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8 Bulletproof Strategies to open up the Floodgates to free Traffic

There’s a lot of brands and online marketers out there who take the “Field of Dreams” approach to SEO – “If we build it, they will come.” Or, in other words, if they create awesome content, Google will take notice, rank their website, and send crazy amounts of traffic their way. We hate to be the bearer of bad news but…

If your entire traffic-driving strategy is “Invest in great content and hope for the best,” you might as well take your money and light a match to it, because that’s just not going to work. If all it took to reach the top of the rankings was creating great content, everyone would do it. And Google AdWords wouldn’t be so wildly popular, nor would they be able to get away with charge $6, $10 or even $892 per click!

Great content is important. But it’s only a piece of the puzzle. If you want to move up the ranks in Google, you need to be smart about it. You need a strategic system for creating content that not only wows your audience, but plays nice with Google’s algorithm, gets you on the front page, and drives the traffic you need to make serious cash off your content. We’re talking about Search Engine Optimisation. Also known as SEO.

SEO is the key to ranking your content in the SERPs, driving crazy amounts of qualified traffic,and transforming your content into a cash-generating machine.Today, we’re going to show you our ultimate SEO secrets so you can see exactly how to gethigh-quality links and free traffic to your website – and make a ton of money in the process. Think you know about free traffic? Think again. Here are our 8 bulletproof strategies to floodyour business with qualified leads and customers:

Getting started: Prep your website for success

First things first: before you start driving crazy amounts of free traffic to your website, you need
to make sure your website is prepped for success. If your site is a mess, there are a million
technical glitches, and your page takes an eternity to load, it doesn’t matter how much traffic
you get to your site… they’re all going to take one look and run in the other direction.

Do a site audit
and fix any
technical errors

Make sure your
page loads
lightening fast

Create a backlog
of ah-mazing
content to keep your
traffic engaged

Let’s start with the site audit, shall we?

Do a site audit and fix any technical errors

If your website looks like a bomb full of technical glitches exploded all over it, consider it ground zero. Before you do ANYTHING else, you need to get those glitches fix and get your site working like a well-oiled machine. Tech issues will tank your site because a) it will never rank in the search engines, no matter how great your content is, and b) as soon as your visitors encounter a tech glitch, they’re going to hightail it out of there quicker than you can say “site under construction.” Here are a few of the most common technical errors you might be facing – and, more importantly, how to fix them:

You’ve got a bunch of versions of your homepage

Your homepage is – you guessed it – the home-base of your website. And, since it’s a home-base, there should only be one. If you have ten different versions of your homepage, all with different URLs? Yea, you need to fix that. Check different variations of your home URL to see if additional pages are floating out there in the interwebs:

 
www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com/index
http://yourdomain.com/default.aspx
http://yourdomain.com/home
 

If you find an extra homepage or two (or ten), set up a 301 redirect to automatically direct all the duplicate versions to the correct homepage (if you’re using a CMS, you can take care of this with a plugin; if you’ve got a custom site, you’ll need to get into the code).

Your 404 error page is terrible

You know what readers – and search engines – hate?
When they try to find a page on your site and get a boring, generic error page like this one: Yeah. You’re not winning any points for creativity with that one.

If you want to please your readers (and again, the search engines), you need a custom 404 error page that’s in line with your brand and isn’t a complete snooze (bonus points if you canmake them smile). Just take a look at this custom 404 error page from illustrator Dan Woodger:

If you’re not sure what your current 404 error page looks like, you can find it by visiting any random, non-existent page on your domain like www.yourdomain.com/random-non-existent-page/. If you find that your 404 page is terrible, it’s time to get to work. First, use a tool like Web Sniffer to find any existing 404 error pages and then set up a redirect
to take your traffic to the proper place. Then, design a custom 404 error page that’s looks better, less generic, and more on-brand than what Google serves.

Your images are missing alt tags

If you’re not using alt tags on every single image on your website, you’re
doing it wrong. Images without alt text will tank your rankings in the search
engines. You can check each image on your website manually for alt tags, but
depending on how many images you have, that can take forever, so we
recommend either:

• Using an Image alt text checker tool, or
• Using a W3C validation tool.

Both of these tools will let you know which images on your site are missing alt
text so you can go in and update each image. Make sure the alt text is
descriptive and relevant to the image; otherwise, you’re wasting your time.

Your meta tags are messed up

Because they’re the only things visible to potential visitors in the search engines, your title tag
and meta description are key to driving organic traffic. And if they’re messed up? You can kiss that traffic goodbye. Most people mess up their title and meta tags by making them too long.

Google cuts off your title tag at 70 characters and your meta description at 150 characters, so that should be your maximum for each. If you’ve got longer tags lurking around your pages and posts, you need to fix them. If you’re a WordPress user, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to find and fix any unnecessarily lengthy
meta tags.

You know the saying “slow and steady wins the race?”

Yeah… that definitely does NOT apply when it comes to page loading time. For every second your page load time increases, your conversion rate decreases. So if you want to make the most of your free traffic, you need to make sure your page loads quickly – in under 3 seconds. If it takes more than 3 seconds, your traffic will hightail it out of there and probably never return. A slow page time is also going to hurt your rankings since it messes with user experience, which is a big no-no in the eyes of Google.

Luckily, this one’s an easy fix. All you have to do is type your website’s URL into the PageSpeed Tool by Google and hit “analyse.” PageSpeed will show you how fast your page is loading and, if it’s too slow, will make suggestions on how to improve page speed. Implement the suggestions, fix any errors, and keep running the test
until you score 100/100.

Create a backlog of ah-mazing content to keep your traffic engaged

Driving traffic to your website is one thing. Keeping them there is another. If you want people to visit your website and stay more than a millisecond, they need something to DO when they get there. So before you start driving tons of traffic, you need a backlog of ah-mazing content to keep them engaged once they arrive. The emphasis here is on “ah-mazing.” Ordinary, generic, or low-quality content isn’t going to work. In order for your website visitors to engage with your content, it needs ot be top notch.won’t work.

So, what are the golden rules for creating ah-mazing content?

Know who your audience is… and
create content specifically for them;
what works for one audience might
not work for another

Every piece of content needs a killer
headline to hook visitors’ interest

People have short attention spans,
so make your content scannable;
use short paragraphs, bullets, lists,
and sub-headings to break things up

Spice things up with images, graphics, videos, infographics, and other
types of visual contentt

Remember, at the core, all great
content is a story; use storytelling to
engage readers

Certain types of content tend to
perform better than others, like lists,
how-to guides, case studies, and
infographics; incorporate them as
much as possible

Alright, so now that we got all the technical stuff out of the way and your website is prepped for success…

8 Strategies

To Send Insane Amounts Of FREE Traffic To Your Website

Know Where You 1 Stand With Google

Before you can get started driving tons of free traffic, you should definitely take a look at what traffic you already have and see how much love Google is sending your way. Figuring out how much traffic you’re getting from Google and where its being sent to on your website is as simple as a Google search. To check your Google index, just go to the Google search bar and type site:domain.com. So, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you wanted to check how much traffic Facebook was getting, you would just head on over to Google and type site:Facebook.com into the search bar and hit enter. Google will pull up all the indexed pages that show up in the search results and are eligible to receive traffic and display them at the top of the results page.

As you can see, Facebook is doing alright for themselves with over 2 billion results in the Google index.

By doing this quick search, you can see how many pages on your site are eligible for Google traffic. If the results are surprising to you – like you have way less pages than you thought being indexed – it’s a red flag that’s something wrong. If you get zero results, you’ve either a) typed in the search query incorrectly, b) restricted Google from crawling your page, or c) done something to make Google mad and gotten your site banned from the index.

If you’re dealing with scenario a, just type the query in correctly (obviously). If you’re dealing with b or c, you’ve got some work to do. Check your robots.txt file to make sure you’re not restricting Google’s access to crawl your website (you can learn more about how to update your robots.txt file here). If you’re a WordPress user, head over to Settings and, under “Reading” make sure the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is UNchecked.

If you’re worried you might have done something to get on Google’s bad side, check your Google Webmaster On the flip side, if you see 10,000 pages you’ve never heard of indexed in Google, that’s an issue to. Certain plug-ins will create unnecessary, spammy pages on your website that, when indexed, will hurt your rankings – so if you see them, get rid of them. Knowing where you stand with Google from the get-go can help you get things in line and maximize your strategy to drive the most traffic. Tools for any penalty notifications (you can find them in the Manual Actions report). If Google penalized you, fix whatever’s wrong and then send in a reconsideration request to get your pages back to being indexed – and traffic back to your site. If you see SOME of your pages but not ALL of them, you’ll need to do a little more digging and see what’s up. Do you have duplicate content? Are there specific directories that aren’t coming up? Do a deep dive on the parts of your website that aren’t coming up and look for any bugs or errors so you can a) fix them, and b) get your pages indexed.

Spy On Your Competitors And Steal Their Traffic

Got a competitor that’s absolutely crushing it with traffic? Great. It’s time to do a little detective work, spy on the competition, and steal that traffic for yourself. Now, before you start wondering “is it wrong to steal my competitor’s traffic?” let us be the first to tell you: the answer is NO. Competitive auditing is a common practice in SEO. Everyone’s doing it – even Starbucks. Through competitive auditing, you can find out exactly which keywords your competitors are using in their content to drive crazy amounts of traffic. Do you know the top keywords your top three competitors are ranking for right now?  You 100% should. If not, you’re doing it wrong. But don’t feel bad. Most businesses (and marketers for that matter) have zero idea what keywords their competitors are targeting. Their keyword research consists of downloading a list
from Google’s Keyword Planner tool. Yeah… not the best approach.
A better approach? Spying on your competitors, finding out exactly which keywords are sending them the most business, then creating content that’s better than theirs – and stealing that traffic for yourself.

If you want to steal your competition’s traffic, you need to create content that puts theirs to shame. Once you’ve got that all-sorts-of-awesome content ready to roll it’s time to get sharing. Get out your (virtual) bullhorn and start telling everyone and their mom about your new content. That includes anyone who was linking to your competitor’s piece; if they like the original enough to link to it, they’ll definitely want to link to your 10x content. This sneaky little technique will have the inbound links pouring in – and sending lots of free traffic to your content. Before you know it, all of those links and traffic will help your content get pushed right to the top of the organic listings – outranking your competition in the process.

Spy On Your Competitors And Steal Their Traffic

Not all links are created equal. An inbound link from your great Aunt Joan’s blog isn’t going to deliver the same kind of traffic you’d get from Fast Company, Mashable, TechCrunch, or Forbes – the “big dogs” of the industry with hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of readers and thousands of shares on each article. Is getting a link from one of the “big dogs” harder than going after the smaller players? Of course. But even a single link from a huge, well-respected site can do huge things for your site; it’ll increase your credibility with your audience, drive huge amounts of traffic, get your content in front of new audiences, and – ultimately – lead to more sales and leads. So, how do you get an in at one of the larger publications and get a link from one of the big dogs? We’ve got one word for you:

If you want to get featured on a big site, you’ve got to throw your hat into the ring and reach out with an idea for a guest post. But remember: these editors get hundreds – if not thousands – of emails every day. A random email from someone they don’t know that says “Hey! I want to write for you!” is 100% guaranteed to get sent straight to their spam folder. No, if you want to get a link and/or guest post from one of the big dogs, you need to have a little more finesse.

Here’s our four-step process for getting featured on a large industry site:

Step #1: Find The Right Editor

The first step to “getting an in” at a big publication is finding the right editor to reach out to. If you can avoid it, never pitch to a general submission form or email; they’re like the black abyss of content requests, and 99 times out of 100 your request will never get seen by a real person. If you really want to get in at a large publication, you need to find an actual person to deal with. Luckily, just about every editor under the sun has a Twitter account. Some sites, like Mashable, even make it easy for you by compiling their entire staff into a public Twitter list:

You’ll also want to track down their email address. A lot of editors will make their contant information public and list it on their Twitter profile, but if not, you can always reverse engineer it by looking at the email format for that particular publication; so, for example, if you see a Forbes
email that’s [email protected], you can just plug your editor’s info into that format and voila! You’ve got their likely email address.

Step #2: Don’t Be A Stranger

Once you find the right editor, you need to get on their radar. Start engaging with them on Twitter, retweeting their articles or sharing their content. Comment on the articles they write. The more you engage with them, the more familiar they’ll become with you – and the more likely they’ll be to respond to your email when the time comes to connect. A word of caution: when you’re engaging with an editor, don’t be fake. People – including editors – dig people who are genuine, and if all of your interactions are clearly designed to get something from them in the future it’s only going to turn them off.

Step #3: Know What They’re Looking For

Things that will make an editor immediately delete your email: 

You pitch an idea that’s been covered on their site 1,000 times, showing themyou clearly haven’t done your research Yur pitch an idea that has no place on their site, again showing them you haven’tdone your research You completely ignore their pitch guidelines Before you pitch an editor, it’s important to set yourself up for success. You need to know what they’re looking for. Most website will have pitch and contributor guidelines on their website. Read them through and make sure you follow the process to a T.

Scour their website and read the types of articles they cover to help you formulate an idea and an angle that makes sense for their audience;
then, look through their old posts to make sure that angle/idea hasn’t already been covered. You can also look around the interwebs to see if there’s any additional information on how to pitch a specific publication successfully; Mashable published this article about what NOT to do when pitching them story ideas, and a freelance writer (and contributor to Forbes) put out this guide on how to become a Forbes writer. 

When you know what kind of ideas an editor is looking for and how they want those ideas delivered, you’re much more likely to have success than
just sending them what YOU think they should want and hoping for the best.

Make the connection

Once you’ve found your editor, gotten on their radar, and figured out what to pitch them, the only thing left to do is actually make the connection and send them a pitch.

Send a brief email that introduces you and your company and builds the benefit as to why they should publish your post. Remember, the only way they’re going to publish your content is if they can clearly see what’s in it for THEM, so make sure you outline exactly what value you’re going
to add to their publication – and their readers.

You should also include an outline of your post that breaks down what you’re going to write – editors LOVE that extra step, and it helps them get a better picture of how your content could fit on their site.

Once you send the email, then the waiting game begins. Remember – editors are SUPER busy, so if they don’t get back to you in 5 minutes, don’t sweat it. Give it a week, and then send a short follow up email to see what’s up

Use SEO Copywriting To Increase Clicks From The Search Pages

Once you’ve found your editor, gotten on their radar, and figured out what to pitch them, the only thing left to do is actually make the connection and send them a pitch.

Send a brief email that introduces you and your company and builds the benefit as to why they should publish your post. Remember, the only way they’re going to publish your content is if they can clearly see what’s in it for THEM, so make sure you outline exactly what value you’re going
to add to their publication – and their readers.

You should also include an outline of your post that breaks down what you’re going to write – editors LOVE that extra step, and it helps them get a better picture of how your content could fit on their site.

Once you send the email, then the waiting game begins. Remember – editors are SUPER busy, so if they don’t get back to you in 5 minutes, don’t sweat it. Give it a week, and then send a short follow up email to see what’s up

Title

Your title is, hands down, the most important element on your page. It’s the first thing people read and the deciding factor in whether or not they keep reading, so it needs to be killer. But how, exactly, do you write a killer heading?

Use The Right Words/Figures

Starting with a number and using power words in the title are two go-to’s for amping up your title copy. So, for example, instead of titling a post “Ways To Build An Online Brand,” (which is super weak), title it “7 Smart Ways To Build a Strong Online Brand” (much better).

Get Specific

Your potential readers want to know what they’re getting into when they click on your link. By including the who, what, why, and how in your post title, you’re putting that information out from the get-go, which will drive more qualified clicks.

Include keywords

If you can, add your primary keyword to the title. The closer to the beginning of the title, the better. Including your keyword in your title will make sure your readers know exactly what the main topic of your post is – and it’ll help you rank better in the process.

Avoid The Passive Voice

When it comes to writing headlines, using the passive voice is a big no-no. It sounds… well, passive. You want to sound assertive in your title, so the active voice is a much better fit.

So, instead of writing “7 Ways To Start Driving Traffic” try “7 Ways To Drive Traffic” instead. Sounds better right?

When all else fails, you can always use headline generators like HubSpot’s blog topic generator and Sumo’s headline generator to come up with compelling titles to drive clicks.

Meta Description

Your meta description is almost as important as your title. If people are on the fence about whether they want to click, they’re going to look to the meta description to decide. And if your meta description doesn’t work, you can kiss those clicks goodbye.

Here Are The Rules-Of-Thumb For Meta Descriptions That Work:

  • Keep it less than 150 characters; anything after that will get cut off
  • Use your primary keyword in the meta description; just don’t keyword stuff or make it look spammy
  • Remember those power words? Use them in the meta description and, while you’re at it, pair them with action words (like grab or click) to inspire readers to take action and get their click on
  • Want your readers to click? You need to tell them. Use a clear call-to-action (CTA) to tell readers a) what you want them to do, and b) why they should do it. (So, for example, “click here to learn more”)
  • Make it about your readers’ the more benefit and value you can build for them, the more likely they’ll be to click

Look For Traffic In Unexpected Places

When it comes to driving traffic, sometimes you’ve got to get creative. You can find traffic in all sorts of unexpected places, and the more opportunities you find to drive free traffic, the quicker that traffic will add up and have a major impact on your success.

Here Are A Few Unexpected Ways To Drive Pualified TrafficTo Your Website:

Slideshare

Got a post that people love and is performing well? Turn it into a slideshow on SlideShare to scoop up some extra (free!) traffic. Slideshare is a heavily trafficked site, and thanks to its high authority ranking, the potential for sending traffic your way is huge (just ask Ana Hoffman, founder of Traffic Generation Cafe. She did a little experiment where she posted 9 presentations in a month to see what would happen. And what happened is those presentations? They garnered over 200K views and 1400 clicks in 30 days). If you want to get traffic from Slideshare, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. All you’ve got to do is repurpose your old, well-performing blog posts, transform them into slides, and watch the traffic roll in.

Reduce Your Blog Post Into Short Blurbs

Give enough information but leave your audience wanting more Remember your goal: Drive traffic to your blog Need a step-by-step on how to create a presentation on Slideshare? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered:

Select a blog post you want to convert into a presentation and turn it into an outline, maintaining its subheadings, bullets, and lists.Your outline should have:

  • A title
  • Headings
  • Essential information about what people can find in the post
  • Power words and punchy sentences (to get people excited about the presentation!)

Every heading and subheading should include the most crucial points of your content. Priority number one for creating slideshare content is having an outline that’s both catchy and persuasive.

  1. Start creating a slide presentation based on your outline in your preferred presentation software, like PowerPoint or Slides. You can just copy and paste the content directly from your original post.
  2. Punch up the slides with images.
  3. Once your slides are ready to roll, it’s time to optimize them. This, my friend, is the most
    important step in maximizing Slideshare traffic.

Choose a long-tail keyword that you want to optimize your presentation for. Add this keyword in:

  • Your final PDF file
  • The majority of the slides
  • Title
  • Description
  • Tags

SlideShare transcribes all the text from slides automatically, so including your primary keyword in slides is the key to ranking for said keyword.

  1. Add a CTA. The last slide should have a clear call-to-action so that readers can click on it and get sent right to your website/landing page
  2. Last step, upload your presentation to your SlideShare account (look for the “Upload” button on the top right-hand side of your account screen). Make sure you set the privacy option to “Public,” then hit the “Publish” button and you’re done! Seriously, this entire process from beginning to end takes about 30 minutes. And once you see the traffic that roll in thanks to Slideshare and their high authority, you’ll know it was 30 minutes well spent.

Seriously, this entire process from beginning to end takes about 30 minutes. And once you see the traffic that roll in thanks to Slideshare and their high authority, you’ll know it was 30 minutes well spent.

Pop Your Presentation On YouTube

Since you already have a presentation made for Slideshare, why not get the most out of it and turn it into a YouTube video?

All you have to do is run the presentation on your computer and record it (you can use a screencast software like Jing). As the presentation is recording, read the slides to add voiceover.

Once you’ve got your video, pop the video on YouTube with a description (including a) the long tail keyword you’re targeting and b) a link back to your site), a killer title, and some tags and you are DONE.

This is a great strategy to send some additional free traffic to your website – and build your YouTube following in the process.

Give Testimonials For Products And Services You Love

If you think testimonials are just a way to sing the praises of a product or service you love, you’re mistaken. That’s not ALL they are. They’re also a great way to get some link juice.

Companies LOVE sharing their testimonials; if one of their customers has great things to say about them, they want all of their other potential customers to hear it. Which is why getting a testimonial link is one of the easiest links you can get on the internet.

Reach out to your favorite product or service’s website and send over a testimonial for them to publish on their testimonials or homepage.

The best part? You probably won’t even have to ask for a link. The power of testimonials is that they come from real people, so the company you’re creating a testimonial for will want to show their audience you’re legit… and a link to your website is the best way to do that.

Give Away Your Product Or Service To The Right People

Giving away your product or services to influencers in your niche is an awesome way to get high-quality traffic. Influencers often have a huge audience that’s made up of your ideal customers, and working with them can be a win-win-win situation: they get an awesome product or service to try, their audience gets to know about an awesome new product or service, and you get a review and some super qualified traffic.

The only thing to be careful about here is the approach.

It’s against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to directly ask for a link or review in exchange for a product or service. You can suggest it, but you can’t ask outright; the influencer needs to be the one to decide whether they want to review or link to your product

Just be careful with your wording. Other than that, influencer outreach is a slam dunk for getting free traffic.

Look For Places Where You’re Mentioned… Just WithoutA Link

You’d be surprised how many times your business might be mentioned on the interwebs without a link. And all of those mentions are a waste of potential traffic. But they don’t have to be! You can easily fix the situation by searching for mentions of your company (by using a tool like BuzzSumo) and, if they’re not linked, reaching out to the webmaster and gently asking them to link the mention to your site. Seriously, it’s that easy. If they mentioned you in a blog post or article, they’ll have no problem linking to you as well.

Hop On A Podcast

Podcasts are having a serious moment right now. After “Serial” hit it big, it seemed like everyone and their mom hopped on the podcast bandwagon and now pretty much every niche and industry under the sun has a number of well-trafficked podcasts.

And those podcasts are a HUGE opportunity to get yourself in front of a new audience – and drive traffic in the process. I can think of very few podcasts that are one-person shows; nearly all of them feature guests. So all you have to do is convince a podcast that you’d be an AWESOME guest and voila! Free traffic.

Do your research. Find out what the top podcasts in your industry are and listen to a few episodes. What kind of topics do they cover? What kind of guests do they typically host? Once you’ve got some intel on what they’re looking for, you can tailor your pitch and frame yourself and your business in a way that’s likely to snag you a guest spot.

Hop On HARO

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) connects journalists looking for sources to individuals within the community that can act as those sources.

Once you make an account, you’ll get a few emails each day from reporters looking for sources. You email them back with your credentials and answers to their questions and, if they like you, they’ll include you in their article (with a link back to your website, of course).

Depending on the journalist, this can be a great way to get your company mentioned in those “big dog” publications that are notoriously hard to get into.

Info-crazy

There’s some types of content that, for whatever reason, just perform better than others. And one piece of content that’s pretty much guaranteed to explode your traffic – if you do it right is infographics. People just can’t get enough of them.

A lot of people think that infographics are expensive to make, but they’re not. If you have an in-house designer that’s worth their salt, they should be able to whip one up using a tool like Visual.ly. If not, you can find tons of decent designers on sites like Upwork or 99designs that can get it done for you.

The key to killing it with infographics is this: you need a good idea. You can’t just recreate an infographic someone’s already done. If you want it to generate some serious link juice, you need to come up with an infographic that’s unique, original, and compelling.

Once you’ve got your idea locked in and your infographic designed and published on your website, it’s time to get it out into the world.

First, you can submit your infographic to sharing sites like AmazingInfoGraphics.com or DailyInfoGraphic.com. But you never want to leave your link building efforts entirely up to chance, so the next step is to do a massive outreach campaign.

Find the top influencers in the topic your infographic covers. Then, reach out to them all and let them know about your infographic and why it would be helpful to their audiences

Check out this email that Brian Dean recently used to get some serious traction with one of his infographics:

You can even take it a step further sweeten the deal by offering to write a guest post with the infographic 
(which is exactly what Brian did):

Don’t Let Traffic Slip Through Your Fingers

You can drive all the free traffic in your world to your page. But if you don’t do anything with them when they get there? You’re wasting your time.

If you want to make the most out of your traffic, you need to think about more than just how to get traffic. You need to think about how to convert traffic.

Wherever you send your traffic – whether it’s a blog post or an infographic or any other piece of content under the sun – it needs to be set up like a landing page, optimized to capture their email address and convert your visitors from “casual reader” into “subscriber.” That way, you can continue to build the relationship and keep selling them on your products and services from now ‘til kingdom come.

Just take a look at marketer Neil Patel. Every single blog post the man writes (and believe us, there’s many) is essentially its own landing page with powerful CTAs that drive readers to subscribe to his email list:

Same thing with HubSpot. At the end of every blog post, they include a CTA that offers a free template in exchange for the oh-so-valuable email address:

Add Your Heading Text Here

You put a lot of work into creating awesome content and driving traffic to read that awesome content. And after all that blood, sweat, and tears, you’re selling yourself short if you let that traffic slip through your fingers. At the very least, include a strong CTA at the end of every post that encourages your readers to subscribe to your mailing list.

You can also put a CTA in the sidebar or link to it from the article text. Just don’t get too crazy with it. If all of your content feels like a sales page and every other word is begging for your email addresses, you’re going to come across as desperate – and that’s never a good look.

Know The 3 Fatal Traps No SEO Company Would EVER Tell You

(And Ignore Them At Your Own Peril)

Now, after reading this, you might think “all of this is great, but I think I’ll just hire an SEO company to do this for me.” And that’s fine. But it’s insanely important to make sure you work with the RIGHT SEO company; one who knows their stuff and isn’t going to waste your time. Here are the three fatal traps that no SEO Company would ever tell you. And trust us when we say:

Fatal Trap #1: Agencies use PBN’s

As we mentioned earlier, not all links are created equal. But some shady SEOs don’t care and they’ll get links from anywhere they can – including PBNs. The vast majority of agencies out there are using PBNs (Private Blog Networks) to generate backlinks for their clients. And the value of these links? They’re absolutely worthless. Using a PBN to generate backlinks is like strapping a time bomb to your business chest. 

Eventually, Google will find out. And they’re not going to be happy. Yes, PBNs will get you backlinks. But the websites they’re coming from have zero authority with Google, and when Google catches wind that all of your links are coming from questionable websites, they’ll shut you down quicker than you can say “I didn’t know the links were bad!” When an agency promises you hundreds of backlinks, it all sounds good. But if those links are coming from a PBN, you’re wasting your time, money, and – eventually – your rankings.

Fatal Trap #2: They can’t rank themselves

You’d be surprised how many times your business might be mentioned on the interwebs without a link. And all of those mentions are a waste of potential traffic. But they don’t have to be! You can easily fix the situation by searching for mentions of your company (by using a tool like BuzzSumo) and, if they’re not linked, reaching out to the webmaster and gently asking them to link the mention to your site. Seriously, it’s that easy. If they mentioned you in a blog post or article, they’ll have no problem linking to you as well.

Fatal Trap #3: They’ll Get You Ranking… For Keywords That Don’t Matter

Ranking #1 for a keyword with no search traffic is like coming in first place in a race where there’s no one else competing. In other words, it’s completely useless. A lot of SEO agencies will rank your brand for useless keywords so they can say “See? Look! You’re #1 for this keyword!” But it doesn’t matter if you’ve got top ranking for a hundred useless keywords – they’re still useless. The only thing that matters is ranking for competitive keywords that drive real, qualified traffic. If your SEO agency can’t do that (and would rather waste their time showing off their ability to rank you for keywords that don’t mean anything), it’s time to drop them.

CLAIM YOUR FREE DIGITAL MARKETING BLUEPRINT TO DOUBLE, TRIPLE, OR EVEN QUADRUPLE YOUR BUSINESS (WORTH $1,000)

Getting the stuff in this report right is the only way to start becoming super successful online. If you’re serious about dominating your market and maximizing down to the last dollar – your advertising ROI, you must address these five things. If you’re not, then you’re probably spending more money than you need to on marketing…but getting less return than you should. For example, when you work with us, we target a 3:1 ROI on your marketing spend. That’s right. Our goal is to get $3 into your business for every $1 you spend on marketing.

I’ve given you what you need to get started. But if you have any questions, or would like our help on implementing any of the above, get in touch today. Even better, for a limited time we’re offering you a 30-minute strategy session where we’ll discuss your business goals and challenges and draw up a Digital Marketing Blueprint for you for free.

Please note this is NOT a sales call. You will be speaking with one of our highly experienced Digital Strategists, not a salesman.

Claim your no-obligation free 30-minute strategy session now and get your $1,000 custom Digital Marketing Blueprint, FREE!

WARNING: Before you claim your free strategy session you must understand that, this is only for people serious about setting up their business for long term success We’ll do the brunt of the work, but to truly get your sales figures skyrocketing we need your commitment and dedication. If you’re not ready for that please don’t waste our time.

But if you are ready to kick your business into overdrive and skyrocket your profits book your FREE strategy session call now.