49 Expert Traffic Generation Tips – How To Generate Traffic Today

Traffic generation is tricky. Especially if you don’t really know how to generate traffic effectively.

One day you may get a hundred visitors and the next day, zero.

Plus, there are free and paid methods that work in combination which can bring you a flood of visitors to your web site.

The question is: which work better than the others and which are not worth the time or the investment?

For this reason alone, you need expert guidance. That’s why I’ve got my partner (Codrut Turcanu) to scour the Internet and find those top bloggers and social media influencers willing to share their traffic grabbing tricks.

We wanted to learn their #1 traffic generating tip.

Some of these guys have also included a link back to their web site of choice where you can further your learning on the topic. That’s like hitting one rabbit with two stones.

How To Generate Traffic To Your Website

Before we start off with the answers, I want to THANK in advance to all participants and all the others (including you) who help spread the word about these proven traffic generation tips.

Enjoy and good luck!

Chris Dyson –TripleSeo.com –Twitter

This might not work for all niches but it can certainly be a good traffic leak from Twitter.

By embedding a tweet in a blog post Twitter can feature your website within the tweet as a source of further information.

A great example of this is when Dan Barker sent Matt Cutts a tweet about the irony of Google looking for examples of sites that scrape content:

The tweet went viral and over the course of a few days received over 33000 retweets and was featured on a wide variety of news and tech related sites (over 80 according to ahrefs)

And the sites that embedded Dan’s tweet saw a spike in Twitter traffic as they were featured as Related Headlines.

So if you see a tweet related to your niche going viral throw up a quick blog post to add some additional context and you might be able to leech some extra traffic.

Stuart Walker –NicheHacks.com –Twitter

It starts with great content and usually involves a great deal of manual outreach.

But first you must figure out WHO your target audience is and WHERE they hang out online then get a presence there.

If it’s a blog then you’ll either want to blog comment or guest post there. If it’s a forum be active in the forum. If a social media group you’ll want to interact there etc.

Leverage other peoples audiences to get them back to your own site.

Here’s 4 of the most effective ways to get traffic….

http://nichehacks.com/building-traffic/

Tom Demers – CornerStoneContent.com –Twitter

Have a distribution hook in mind before you do anything!

This is sort of like the online / content marketing version of “building the marketing into the product” – don’t create a piece of content or start a site unless you have an idea in advance of how people will share and find it.

So instead of just writing a blog post or larger article, have an idea of how that will get found, whether it’s:

• Finding and engaging your audience where they live before you start writing
• Leveraging other popular blogs’ audiences to get attention for your content
• Creating content with a baked-in incentive for thought leaders to share it like thought leader “round up” posts (Richard Marriott from Clambr has a great free in-depth guide on the subject here: http://www.clambr.com/expert-roundups/), best of lists, lists of tips and resources where you’re linking to and citing other folks’ content (which gives them an incentive to share)

We also have a big list of specific tips to squeeze some additional traffic out of your content on our site at Cornerstone Content (http://www.cornerstonecontent.com/free-guide/).

The main thing is to have a specific idea of who will share and find your content, and how you’ll get them to share / find it before you start writing.

Robbie Richards –RobbieRichards.com –Twitter

I follow a proven 3 step formula for all my content marketing campaigns.

1. Find proven content
2. Make it better
3. Promote the c*** out of it

In this case study I’ll show you how I used this exact technique to write a blog post that generated 10,199 visits to my site in 30 days (without spending a penny).

Matthew Capala –SearchDecoder.com –Twitter

Install Tynt to increase traffic to your website.

Tynt generates backlinks to my website, provides me with content performance analytics, and drives hundreds of unique views for me every month.

Ivana Taylor –DiyMarketers.com –Twitter

Content is important, but promoting exiting content is even more important and there are several tools that I’ve started using successfully.

snip.ly – this tool helps you take advantage of posts that are already frequently shared.

It allows you to shared a frequently shared post and add on a button to YOUR content.

I also like using tools likeScoop.it that gives you the ability to leverage curated content.

Bill Gassett –MaxRealEstateExposure.com –Twitter

Without a doubt my best traffic generation tip is to join Viral Content Buzz.

Viral Content Buzz is a platform that allows you to get your content shared through a number of social channels including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Stumbleupon.

The concept is simple you share other peoples content and receive points for doing so. In return you are able to use your points to get others to share your articles.

What is great about this is the fact you can establish relationships with others that you otherwise would not have known. There are a very wide range of topics in the site from social media, SEO, general business, travel, internet, law, finance and a whole host of others.

Adam Connell –BloggingWizard.com –Twitter

Don’t market to your target audience, market to the people that influence them.

This can be as simple as linking out to influencers in a blog post and letting them know about it.

People love it when you say awesome stuff about them and there’s a good chance they’ll share your content (or even link to it). This post will tell you more.

Josh Coffy –Blog.FlightMedia.co –Twitter

I spent the first year blogging trying every ‘traffic method’ out there. But the best method we ever used was taking a 30-Day Content Challenge.

In January of 2014, we went from a measly 814 monthly visitors to 9,575 by January 31st. It was one of our largest feats as a company and our traffic has not only maintained, but grown!

Andrea Loubier –GetMailBird.com –Twitter

Focus on only 1-3 marketing channels at a time like SEO, PR, Advertising, CRO, Content marketing etc.

Try to find out as quickly as possible which channel works for you.

If one channel isn’t giving a good ROI, scrape it and move on to next. The faster you iterate, you’ll know which channel to focus on to generate traffic.

Also analyze your analytics and find out what has worked for you in the past and focus on that first.

Dennis Seymour –LeapFroggr.com/blog –Twitter

Besides SEO, I do a good chunk of media buying nowadays for traffic generation but I’ve been experimenting with old school blog commenting recently – basically trying to meet other people on their blogs and getting their attention.

Ryan Biddulph (who shared some Arnold Schwarzenegger motivation recently) and Adrienne Smith are 2 of my inspirations to “finally” give it a try.

I subscribed to blogs, commented, shared and just be genuine.

In return, I’ve met a lot of wonderful people and they linked to my blog, shared it out to their own social profiles and community.

It obviously takes more time but the relationships/friends you meet along the way are forever and I’m glad that I did take that step to give it a try.

A lot of wonderful, awesome people that I wouldn’t have had the chance of meeting if I sticked with my “introvert” strategies.

Leigh Louey-Gung –VisionSyste.ms

The easiest way to generate traffic is to have respected and well followed people contribute to your website.

They’ll not only help you create great content but they’ll usually let their followers know about the article which will send a stream of traffic through.

Guest blog posts or even an expert roundup (like this one) are great tools to make use of.

David Leonhardt – Seo-Writer.com –Twitter

For each blog post, create a pic that is designed to do double-duty in social media:

A) designed to be interesting on its own, so that people share it with their audience
B) designed to arouse curiosity so that people will click through more frequently to the actual post on your site.

Check the image on this post: http://thgmwriters.com/blog/write-caveman/

It is amusing, perhaps even funny – designed to be shared. But it also begs the question, how else would one write like a caveman – what else could I learn from them?

So it hopefully will drive click throughs, as well.

Joseph Ho –Joseph-Ho.com –Twitter

My best traffic generation is using giveaway. Using Facebook ads to drive targeted traffic to the giveaway I will gain the traffic and the subscribers.

If you are using Kingsumo plugin to run the giveaway, you will gain viral traffic too when the contestant share the giveaway on social media.

Using this method I managed to increase my traffic and subscribers by up to 50% within 2 months.

Jamie Spencer –SetupABlogToday.com –Twitter

My biggest traffic generation tip would be to make sure that you tag your URL’s, so that you know what is working so you can do more of it.

It may sound silly but a lot of traffic that will come to your site will not have a referrer so it can be hard to see where your visitors are coming from.

For example a lot of traffic from the Facebook app, Instagram and even Twitter is tagged as “direct” in Google analytics so using the URL builder you can start to learn more about your “dark social” traffic.

Mike Wallagher –StartBloggingOnline.com –Twitter

Do whatever it takes to get yourself listed on the front page of buzzfeed.com.

It can’t get any better… Here’s a great guide by Matthew Barby – http://moz.com/blog/my-recipe-for-success-how-to-launch-a-successful-blog

Charlotte Waller – Vis-e-bility.com –Twitter

There are a lot of tools out there for this, I’ve got limited experience but I had a very positive experience with www.revisitors.com.

You get referral traffic ONLY from this domain and not a load of spammy sites cluttering up your Google Analytics view.

The visits positively affected bounce rate, pages per visit and time on site too, suggesting an engaged audience.

BUT – conversion rate for this kind of traffic is very low

AND – there’s nothing quite like the effect organic traffic has on conversions when it’s been earned by building a brand, building relationships… the boring, long-term difficult stuff basically.

If you love social, Facebook is also a great traffic referrer for a lot of my sites.

Andrew Fortune –GreatColoradoHomes.com –Twitter

Since I learnt how to advertise on Facebook, I’ve been doing very well generating traffic over these last couple of months.

I wanted to develop a long term branding strategy for my local area and Facebook Ads is really getting my brand out there to my target market.

The traffic in substantial in comparison to Google AdWords and the cost is much less. Here’s a link to the custom graphic I created for this campaign.

Cody McLain –MindHack.com –Twitter

I find having a dedicated person who’s sole job is content syndication helps get me visitors from around the web.

Simply setup accounts and find niche communities to post on.

Whether be places like Reddit or even small forums, it’s a great way to share what you have to say and ultimately increase inbound traffic from around the net.

Carol Amato –CarolAmato.com –Twitter

I have grown to the understanding that the most successful people on earth are proactive – they are able to create or control situations, and they don’t just sit and wait for things to happen.

Bloggers need to be proactive: displaying action and result oriented behavior. We don’t have to be on the waiting end as we can cause things to happen in our favor, producing desired results.

http://www.carolamato.com/how-to-be-proactive-and-grow-your-blog-exponentially/

Nicholas Scalice –EarnWorthy.com –Twitter

You can have the best content in the world on your site, but if nobody knows about it, does it really matter?

Nope. That’s why you need to reach out beyond your site to pull people in. A great way to do this is by guest posting.

Try to leverage blogs that are already getting a lot of traffic and build a following slowly by really “wowing” those readers.

Marko Saric –HowToMakeMyBlog.com –Twitter

Most people forget that you need to be actively working on getting traffic to your site. Publishing content is not enough.

Nobody will know about you unless you go and tell them. This is why my best tip is to spend at least half of your time on promoting your content.

Join relevant conversations in forums, comment areas and social media. Email and contact relevant influencers and people relevant to your field.

Take every opportunity you have to showcase people the quality you provide.

Nick Loper–SideHustleNation.com –Twitter

My biggest traffic spikes have come from mentions on bigger media sites like The New York Times, Entrepreneur, and Learnvest.

But those mentions don’t happen overnight; they’re earned by consistently creating link-worthy content, developing relationships with journalists and other peers, and occasionally responding to HelpAReporter queries.

Sean Si –Seo-Hacker.com –Twitter

Guest posting is simply the best thus far.

Being able to tap into another blog’s audience with your thought leadership attracts a lot of eyes and loyalty.

Don’t just publish on your own blog. Take time to spread your content around.

Sue Anne Dunlevie –SuccessfulBlogging.com –Twitter

Blogger outreach is the best way to get traffic for your blog. T

ake time to connect with influential bloggers by commenting on their blogs, sharing their social media posts and tweets, and by linking to them in your blog posts.

Then create a longer blog post, like this Ultimate Guide, that answers the problems of your target audience.

Spend time after you are done writing the post on promoting the post. Ask the influential bloggers you have connected with to share it with their audience.

Benjamin Beck –BenjaminBeck.com –Twitter

Reddit is one of the largest most active websites in the world and they have a section or “sub-reddit” for almost anything.

If you can find a sub-reddit for your niche it can be a great way to drive lots of traffic to your site.

This post outlines how to generate traffic with reddit in a way that won’t get you trolled.

Steven J. Wilson – HighPoweredSeo.com –Twitter

The right community can quickly drive a ton of ‘targeted’ traffic to your site.

Just be sure to have an attention grabbing headline, a nicely put together intro to your post and the content to back it up.

Moosa Hemani –SeTalks.com –Twitter

I am not a genius who can generate traffic without content or relationships or social media connections.

My number one traffic generation tip will be to write controversial stuff that pull the trigger of engagement of your audience and they automatically start conversation.

Once you will write such sticky post, people will share it with their circle and if you are targeting the real and targeted visitors on the website, it will most probably go viral and attract great amount of traffic and possibly some conversions for the business.

Dave Evangelisti – StartGrowProfit.com –Twitter

Every niche has one or more forums that can be great sources of traffic.

Find active forums, provide relevant and practical advice to the user base, and build your credibility (and traffic!).

Learn more at http://www.startgrowprofit.com/promote-your-blog/

Kevin Duncan –BeABetterBlogger.com –Twitter

The best way to generate traffic to your blog is to introduce your writing to new audiences. Guest blogging for influential sites in your niche will bring new visitors to your blog.

Play your cards right, and you can turn these visitors into regular readers and email subscribers!

Logan Chierotti – LoganChierotti.com –Twitter

If you’re not generating leads that aren’t converting to sales there is no point in generating the traffic. Find a profitable niche and a targeted audience and make them your target group.

Use keyword specific tags in social media and unique keywords in pay per click and SEO to get visitors. I’ve found more often then not long tail PPC and SEO keywords generate more quality traffic then your average popular terms.

Use pay per click tests to find out what people are searching for and clicking on.

Jane Sheeba –ProBloggingSuccess.com/blog –Twitter

Blog commenting helps me make new connections; and it works like a mini form of guest blogging.

Depending on the quality of the comment you leave, you can expect great results.

Consistency is important though.

Jock Purtle –DigitalExits.com –Twitter

Nothing beats Google Adwords.

We have been getting great success for our ecommerce clients because of the track-ability of the ads to customer acquisition.

That being said I know many Adwords campaigns that are run inefficiently and are losing money.

Daniel Cuttridge – Auditalyze.com –Twitter

I believe we all know that every niche has an audience that are interested in one or more of the same things. In business, a lot of our audience are equally interested in productivity and this is why you see sites like Buffer taking advantage of that.

This can be utilized outside of content marketing as well, however, you have to engage with this audience on a platform that is outside the comfortable walls of your typical content marketers playbook…

Finding relevant forums, groups, sub-reddits, and other similar places that your audience hang-out or may frequent is extremely rewarding in terms of traffic. I mean, you guys have seen Matt’s traffic statistics right?

In order to be able to generate good traffic from these sources you have to get involved and build a good reputation. In essence, this doesn’t work when you spam or even if you put in a half-hearted effort.

Sophie Lizard –LizardCreativeChaos.com –Twitter

Guest blogging is still one of the best ways to bring new visitors to your site.

But it only works if you blog to serve your host’s audience – guest blogging is NOT the #1 SEO or marketing tactic, it’s simply a way to find new people you can help.

And if your guest post genuinely helps them, they’ll read your author bio and visit your site because they want to know if you’ve got more help to offer.

Here’s a start-to-finish walkthrough of guest blogging done right: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/guide-to-guest-blogging

Felix Tarcomnicu –ProOptimization.com –Twitter

Two simple tips here.. be everywhere and never stop testing.

If SEO works best for you, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do social media or email campaigns.

The moment you stop testing, your website starts failing. Be up to date with what works today because this is what matters the most.

Henneke Duistermaat –EnchantingMarketing.com –Twitter

My favorite traffic generation tip is to answer reader’s questions on your blog.

You’ll gain more traffic when people search for answers to the same questions online.

Mining blog comments and your email inbox is a great way to complement keyword research.

Devesh Sharma –Wpkube.com –Twitter

Participate in forums – this is one of the most effective strategies to generate traffic to your site.

While you can generate a good amount of traffic via forums, you can also take questions that are frequently asked by users and create a unique piece of content that will serve as reference.

Want to see how effective forums are, checkout the monthly traffic reports that Matthew has been publishing on this blog.

Erika Madden –Olyvia.co –Twitter

Instead of waiting to get your name on other people’s blogs in the form of guest blogging, bring the guests to you in the form of interviews.

If you do a good job, your interviewees will be eager to share the post with their own community. (Not only that, people naturally regard interviewers as having authority and importance — a big help to growing a following, especially if you’re just getting started.)

Gurwinder Singh –JustBlogTips.com –Twitter

The major pre-requisite for getting traffic to your blog or website is good, unique and detailed content.

And you should not always aim for getting traffic from Google only.

In fact, you must diversify your traffic into different streams so that if one stops working, you still have others.

The other traffic sources can be – Social Media Websites, YouTube, Slideshare, Email Marketing, Forums, Guest Posts, Paid Advertising and of course direct traffic.

Also do keep in mind that traffic generation isn’t exact science i.e. if one method is working for me, then it would work for you as well.

So always keep on trying new methods of obtaining web traffic.

Bonus Traffic Generation Tip> – Conduct expert roundups and interviews just like this one on your blog. This is the best way to get noticed by influencers and build a big audience within short time.

Rick Ramos –RickRamos.com –Twitter

Make most of your content evergreen!

Evergreen content is the type of content that lasts almost forever (it’s the polar opposite of trending news.)

This is the type of content that easily gets linked to and will bring in a steady stream of traffic to your site. Most of my site SEO traffic if to just a few evergreen articles and they will continue to be great traffic generators for years to come.

David Arrington –ProfitPursuits.com –Twitter

While external sources of traffic are clearly important, the most guaranteed traffic source is your internal list.

Focus on your email marketing strategy and then use a process of continual reengagement to get your subscribers coming back regularly.

Source: 23 Data-Backed List Building Strategies From Top Experts: http://profitpursuits.com/list-building-strategies

Venchito Tampon –DigitalPhilippines.net –Twitter

Do linker outreach once you publish your new post.

There are so many ways to drive relevant traffic to your website but one of the underrated techniques to bring valuable traffic to your brand is linker outreach.

Linker outreach is simply promoting your posts to interested bloggers/webmasters/influencers in your industry that can help you amplify your content.

The success of this approach lies on the caliber/quality of your content, recency of the post and relationships built with potential linkers. The more useful the content is, the better off the results will be.

Linker outreach is just one of my solid content promotion techniques. You can check out this post on Digital Philippines to learn other creative content promotion strategies (most of them you’re not familiar with).

Neil Patel –NeilPatel.com –Twitter

Write exceptionally good content and make sure to include customized graphics within your posts.

Blogging isn’t unique and everyone is doing it, but very few people go above and beyond with their content.

If you can be super thorough and detailed, your content will generate tons of traffic.

Zac Johnson –ZacJohnson.com –Twitter

One of my favorite methods for getting traffic to my sites is still through content marketing and ranking in the search results for long tail keywords.

New marketers and bloggers will try and rank for something like “blogging” in the search results, but that is so generic and wide range that it’s not only extremely hard to rank for, but it’s extremely un-targeted.

Instead you should be trying to rank for long tail keywords such as “how to make money with a blog” or “best ways to increase blog comments” — each of these are very specific and your audience will know exactly what they are going to get when they see your site in the search results.

You can see a walk through of how to generate traffic with long tail keywords in this article here.

Tobias Megathor – GrowthHackking.com –Twitter

This might seem a bit strange to you online guys, but growth hacking traffic doesn’t need to be 100% online.

For one client, I painted his web address on the back of his £100K Aston Martin and he got 7 leads all worth in excess of $2million. He paid me handsomely for this offline growth hack.

Online is so saturated. We need to get creative offline to grow our businesses.

Jason Chesters –DoSeoYourself.com –Twitter

The best methods that I have used for traffic generation on my blog are:

Guest post on other blogs in your niche. This method still works great as you get a spike in traffic at the same time as improving your SEO by obtaining a worthy back link. Another method is to do round up posts like this one. These kind of posts get shared a lot which drives more traffic to your site.

Other areas which I have yet to indulge in is ‘competitions’. I know Matt has run free comps on this blog and this can be a great way to get extra traffic! Here are some great methods that I used to increase my blog traffic by 96% in 1 month http://doseoyourself.com/increased-blog-traffic-1-month/

Ken Lyons – Measuredsem.com –Twitter

This one is for generating even more referred traffic so you don’t have to rely solely on Google.

• Look in Google Analytics to see where your referred visits are coming from, ie which sites are sending you the most traffic (prioritize any that have generated conversions)
• Grab the URLs and pop them into the landing page field in the Keyword Planner
• You’ll get a list of closely related keyword ideas; pop that list into a rank tracker (we use Authority Labs)
• Find the “sweet spot” keywords that specific URL ranks for (ie keyword rankings on page one or in the top five of page two) with decent search demand
• Fire links at that URL for some of those target, sweet spot keywords to try and get the page ranking even higher
• Enjoy even more referred traffic from that URL as it begins to rank higher in the SERPs

Tim Bourquin –AfterOffers.com –Twitter

We’ve found that working with other website owners to do “webinar trades” goes a long way to generating more traffic and more subscribers for our email list.

We reach out to other list owners in our vertical and ask if we can do a webinar for their audience. They can then also do one for our audience. The idea is that we will drive about the same number of new subscribers for each other’s email list.

This works even if your list is half the size of the other website owner’s list. You simply ask them to email enough of their list in order to drive a similar amount of sign-ups for each other’s webinar.

That is only part of the work. You then need to do a very valuable educational webinar for the other site’s audience.

You then each post a recording of the webinar with links back to each other on your sites. This results in a flow of traffic to each other after the event and SEO juice going forward as well.

Traffic Generation Wrap Up

So with all these traffic generation tips your probably suffering from information overload.

This is what you need to do next-

1. Take at least two proven traffic generation tips and apply them for your business. Do it within 48 hours, or you’ll forgot about this key task. We both know how postponing works nowadays, right?

2. Spread the word about this expert round up. We want more people to learn from these pro tips. We all benefit from a growing community.

3. Leave your traffic generation comments and questions below. There might be some additional information you’ll want to learn about.

Traffic generation is a large topic and nobody can master all of it, that’s why you have to focus only on a few traffic generation methods methods and combine them like never before.

So know you now how to generate traffic like the experts – what are you waiting for?