Yclas friends
Today is a great day to talk about growing your site. Whether you started a few months ago, yesterday, or want to start in the next few days, today I want to share with you the strategies needed to grow from 0 to 10k visitors monthly
I don't know how much expertise you have in online business, marketing, or customer acquisition nevertheless here is a series of "shots" you can easily do, trust me. For that reason forget about statements such as "I have no marketing team" or "I am 100% dedicated to customers, I have no time for other stuff".
Let's start!
1.- Who is your target audience?
When we are talking about the audience it's more than 'Male/Female' or 'From 20 to 35 years old. It's more about their interest, their behaviors, their hobbies...etc. Moving to 10k monthly visitors means nothing if you don't know your target group.
This short checklist will help you to determine your target audience:
- What do they like offline?
- What are their interests and behaviors (online and offline)
- How do they search on the internet?
2.- Research what your target audience wants
In the exercise of knowing your audience, you must be clever and smart. Use the biggest and free resource you have: the internet.
Let's take an example. We are going to create classified sites dedicated to Buying & Selling Phones. Now we know that we are looking for people that love phones and that are always buying and selling. We can move through Reddit's groups (subreddits) searching for comments and posting related to second-hand mobiles or just mobiles.
We searched for Smartphones:
And selected a topic (randomly for the experiment).
What conclusions can we make from this post? People are doubting about mobile insurance, they don't know how it works or maybe don't know what it covers.
This was a test with Reddit even though you can find thousands of resources through the internet, it´s best advised to look at big websites like Facebook. In this case search for groups/pages of Smartphones (your niche). It doesn't necessarily need to be a Social Network, you can also use Amazon or eBay. Go to those sites and search for 'smartphones' or a specific smartphone: Samsung Galaxy Note II
Check for the most commented device, and once again as we did on Reddit, look into the comments. You will find really useful insights to perform and improve your project or business and spot new opportunities.
3.- Rocking content for your audience
At this point, you have a lot of insights and visions, now it's time to give your audience what they want. Create a series of rocking resources or blog posts about your audience's concerns. Coming back to Reddit's example, where they were talking about mobile insurance. Why not start with something like this:
Or maybe something like this:
4.- Create effective and impacting headlines
I heard so many people saying that their conversions and open rate in newsletters and blog posts are poor. But everything starts with a creative and powerful headline.
If your headline is poor and not engaging, people will not click on it or read it. Even with awesome content, being catchy and effective starts from the headline.
To achieve virality in your headline, here are some tips to follow:
- Use "epic" adjectives: Kickass, Free, Awesome, Ultimate, Useful, Valuable, Great, Fantastic, Essential, Epic, Best...
- Use numbers: "Top 10 best smartphones", "From 0 to 10k visitors a month" The Essential Guide to Top 1 on google"
- Get attractive, use some smart words like Reasons, Principles, Ways, Ideas, Lessons, Secrets, Tricks.
- What, Why, How, When: Use them as the start, such as "How to get the most valuable smartphone insurance", "When to sell your awesome Smartphone". They usually create a call to action to click and discover the answer to the question.
5.- Easy to share, easy to get
Now that you have done the harder part, you need to reach your audience (and that's the harder part). We are going to set an easy way to share your content. With Yclas you have social sharing buttons with widgets. Enable these after every single post, item posted by a user, or any related new content. You can select to set it on the sidebar, header, or footer, but the most effective way is as easiest as you can. Visible for everybody, just a click away to million users.
6.- Auto read Strategy
You might be thinking and worried about the possibility that users will find you, click and read your content and then leave your website. This happens every day but not just to us, to every single website. Just know that both Big and small companies will have residual traffic.
The good news here is that we have some tricks for you to keep people reading, and even take action.
This is the Auto read strategy, people who want to read your content, and take action because they know that content is useful. Welcome to Newsletters and Mail lists.
Creating a Newsletter strategy is not easy. First, you need to get relevant email addresses, then send useful content that pushes people to read and take action. the most common action is to create a newsletter sign-up bar and get emails in exchange for an incentive.
For example, (for our smartphone example), we would regularly create posts about phones, smartphones online shops, insurance, etc... But if we would ask users for their emails in exchange for let's say Coupons code on your site (discounts), a Free eBook about "How to sell your smartphone in 1 day", or a series of video-course talking about "Tips&tricks for iPhone" or Tips&Tricks for Samsung Galaxy", they would be more willing to give away their email address.
Just following these effortless steps, you will be able to build a strong email list.
7.- Influencers
This might be difficult at the first point, but once you are comfortable with it, it is easy. Influencers are people that have many followers, because of their fame, notoriety, or some other reason. Those followers will read, retweet, like, comment or even climb a mountain (I'm joking) if their influencers tell them to do it.
Taking action and getting noticed by influencers is to add content they will talk about normally and try to reach them via cold email or Tweeting them.
Example: You want to target Michael Nicosia (He doesn't exist it is just an example). He is a smartphone influencer.
You wrote an awesome post about smartphone insurance, including a text or maybe a trick Michael did in the past. For example, he normally reinstalls the ROM of his new device after purchasing it.
Then create a cold email or a tweet: @Mnicosia I mentioned you in my today's post (link to post), hope you like it!
An average of 25% of influencers Will retweet or reply to you, which means, all their audience will get your message via their favorite influencer. ;)
8.- The viral virus formula
Share your content in all the ways you can.
- Facebook groups
- Linkedin groups
- Google Communities
- Instagram, use as many hashtags as you can!
- Online communities: Quora or Reddit
- Use Disqus
- Comment post on big online publishers related to your post
Don't try to sell them directly your content. Something more smooth is always welcome: 'hey here is my new post: (link) read it'. VS 'I would like to contribute to the community with a series of valuable content and help others to...' (depending on the group you will put here something different) (link to your post).
9.- REPEAT
Don't be tired. I bet following these strategies you will get noticed out there. People will start replying, searching, or asking you. This is good news.
10k visitors a month is nothing if you follow and improve all the strategies mentioned above. You will see that in a few months you are getting more than 10k visitors and your next milestone will be 100k/month.
Feel free to ask me if you want to know more or have any doubts!
