Building a site and creating content is hard work. After that, it should be smooth sailing, right? The short answer is yes; the more complicated answer is not at first. If you want more people to view your site, it may take time to get your content out there, but the payoff is worth it. Here are three quick tips for increasing your site traffic.

1. Building a Community

One of the best ways to increase site traffic is to build a community around your site. First, you need to figure out who your audience is. In other words, who are you trying to reach? Who would be interested in your content?

Once you figure out who your audience is, the next step is to build relationships because these are the people who will foster your site. If you have a blog component on your site, you can develop a relationship with your audience by encouraging discussion and participation. A conversation goes two-ways so don’t be afraid to reply to comments.

If you don’t have a blog component on your site, you can utilize social media to interact with your audience. Either way, it’s important to connect with others in your network by supporting and commenting on their site. Soon, your name will be recognizable, and they will start visiting your site as well.

2. Providing the Right Content

After determining your audience and building a community, it’s time to discern what content will generate traffic. Unfortunately, you can provide great content that may never be viewed or shared. The key is to provide the right content. What is your target community looking for? You can determine this a few different ways. One, look at others in your field of interest. What are they putting on their site that is working well for them? Or, if you have a blog, what blog posts are generating the most discussion? Those are the topics that your community is interested in the most.

Second, you can use Google Trends to find out what people related to your field are searching for. It is a free tool that measures what people are currently Googling the most often. You can view what is trending sitewide, or you can specify by adding a search term (second).

For example, if you are in the health field, you might search the term “health.” You can see the interest over time, interest by subregion, and interest by related queries. You can even download the top related queries into an excel spreadsheet. This tool can aid you in providing the right content by showing what people are actually looking for pertaining to your area. If you want others to share and view your content, you need to know what they care about the most. 

3. Getting Your Content Out There

“…Even if you’ve created the Mona Lisa of blog posts, if you don’t know how to distribute your content it’s not going to be seen, clicked, read or shared. This is what makes intelligent content distribution so vital.” –  Evan LePage on Hootsuite Blog

Lastly, and I know this goes without saying, it’s imperative to get your content out there for the world to see. I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Duhhh, tell me something I don’t already know,” but maybe these are some strategies you haven’t thought of yet.

Connect with other communities 

Of course, it is most important to connect with people directly related to your field, but connecting with other communities will get your site out there faster and with a wider range. You can connect with other communities by visiting their sites, leaving comments, providing positive feedback, and directing your audience to their sites. Promoting other sites may seem counterproductive, but external linking actually improves your SEO and makes you seem more credible. Just make sure to connect with trustworthy sites and watch your site traffic increase.

Have a giveaway contest

Most of the time, the reason people aren’t visiting your site is because they don’t know that your site exists. A great way to make your site known is having a giveaway contest. The WordPress team did this for Christmas as the official launching of our blog. We required participants to share our Facebook post that announced the contest (so a lot of people would see it) and to leave a comment on one of our blogs. Then, after a week, we randomly chose three winners who received multiple gift cards. It was a success! Now we have regular visitors, whereas before, not a lot of people knew about our blog. This is a fun way to generate traffic, and trust me, everyone loves free stuff!

Generating traffic to your site may be work, but it is definitely worth it.