There’s many ways to turn a single website visitor into a hundred “hits” a day. But in this post I’m going to concentrate on doing it organically. When you attract organic traffic to your website it’s free! So any sales you make is 100% profit. When I started out as an affiliate I did use paid advertising. But after getting my Adwords account banned (back in the early 2010’s), I switched to organic only traffic.
The fastest way to turn 1 website “hit” into many is through using paid advertising of course. But there’s a problem with paid advertising: it costs money! And it’s money which you aren’t guaranteed to see back again, even if you sell something. So you need to be very careful with paid advertising because you can spend a lot without a return if you’re not careful. Anyway, that’s a post for another day. In this post I’m going to focus on completely free strategies to bring more people to your website.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day- Get 1 Hit First
I chose this title deliberately because it’s very specific and measurable. When you set goals for your affiliate business it’s worth having specific and measurable goals so you know when you’ve hit the target. Being vague about a goal is no good. You can’t hit something if it’s not clearly defined. See my post on SMART goals and DUMB goals for more on this. A clearly defined goal also helps you to focus your actions around that specific target. Without a clearly defined goal, you can easily spread yourself too thin, doing unimportant tasks which don’t move you forwards.
But most affiliates who have given it a go for long enough have at least attained a hit on their website. If you haven’t started yet, sign up on this site and get going! You can easily get someone to visit your website organically. Simply write a blog post and then share it on your social media platforms. Make sure you have a counter on your blog so you know if someone (other than you) visits it.
Still no visitors? Rinse and repeat step 1 – write a blog post and share on your social media platforms. Keep doing it until you get that 1 hit and you’ve done it! As Obi Wan (Star Wars reference) would say, “you’ve taken a small step into a larger world”!
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Getting Your Content To Rank On The Search Engines
It can be quite a challenge getting your content to rank on the first page of Google. But it’s worth the effort, even if you fall short, you can still find your content ranks on lesser used search engines such as Bing, Yahoo and Duduckgo etc. You won’t get an easy ranking for the top, most competitive keyword terms, especially if you’ve chosen a competitive niche. But if you can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you’ll have a greater chance of ranking.
The longer tail keywords get fewer monthly searches of course. But a little slice of few is worth a lot more than no slice of many. Here’s a quick tip to get some of your content to rank:
- Use Google’s keyword planner and type in your main “seed” keyword
- Scroll to the end of the list (by clicking on av. monthly searches) and you’ll see the keyword terms which get the least monthly searches. These tend to be less competitive and have more keywords in them
- Write content around these terms and use an SEO plugin to help you write SEO friendly content which has a better chance of ranking (SEO = Search Engine Optimisation)
Now you might not rank your content at all, so don’t hold your breath. But if you keep at it some of it will rank, especially if you do a good job of writing useful content.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day:Write For Your Target Audience
Before you set about writing a tonne of content, it’s worth mentioning what you’re going to be writing about. Don’t just choose any old topic. Make your content relevant to your target audience. The target audience is the visitor/s you want to attract to your affiliate products.
Most online traffic doesn’t turn into sales. Most people are simply browsing, gathering information. But if you focus on learning about your target audience/customer avatar, you can attract more of the people who are likely or wanting to purchase your products.
To learn more about your target audience visit the customer avatar worksheet pdf on this website. As a quick example, a product review attracts someone who is likely to buy, whereas a “how to” guide is less likely to produce a sale from your visitors.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Sharing Your Content Automatically With Plugins
If you write a good amount of content some of it might rank on the search engines and this is a major key to attracting organic traffic for free. However, nothing is guaranteed with the search engines so it’s worth also promoting your content yourself too. You can do this by sharing content throughout your social media platforms.
This is often a step that bloggers forget after they have finished a post (I certainly did). What a waste because no one will see your content unless you promote it! There’s a few plugins you can use to help automate the process of sharing your content as you publish it. Here’s a couple of plugins you can use to help you:
- Revive Old Posts plugin for WordPress
- Social Media Share buttons – for visitors to share your content
See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Write SEO Friendly Posts
SEO friendly means they have been specifically written with the search engines in mind and the word count of your specific keywords are considered when writing. I use a plugin called Yoast SEO.
SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and by writing SEO friendly post you’re letting the search engine “spiders” know what your content is about and the keyword/s you want them to rank for. You’re still writing for the person reading your post, but a plugin can help you get the word count right and optimising your content for SEO can help you when it comes to ranking your posts.
Build BackLinks
Building backlinks was always the last thing I wanted to do, so I outsourced it to this company! You can do this yourself of course by posting on other people’s blogs though blog commenting or guest posting.
Backlinks are used by Google (and others) to help determine the authority and ranking position of a website. So a lot of back links from high quality websites which have high authority is going to do you a lot of good when it comes to ranking your content on the search engines.
If you concentrate on creating high quality content, and promoting it, backlinks should be a natural by-product of your high quality posts. People should share and link to them over time which would give you a natural link profile anyway, which is what Google looks for. So avoid paying spammy companies for many links at once, it can have the opposite affect and make your site look spammy.
Rinse and Repeat
I’d like to tell you that some magic will happen when you do all of these steps once! But sadly it isn’t going to happen! In reality, you’re going to need to spend a few months building content and posting it throughout your social media platforms.
Over time as your domain authority improves, you should see some of your content ranking with the longer tail keywords you’ve written content for. This means you’ll likely see only a trickle from the ones which rank. That’s because long tail keywords have fewer monthly searches. But just remember that this is free traffic, so it’s worth building more of these little trickles! Eventually you’ll have a stream and then a river!
You have also build a load of backlinks by sharing content throughout social media. The knock-on effect of this is people will like, share and even link back to your content over time. In turn this will help boost your domain authority and your rankings.
Tipping Point
There will come a tipping point if you carry on doing this for long enough and even though it can be tough, it’s worth pursuing. There were times I wondered whether it was worth all the hard work I put in to blogging. But then a sale would drop in (organically) and I would have another spirt of enthusiasm!
By building content which serves your target audience in some way and attracts potential customers to your products, you are ultimately placing a number of fishing lines in the river, and fishing for a catch!
Your website traffic has multiple sources:
- Organic search engines: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and Google
- Social media platforms where you and others have shared your content
- Backlinks from blog commenting and guest posting.
Build More Sources Of Traffic To Existing Content
Your plugin Revive Old Posts is a great one too. It quietly posts your older posts throughout your social media platforms in the background, while you get on building new content. But there’s a couple of other things you can do to speed up your traffic growth too. One of them is to build an email list of subscribers and send out regular messages to them sharing your new content.
An email list gives you greater control over your traffic, whereas earning traffic organically takes time, and paying for it cost money, a list gives you the power to send your subscribers directly to your content whenever you like!
Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer website where you can post answers to relevant questions and also post links to your content. Although Quora doesn’t give you a “do-follow” link, which means you don’t get any ranking “juice” from it like with a guest post, you can attract traffic through Quora.
So by making a small daily habit out of finding and answering questions, you can build up a lot of content which links back to your blog posts. I’ve used this little tactic to great effect and it does bring in traffic, leads and sales.
Quora users look for questions they want to know about and if they find your content, they can also link to your blog post. Make sure to post only relevant content which helps to answer the question and read Quora’s terms and conditions so you don’t fall foul of their link policies. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Paid Marketing
Now I know I said this post was about organic marketing, but still a little paid advertising can easily make a massive difference to your traffic with only a little marketing budget. So it’s worth a mention here. Once you have a good amount of content under your belt, you can also use what’s called a “dynamic” advert on Google Adwords/Microsoft Ads.
A dynamic ad creates adverts which are relevant to your content and serves those ads to people looking for what you’ve written about. You can start an ad for as little as $1 a day too, which means you can test and measure your advertising at very little risk.
Summary
Each of these strategies will take some effort and time but content marketing is renowned for being a much more “slow and steady” form of online marketing than through using paid ads. Over time, if you persist, you should find more and more traffic is landing on your content; especially if you build multiple streams where they can come from:
- Organic search results – through your SEO efforts and writing high quality content for long tail keywords in your niche
- Social media – through your own sharing of your content and the sharing from your visitors
- Back links – improve your SEO score but also bring traffic directly from other websites in your niche
- Quora and other Q&A websites – answer questions, provide value and you’ll be allowed to link back to your content from Quora.com, bringing in another source of traffic
- Your email list – build an email list from your blog by offering some value driven giveaway (see my ebook/video course) on your site. Send subscribers back to new content and/or your affiliate products
- Paid advertising – with a little paid advertising at low cost you can easily push up your website “hits” to 100 given the time and effort. Pay more and you get more traffic!
Remember it’s the small steps you take every day which lead to the big breakthroughs over time. Don’t get overwhelmed with the size of the job ahead of you, focus only on the small step in front of you! This book is a great accompaniment to the blogging strategy:
