How to drive more traffic to a new website

by | Growth tips | 2 comments

I see this topic come up time and time again.

A lot of the advice for driving traffic to a new site or brand is wonderfully vague.

It’s bullshit ideas and aspirational goals like…

  • Publish better content than the competition
  • Add internal links
  • Secure backlinks

And just like that, in 6-12 months you have a chance of ranking.

Don’t know about you, but, I’m not a fan of having to wait 6-12 months for feedback on whether or not my content really is better than the competition.

The fast way of generating more traffic

I’ve wasted years of time and effort following the “do good work and wait for Google to recognise it” model.

But as soon as I changed my mindset and approach to get quick results, I saw immediate improvements in all key metrics.

And by key metrics I mean…

  • Traffic to key pages on my site
  • Conversion rate from traffic to free email subscribers
  • Conversion rate from free email subs to paying customers

Here’s the simple, but highly effective promotion strategy Dan and I have been using to grow new articles to 100+ visits per day in under 2 weeks.

Manual content promotion works in the short term

While you’re waiting for the Google gods to smile on you, there’s only one real way to drive more traffic.

Promote like your life depends on it.

Here’s a quick snapshot of a post’s traffic from social media alone.

This post was published just a few days before and had no real chance of ranking yet.

Not huge numbers, I know.

but to get that traffic quikcly after hitting publish is no easy feat.

Here’s a basic outline of our content promotion strategy to drive immediate traffic to new sites and blog articles.

Our content promotion startegy

Every piece we publish has a number of elements we can pull for promotion. We’ll go through the piece and select things like…

  • Custom images
  • Key ideas / opinions
  • Quotes
  • Simple step-by-steps we can turn into shareable bullet points
  • Anything that stands out as a value bomb

Then we’ll pick one of those elements every day and share it across multiple platforms.

The general process looks like this.

  1. Share to Twitter as a short thread (like this 👇)

2. Reformat and share on LinkedIn (like this 👇)

3. Share a slightly amended post to Facebook groups

Make sure that you focus on value over a straight promo though.

Here’s one I shared that went well.

If you want to join a good Facebook group focused on growth, check out our group here.

4. Share as a relevant Quora answer (like this 👇)

5. Reshare articles to Medium

You can check out my Medium account here.

I put all of my articles behind their paywall so I’m eligible to also earn money from them.

6. Submit to various syndication sites

So I also submit the articles to a few places including…

  • HackerNoon
  • IndieHackers
  • Growth Hackers

Then we repeat that process every single day.

It takes us about an hour a day to do, but it helps propel traffic to articles that would otherwise stagnate.

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2 Comments

  1. Jason

    This is one of the best articles I’ve read on marketing in a while. Simple and direct advice. This content promotion strategy is systematic and can be part of regular work flow. How have you seen your traffic increase. You mentioned a hundred visits a day? Has that grown since writing this article?

    Reply
    • Pete Boyle

      Thanks Jason,

      Overall traffic has increased and continues to do so.

      The article featured has seen a dip in traffic as the daily promos have moved on to other pieces now. However, generating that initial interest through daily promotions has ensured that, even after a month or two, we get consistent traffic to a piece that could have otherwise gone unnoticed for 6-12 months.

      Reply

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