What source of traffic is higher quality - Facebook or Pinterest?

Regardless of your industry or product, we all want to increase the amount of traffic to our website. Right? After all, more visitors usually means more sales. The easiest way to increase website visitors is to pay-to-play. You can buy ads on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to send more targeted traffic. You can also pay Google to appear in the search results more often. Here are some ways to increase the number of visitors to your website which don’t require a huge budget. 1. Business Listings Sites like Foursquare, Google, Yelp, and Yellow Pages are great for driving more people to your website. Several years ago, HubSpot published a list of 50 local business directories to submit your business listing to. Check it out. These links will not help you for SEO purposes, since many of the actual hyperlinks are ‘no-follow’, but they still generate a great amount of human traffic (let’s not forget, humans click on links, too) 2. Create a Slideshare Slideshare, a service now owned by LinkedIn, is a like a traffic firehose. The service allows you to upload presentations (think about that PowerPoint presentation that you made last quarter for the talk you gave at the local Chamber). Visual marketing and corporate storytelling are huge this year (and will be for the next several years), having engaging slide decks on SlideShare will drive your targeted audience back to your website and increase your reach. If you need some inspiration, here are some examples of great PowerPoint or Slideshare designs. 3. Video There is a huge demand for video content right now. In fact, video posts generally out-perform text and image-based updates on Facebook. Moreover, most modern smartphones are packing a high-quality video camera anyway. Use your smartphone to record a series of videos answering common questions your customers have. Upload to your blog, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, SnapChat and Facebook (side note: upload the video directly to Facebook, it will get more reach than simply sharing a link to the video from another service). 4. Guest Blogging Guest blogging is writing content for another website in your industry. Just like you and your website, other brands are struggling to generate relevant content. Contact the owners of a complementary website and offer to write a high-quality blog post for them. Don’t be overly promotional (respect their audience and their platform). Again, you won’t get a ton of SEO benefit, but you will get exposure to their readers and benefit from that cross-promotion. 5. Interview Other Experts Chances are, you know other folks in your industry with an expertise or specialty. Interview them and post the transcript on your website. 6. Blog On Your Own Site Blogging — that is, regularly publishing high-quality content — on your own website is absolutely, without-reservation the best way to attract visitors to your website. Blogging works because search engines are always looking for the best possible content for their customers — the searchers. Search engines love fresh content that is relevant to a specific topic. By publishing this on your site, you are signaling to the search engines that you are an authority on that particular topic. 7. Evaluate Your Message Visitors are always asking WIIFM: “What’s In It For Me?” If you have some traffic coming to your website, but are not converting them into known leads (growing your email list, for example), then it is likely that you are not “speaking their language” and providing a clear unique proposition for them. Be very intentional about your language — and use words, terms, and phrases that your ideal audience will connect with. 8. Experiment with Pay-Per-Click Facebook and Google offer incredible pay-per-click programs. You can set a either a daily budget or a campaign budget and your ads will be shown to your selected audience. For as little as $5 per day, you can see how your message resonates with your intended audience and adjust accordingly. I usually see website traffic increase almost instantly when running pay-per-click ads. 9. Social Media Social media is a great “outpost” for your brand. It should be used for listening to the needs and frustrations of your ideal customers — not for self-promotion (there is a place for that, but that is in another article). Focus first on developing a relationship with your followers, ask questions, answer their questions, be helpful, and always be looking for ways to make their lives easier. 10. Website Analytics Install a free analytics tool like Google Analytics to start tracking where your existing visitors are coming from, what content is most popular, and how visitors are interacting with your site. This will give you key insights on what your audience is craving — publish more of that. Bonus: Make Several Pieces of Content from One Idea Don’t fall into the trap of using your content only once! Members of your audience consume content in different ways, from video to podcasts and infographics to text, be creative by re-purposing your content. For example: If you interview a partner within your industry, host the interview on Skype or Google Hangouts and record the video and audio. Pull out key quotes from the interview and schedule them as Tweets with a link back to the edited transcript on your blog. Hire a graphic designer to apply those quotes to an non-stock photo and share on Instagram or Facebook. You can also use a service like Canva. Next, save just the audio of the interview and make it available for offline listening. If the interview is especially long, break it into multiple parts and publish them over time. Assuming you publish 1-2 blog posts per week, this will give you content for your blog for 2 weeks. Recap: As you can see, it is entirely possible to generate 10-20 pieces of content from just one interview: 6-10 Tweets of quotes from the interview 6-10 images with text to publish on Instagram or Facebook 1-2 part video segments 1-2 blog posts with a text version of the interview 1 downloadable audio file for offline listening 1 Slideshare presentation recapping the interview Conclusion While the technical aspects of search engine optimization have changed over the years, the principles have not. If you continually optimize for your human visitors and establish yourself as a knowledgable authority in your field, you will see an increase in website traffic. Remember, Rome was not built in a day. Neither will your online empire; but with any combination of these tips, you will attract more traffic to your website.

Hey! That's a great question and of course there are many answers but I'll give you my two cents based on my expertise and hope it will help you on your way... If you want to drive traffic the fastest way possible, you can use various paid methods like Facebook Ads or Google Adwords. They are both very good tools and the cost per clic is quite low compared to other traditional methods of getting "eyes". I prefer these methods when starting out because SEO can take a long time and effort, while paid advertising can get you in front of the right people. You can choose specific demographics by age, interests, behaviors, etc and show your work to people who may actually be interested. It is important to have a purpose for all that traffic: think about how you are going to convert them to customers (ideally that is what you want). Then create a way for them to convert on your site. ONLY then, pay for traffic. As far as SEO goes, it is good to do it anyway because you'll reap the benefits later. Make sure you create quality content that people actually want to consume (read, watch, listen to, etc). I hope this helps, let me know if you need additional assistance.

Hi there 1) Define your story I'm not sure who your audience is, but getting users to write reviews means that they need to resonate with your story. In order to do that, you need to convey what you've built, why it's important, why it's likely to work, etc. In other words, you across all your channels, you need to be telling the story about the value you are creating in such a way that it resonates with your target audience so that they take a desired action e.g. writing a review. 2) Attention and trust The problem you have is that you don't have attention. Now it's not about being worthy or not, its about how you architect your communications so that your audience understands the worthiness and value of what you are doing - get this part right and everything will take care of itself. The other consideration is does your target audience know who you are? If not, then it's going to be a tough job and if they do know who you are, do they trust you and your story enough to engage with you? At the heart of every transaction is trust - if you don't have it, you need to get it 3) Ask I think it goes without saying that you need to ask first - if you don't ask they just won't do it. 4) Incentivise it Typically, users won't do anything unless there is something in it for them. Think about what incentives you can offer in exchange for reviews but remember that people are rarely motivated by money 5) Create an event around it People love events and they're a great medium to convey your story and to build a community around your platform. Happy to have a call with you to discuss further... Matt

I've done this on a small scale for my product, but it worked nicely, and I learned some useful techniques. I'd be happy to talk with you about the process, and also answer any other startup questions you might have. Best of luck, Lee

The first thing you should do (if not done already) is analyze your current traffic. You have to make sure a good percentage of your visitors are actually sticking around to either watch the video or at least enough to look at your other content. If this is not the case, then improving targeting for your ads might be your best bet. It is not just the quantity of the visitors but the quality that makes them worth it. 100,000 visitors that just bounce off immediately after arriving are worth less than 5,000 visitors that actually stay for the intended purpose. A visitor that is on your site for a minute is much more likely to see an affiliate link and/or ad than one that just exits after a few seconds. The next point would be looking at your site performance and formatting. If the site is slow to load, then people are more likely to exit as fast as they came in. Also, if they are there to watch a video clip and all the page is filled with ads everywhere, it does no good to the user experience. Finally, make sure the ads shown on the pages are either relevant to the content in question or relevant to the customer. Good Luck and let me know if you have any questions!