Top tips for organic traffic and conversions

I get this question a lot on my online marketing workshops in UK and in Thailand where I now live, and I tried to educate my pupils that there are a lot of poor people out there with hundreds of thousand, maybe millions of visitors to their site but they are just not sure how to convert the traffic to cash. Imagine you are on the board of Twitter, and each day the boss comes in in his ragged cheap suit, gathers all the board members and says:

“For the love of God we have half a billion users, can someone please help us come up with a way to monetize before the wife and even the dog leaves me”

Maybe monetization is not what you need; perhaps you are happy to just have a few thousand listening to what you have to say on your blog.

Businesses however need more traffic because more traffic leads to more chance of conversions, well it does if your site is easy to navigate , says exactly what you do, and is seamless to find out how to buy what you sell.

biz-find.co.uk is 2 years old and we reached 27,000+ visits this month (Oct 2014). The visits are targeted to business people, as the site is 100% business, yet the people stay an average of 3 minutes.

biz-finduk_stats

So what can you do as a business to get more traffic to your website?

First off: Plan exactly who your ideal client is; the idea of generalising has been time and time again proven to be NOT cost effective, we call it throwing mud at the wall marketing; as in throw enough mud and some will stick, ahaa, but wall owners have got smarter and now have anti mud walls!!

The most effective websites are ones that stick vehemently to their subject matter; there are some website owners out there who are very niche; like surfboards and their website traffic statistics will make you weep if you own a business!

As marketers we try to educate that consistency and faith are the brothers of success, for example I have a friend who runs a market stall in UK selling Asian artifacts, his stall is very busy in a market that struggles, his secret; he spent the first 3 years on the breadline, freezing each winter outside, whilst people walked past his shop day after day. Yet what he was doing was branding his business, people now know him as the ‘Thai statue and incense man’ and when people think incense, they know where he is, and he sells the odd curio whist they are there, he is the master of the upsell (that’s where the profit is).

The vast majority find out quite quickly that online marketing is front loaded, as in you have to do a lot of work first before you see the fruits of your labour, and it’s mostly about brand recognition, even Google has an algorithm that tries to see if you are trustworthy as in; Is your phone number on the home page? Do you have social media links clearly visible? Do you have your pages on the footer? XML map? Internal links?  Links back from other sites? Etc.

Even if you are selling low cost, small items immediately, don’t be shocked if it takes a few months a few good blogs, testimonials and good content before you get a single sale. If you sell a consultation, it’s going to take longer than a few months, and your search engine ranking will depend on the competition for the key phrase you are aiming at, if you sell car Insurance well I think you will need a few thousand blogs to get anywhere near the top of Google!

The search engines are moving further and further away from keyword dependency each day, as this really is not the best way to give people what they are looking for so your content better be good and consistent.

We have a simple system we teach in our online training and the system is such:

On our first day we learn all about what keywords people search for, and make notes and consistently keep abreast of keyword research then we purchase a keyword rich domain, because search engines look to see if you own the domain and reward you. A few years back all you needed was a keyword rich domain and you were top on Google regardless if your content was spurious to say the least, now it’s purely vanity. For example; If you sell social media marketing in Thailand, it sounds good to say you own www.socialmediamarketingthailand.com, but that’s about all it is now if you have no content!

We then create a hosting account, and build your blog site live, with all the best SEO plug-ins to add your keywords to the source code. Blogs work better if they are on a separate website to your main corporate website; this is great training as you can see how easy it is to build a new website for yourself whenever new trends emerge in your industry. The cost to build a website when you own your own hosting? Less than $20!  Eg, domain $10 and one month hosting $9

We learn how to write great content that people love to read, how to add the keywords into your heading and body without ruining the read, then how to add these great articles to your blog, and how to add images and videos. This how you become a leader in your field, develop trust and brand recognition, without which you have no chance of selling online, whether that be a lucky charm, to an appointment to sell a luxury yacht,

Social media plays a huge part in branding your business online so we create all your social media pages and sites live. The system then is:

Write and publish your blog 500-700 words with a great compelling headline and then publish the link to all your social media with a call to action pointing (hyper-linked) to your main corporate website, which is called back linking, of course you need to get on other websites as well, authority sites mind, with a topic not far from your own, this we cover on the workshop also, as well as how to grow your social media with the right people fast.

The system should take you two hours to write, publish and share your blog to maximum audiences. This is how you grow your website traffic, in my experience one blog a week will take around three months to start getting good traffic to your site, two blogs a week half that again, more than three blogs a week, and its overkill I am afraid, so you have to be patient

 Sure P.P.C. works and Facebook advertising, but you have to learn to get your traffic up yourself and get your conversion of website visits to sales right first, and then I will show you how to double that with paid traffic!

Netmedia are Thailand’s leading online marketing consultants so contact Netmedia for help with website conversions.