mailing list).
That your commercial actions are aligned with those contents (with the interests of the people on your list).
But there’s more: it’s not the same to have your followers on a third-party platform (Instagram, YouTube, etc.) than on your own mailing list.
In the first case, you don’t have the direct contact, but you do have it in your own mailing list. That means that the contact is controlled by the platform, not you.
What does this mean?
Well, your followers are not real contacts, your possibilities of contacting them are very limited. The platform decides what you can and cannot do.
In addition, as we will see below, practically all social networks and YouTube severely limit the reach of their publications, so they only reach a fraction of your followers.
So you should work on turning your followers into your own, on bringing them to your own website with your own mailing list.
- Generate web traffic with social networks
Social networks are, within the free options, surely the most important channel when you start with a new site.
That’s why I recommend, as a general rule, that you have your accounts at least in: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. If your content is quite visual, consider Pinterest as well.
That said, if you start with this, your problem will generally be having little or no followers on your own social media accounts. Therefore, your outreach capability will be close to zero.
To counteract this, here’s a trick: focus on groups (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). They are a small gold mine, because in many of them you will find thousands of people. Just do it right, don’t be a spammer.
Post with due caution, spread quality stuff (not just your own content) that fits in with the group in question and have a bit of a social life in those groups. That will make you a lot less spammy and build the trust you need to get results. Otherwise, you will probably be seen as just another spammer.
Now, I don’t want to raise false expectations.
Nowadays, the return on the work you invest in social networks (if the process is not automated or you already have a very loyal audience) is very low.
One of the main reasons why this is so are the cuts in organic reach that practically all social networks have carried out, along with a certain saturation effect.
On Facebook, for example, it has gone from the original 100% to a ridiculous 2-3%, according to many sources. The strategy behind this is obvious: force you to go through their paid service, Facebook Ads, although they are not going to officially acknowledge it because it would look “ugly”, of course.
So, keep an eye on that return and seriously analyze the paid alternatives.
Once this initial phase is over, when you start to have some traffic on your website (in the order of a few hundred visits per day), it will be the readers themselves who will share your content. You will see that this is a very motivating moment.
- Get visits with guest blogging (guest posting)
One of the hardest things to get and always needed are quality links, especially when you are at the beginning and your website still has very little authority.
For this, one of the best formulas are still guest posts. Doing guest posts is something I highly recommend for three reasons:
Writing on someone else’s website or doing a YouTube collaboration grows your personal brand because it makes you known to a new audience, thousands of people if you get a collaboration on a well-known site.
You will be able to experience the situation of writing in front of a large audience. This will give you much more feedback and learning than writing for a blog that is just starting out.
Take the opportunity to link to your own content. This way you will get quality links, essential for your SEO work to bear fruit.
Of course, it is one of the most effective techniques to make yourself known and grow your blog that I can recommend.
What I do say is that if you want to do it right you have to really take advantage of the opportunity.
What does this mean?
It means that I wouldn’t do any guest post before I have set up my mailing list with a good “lead magnet” (free eBook type hook, etc.), precisely to take advantage of that exposure to a new audience and capture a % of subscribers from that audience (which will be of high quality).
Now you may ask yourself (and not without reason): but which well-known blogger is going to be interested in my publishing on his blog?
Obviously it is not trivial for a large site to pay attention to a much smaller one. However, there are exceptions; you can find them in this blog.
- Generate web visitors with paid traffic
The free ways to increase the visits to your website that we have seen so far have, to a greater or lesser extent, a big problem: they will not work immediately and, especially, if your site is still young.
Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to consider making an economic investment in “bridging” that initial dry phase, a phase that can last for years.
Of course, since you are paying to get traffic, it becomes even more important to prepare your website beforehand in order to build as much loyalty as possible to those visits and convert them into followers/subscribers. We are talking, above all, about email marketing, to take them to your mailing list.
On the other hand, it is not just a matter of paying and that’s it. Like everything else, acquiring paid traffic has its own science. For example: whether you know how to do it right or not, the cost and quality of the visits you get will vary greatly.
I return to the topic of paid traffic and we will go deeper into this a little further down in this post.
