5 Real Ways To Drive Organic Traffic To Your Website

Want to learn the 5 ways that I’ve proven how to drive traffic to your website??

You’ve come to the right place.

How’s it going?

My name is Connor Gillivan. Pleasure to meet if we haven’t already.

I’ve been marketing for my company,?FreeeUp.com, for over 3 years now…testing strategy after strategy trying to find the ones that knock it out of the park and drive us consistent traffic over the long run.

I’ve read growth hacking books, I’ve had coffees with SEO experts, I’ve read?NeilPatel,?Backlinko, and listened to the?Marketing School?podcast.

But the most important part of my learning has been actually testing each strategy within my business.

And when I say “test,” I mean actually spending months integrating it into our marketing strategy and measuring results using Google Analytics.

You should only be spending your time on marketing efforts that actually drive traffic. If they aren’t bringing you potential customers in the short and long run, how is it helping your business to grow?

The answer, it’s not…and you should stop doing it.

Over the past 3 years, I’ve developed a list of?5 marketing strategies that are driving the majority of the traffic?to my company’s website and this personal blog.

They’re marketing tactics that all of the other top marketers online teach about. It’s nothing too out of the box. It’s just all about how you apply it to your business and how you’re able to focus on consistency.

In this article, I’m going to outline the 5 marketing hacks that I’ve used to drive millions of views to my company’s website over the past 3 years.

Today, these marketing strategies drive over 30,000 users to FreeeUp.com on a monthly basis.

If you can take this list and focus on building them into your marketing strategy, you will be taking big steps towards driving more traffic to your website.

Without further ado…

#1: Podcast Interviews

When I first started learning about marketing online, I never thought that podcast interviews would have such an impact.

I knew what podcasts were, but I had no idea how much value they could add to a website’s SEO rank and the traffic generated to the site.

Here’s what it’s all about.

You are an entrepreneur. You have a story to tell. Sometimes about your experiences. Sometimes about your business. Usually it’s a combo of both.

Here’s mine.

Hey, what’s up? I’m Connor Gillivan. I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. While a kid, I used to make pen toppers and sell them to kids in my school. In high school, I started a lawn mowing business and built it up to a consistent 15+ clients each week. In college, I was obsessed with business and also traveling. I found an opportunity to travel to an impoverished area of South Africa and work with people on social entrepreneurship. I took the opportunity and it changed my entire outlook on life. Shortly after, I helped start a business selling textbooks and products on Amazon.com. In 5 quick years, I helped scale it to over $25 million in total sales with a team of over 60 people located all around the world. In 2015, I started FreeeUp.com to make it easier for business owners to hire top freelance talent online. I was frustrated with the way the other platforms were doing it and I wanted a better way. Today, I’m the CMO of the company, I love learning about marketing, and I’ve helped us to grow to a $10 million run rate. I love what I do and I love talking about entrepreneurship.

You take that story, you find relevant podcasts where they talk about topics you know about, and you reach out to the podcast host asking to have you on their show.

You go on the show, talk about your story, answer questions that they have, and give a pitch about your business.

Once the podcast is published, thousands of people hear it and they head to your site. The podcast host also creates a page where you get a high quality backlink to your site. And they also promote you on social media exposing your business to even more people.

The beautiful thing about podcasts? They don’t disappear. You can record a podcast in 2016 and, unless the podcast shuts down, you’ll have that link back to your site and a traffic source for years.

Everyone has a story. Get passionate about yours and share it with the world.

#2: Writing guest articles

Another low hanging fruit that I didn’t know would be so valuable when I first started in the industry.

The key to writing guest articles is making sure that you establish your credibility as a writer.

Here’s how it works.

You own a business. You are an entrepreneur. You know about a specific topic or industry really well.

You turn that all into a short pitch as to why you are credible.

Then you find publications within your industry, you find the person in charge of their content, then you reach out asking if you can contribute a guest article to their site.

It may look something like this.

Hey James, how’s your day going?

Love the content that you’re putting out on the eCommerce Manifest blog. I started my first eCommerce business in 2009 and have been in the industry ever since. My company today, FreeeUp, still works with lots of eCommerce companies.

I’d love the opportunity to write a guest article for you on a topic within eCommerce. I know a lot about Amazon, drop shipping, eCommerce marketing, and Shopify.

Are you currently accepting guest articles for your blog? I promise to keep it 100% value adding.

It would make my week if I was able to write this article for you.

Cheers,

Connor Gillivan

You won’t get a response from everyone, but for the ones you do, you gain an opportunity to show your expertise through the article and then most guest articles will allow you to add a personal bio.

In the personal bio, you can talk about your business and link back to it so that anyone reading that likes the content can go check out your site too.

That backlink strengthens your SEO and provides another source where you could bring traffic into your site.

Here?is a list of websites that accept guest articles:

#3: Partnerships

Building out a network of partners when growing your company can significantly help you gain more traffic to your website.

You want to look for other companies in your industry that you’re not directly competing with.

The goal is to get in front of their customers by offering to give them the same access to your audience.

Tit for tat.

Once you find some companies that look like good partners, find the person at the company in charge of partnerships or marketing, and reach out seeking a partnership.

If the person gets back to you, it’s common that they’ll ask, “what type of partnership are you looking for?”

When this happens, you can answer in a number of different ways.

But the one that I’ve found to be best when starting a new partnership, is to strike up a co-marketing partnership.

This means that you’re going to market each other’s company to your respective community.

This can happen through newsletter exchanges, blog article exchanges, creating video content together, and social media promotions.

When you create on of these types of co-marketing partnerships, you set up a relationship where you can gain new traffic and customers to your site.

A way to add the cherry on the top of the partnership is to offer a referral program where the partner earns money for all of the customers that they send to you and that start billing in some way with you.

It’s a great way to say “thank you” to your partners and to keep the partnership alive.

My rule of thumb for partnerships: Try to achieve 1 new co-marketing activity each quarter.

I’ve found that if you try to do more, someone is going to fall through on the promise.

Each quarter gives both of you ample time to put it together within your business to make sure that you hold up your end of the stick.

As you build out a group of partners, you add more links back to your site, more people thinking about you as they talk to their customers, and more chatter on social media.

It all leads to more traffic to your website.

For more about building strategic partnerships, check out?this article?on Entrepreneur.com.

#4: Influencer Relationships

You may be asking, “what is the difference between a partnership and an influencer relationship?”

They sound pretty similar, don’t they?

So, in reality, they are very similar, but the marketing strategy is slightly different and the way that you treat the relationship is very different.

An influencer is someone that has a strong presence on social media online.

Think of Justin Bieber. Youtube sensation.

In business, think of someone in your niche that you see everywhere and that has a large following of people listening to their content.

That’s an influencer.

Influencer’s are amazing to build relationships with because they have a group of people (hopefully your ideal customer) that listens to them, follows their content, and takes their advice when it is offered.

If an influencer says “jump”, their most loyal followers tend to say “how high?”

As a business owner, you can tap into that ability to create action that influencers have.

Here’s how it’s done.

Look through your industry and find people have large groups of people following them.

Here’s a few hints:

• The owner of a large Facebook group that focuses on your niche
• Someone that writes regularly for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, etc.
• The owner of a popular blog within your niche
• The podcast host of an internationally known podcast
• A business coach within your industry
• Someone that owns a very popular course on a site like?Udemy?in your industry

Find these types of people and work to get in touch with them.

It’s much easier said than done.

Influencers have hundreds of people reaching out to them every day so you really need to make your outreach count.

From my experience, I’ve found using social media to be one of the best ways.

Connect with them on LinkedIn. Find them on Facebook and shoot them a message. Start following them on Twitter and eventually shoot a message to them.

Influencers tend to live on social media so it’s a great place to get in touch with them.

Forget about email…they get too many every single day. Your chances are much lower.

Once you catch someone’s attention, one of the best ways to gain exposure to their community is by hosting a Facebook live together talking about your story, your expertise, and answering questions their community may have.

When you do that, you gain a new audience coming to your site.

As you develop the relationship further, you can ask them to be involved in your referral program too.

When they get involved in this, and if you’re offering a solid product/service, some influencers can really get behind you and refer, refer, refer.

Definitely takes time and a lot of networking, but can make massive impact in the long run.

#5: Creating Consistent High Value Blog Content

Everyone, almost everywhere in the world is going to have access to the Internet soon.

One of the most recognized companies for most people is Google…the ability to search and get immediate results.

As you grow your business, one of the absolute best long term drivers of traffic is going to be Google.

How do you gain your presence on Google?

You create high value content that answers real questions and provides real value to what people are looking for.

I’ll leave the really nitty gritty of SEO keyword research and targeting for another article, but I’ll say that the earlier you start creating strong content, the better. Also?refer here?for more on SEO keyword research.

Here’s how you can easily start.

If you’re using WordPress to build your company website, download the?Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.

This is how you’ll make sure your articles will rank well for SEO.

Next is to find keywords that people are searching often online.

To do this, download the Google Chrome extension called?Keywords Everwhere.

Go to Google and search something, “seo keyword research.”

Right below the search bar, you’ll see a few figures. The first tells you how many monthly searches this specific search term gets on Google.

It’s an estimate, but it will give you an idea of how many people are searching.

Find keywords where there is some traffic coming to the search keyword.

Write blog articles centered around specific keywords and make sure that the articles actually add value.

Aim for the articles to be 2,000+ words long…Google likes the longer articles that really break down the question from the person searching.

Publish it on your blog and create a consistent schedule.

Maybe 1 per week to start. Just make sure that it’s consistent.

Once you publish the article, create a way to get it out to people so they can read it.

Maybe some of these:

• Post on all your social media channels
• Send out in your news email newsletter
• Send it out to your partners and ask if they’d be willing to share
• Go to?Quora, find questions that match with your article, and refer people to check it out
• Post it on?Medium.com?so their community can read it
• Post it on your personal LinkedIn profile
• Post it in relevant channels on?Reddit?to get feedback from people

The more people you can get it out to, the better.

Do that over a consistent stretch and you’ll start to see organic traffic coming into your site on a regular basis.

Over time, you may even start to rank for some keywords on Google bringing in lots of traffic.

Look at magazines (Entrepreneur, Inc, Forbes, Fast Company, etc.) to get inspiration for your titles.

You want something that is going to catch the reader’s eye and pull them in to read your article.

Keep track of the organic traffic that you’re getting from your articles using?Google Analytics.

Conclusion

These 5 strategies drive the most organic traffic to my company’s website on a regular basis right now.

But it took me 3+ years to come to these 5.

I must have tested 40+ different strategies to find what worked best.

I still run some of them that generate enough traffic to make it worth it, but I also had to nix a lot of the strategies because they weren’t working for my company.

Now that doesn’t mean that they can’t work for you.

If you’re just starting your business and are getting into digital marketing, I recommend educating yourself and creating a master list of all the possible strategies that you could try out.

If you do your research right, you should be able to easily come up with at least 50 different strategies to drive traffic to your website.

As you start your business, slowly work your way through them, keep the ones that are working, pause the ones that aren’t, and keep the train moving forward.

Over the course of a number of years, you should have a marketing machine that is regularly driving hundreds of new people to your website on a regular basis.

Blog articles. Podcasts. Partnerships. Influencer relationships. Organic traffic. Social media mentions. Reviews on forums and review sites. Chatter on Quora.

You’ll be everywhere that you need to be getting in front of your ideal customers reminding them about how you can help them.

What traffic generation strategies are you finding to work best??