When it comes to the long-term traffic potential
of marketing strategies, content marketing and SEO will usually offer you the
biggest return on your investment. They naturally lend themselves to
compounding returns over time, and have virtually no risk - as long as you
execute them correctly. However, there’s one major disadvantage to these
strategies; they take a long time to set up and start returning a positive ROI.
Building SEO momentum takes months or years, and when you’re launching a new
site, you want traffic fast.
So what do you do if you want to get traffic
fast? There are a few options, each with advantages and disadvantages. These
are some of the outright fastest:
1. Guest Post. Guest posts serve
multiple functions, but there are two which make them a selling point for those
after fast gains. First, guest posts connect you with authorities who already
have established audiences. Take TechCrunch as an example - its readership is
in the millions, so if you can get your brand featured there, you can lean on
that visibility. Unfortunately, the more visible the publisher, the harder it
is to get featured, so set your sights on something smaller to start.
2. Build Your Social Media Audience. Social
audience building can be unpredictable, but if you have your priorities in
order, it’s an effective and fast way to scale your potential user base. Here’s
why: on social media, you can engage with users publicly and directly. You can
use content to start attracting an audience naturally or ads (more on those in
a moment) to funnel traffic directly, but more importantly, you can actually
engage with people.
3. Leverage Influencers.Remember
what I said about high-profile publishers being a shortcut to a wider audience?
Influencers basically work the same way, except you’ll be engaging with an
individual rather than hosting your client on an external site. You can find
influencers in your industry by crawling the social media world or finding one
through search.
4. Use Paid Ads. Paid
advertising is my least favorite of the strategies listed here, but it’s an
important option to mention. Why is it my least favorite? Because it has the
lowest long-term potential. You’ll pay upfront for a guaranteed stream of
inbound traffic to your site, which may be valuable, but once you withdraw that
budget, the ads are turned off and your stream becomes defunct.
Compare that to something like influencer
leveraging, which gives you a new relationship to draw upon in your industry,
or social marketing, where your audience sticks around (practically) forever.
Advertising is a good strategy that’s both fast and profitable, but it just
doesn’t have the potential growth or gains that organic strategies offer. With
that said, here are some good options for fast paid traffic:
- StumbleUpon ads
- Reddit ads
- Facebook ads
- Twitter ads
- LinkedIn ads
- Google Adwords
- Bing ads
5. Run Contests and Promotions. Contests
and promotions are somewhat like paid advertising in the sense that you’ll have
to make an upfront investment - usually in a hot consumer product, a gift card,
or something similarly valuable. Then, you ask your users to engage in some
behavior to be entered into the contest (such as liking or sharing your post on
social media).
Contests are powerful because they naturally
spread themselves - users like to share these opportunities, and it’s a good
way to get widespread visibility quickly. You might even have a long-term
benefit if the social users who engage with your contest end up following your
brand. The key is to find the right contest - one that’s original, valuable,
and interesting to your key demographics.
Remember that “fast” traffic isn’t always good
traffic, and it doesn’t always mean you’re getting a good return on your
investment. When it comes to the long-term return on every dollar spent, SEO
and content marketing beat paid advertising almost every time (assuming proper
strategic positioning). Think of it like buying seeds to grow your own
vegetables versus buying the vegetables directly from the store; with the right
time and care, your garden will return far more riches to your initial
investments, but sometimes you need a shortcut to tide you over. Try to keep
these short-term methods in balance with your long-term strategies to reap the
benefits of both.
