Are you the best kept secret in town? Do you have a beautiful website, but no visitors? Is it more tumbleweed than stampede? Well it’s time to change all of that as I will reveal the top three ways to get more traffic to your website starting today.

If you want to get more traffic to your website the first problem you face is that there is so much conflicting advice out there on the best way to do it. You probably heard about pay-per-click advertising, Google ads, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, article writing, blogging, etc. What of the all the opportunities out there are, the things that you should be focusing on to get more traffic to your website? And the trouble is, if you’re like most small business owners, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to sift through all the different options and figure out which are going to be the best methods for you. It can be like a full-time job just to generate more traffic to your website.

So let’s keep this simple. At the end of the day, there are only three ways to get more traffic to your website. You can either buy the traffic, you can borrow the traffic, or you can create the traffic. I’m going to take you through each of these in turn, in reverse order so you can figure out which is the best way for you to focus on.

First of all let’s talk about creating traffic. This is normally the best thing to start out doing if you’re new to your website, if you’re really figuring out what you’re selling, and you need to test your price points, and your conversion. And when you are creating traffic what this means is you’re probably going to have to put in more in terms of time, and energy, and creativity, but you’re not going to be risking any hard earned money to get more people to your website.

When it comes to creating traffic, what you’re really doing is finding out where your target audience is already hanging out, and then putting in place interest, and little bits of baits and tidbits to encourage them back to your site. For example, you could find an organization, or community where your target audiences hang out online, and go and post a blog, or guest blog on that place, and then have an invitation for people to come back to your site. Or it could be that you do this offline, so maybe you’ll go, and give a free talk somewhere, and then invite people to sign up for your tips, and advice on your website.

So, when you’re creating traffic you definitely have to put more effort into getting the traffic to you, but this type of traffic is very targeted, as long as you’ve really narrowed down who it is you’re targeting, and where they’re hanging out. And the good news about this is, is it’s going to take time, and energy, but it’s not going to cost you any money.

Now once you’ve started to do that, you can also go on to continually drive traffic back to your website which is what I did for the first five years, and it helped me generate a huge online business doing this.

After I had created the traffic initially, I used email marketing to get people back to my site over, and over, and over, and over. So, it’s not just creating a one time visitor, it’s about creating return visitors as well.

The next way that you can create traffic is you can borrow traffic, and what this means is you go, and find people who already developed a relationship with the people that you want to target, and you ask them to send them your way. This is also known as joint venture and affiliate marketing.

Now when you start out, a lot of people have questions about how this works, and you might be thinking well how on earth can I persuade someone who has a list to send those people over to my website?

Well it can be done, but you need to approach people in the right way. First of all, this is the absolute no no. Never ever just approach someone with a list, and say “Hey I’m launching this new product, will you promote it to your list?” That’s absolutely the worst way to approach a potential list owner. You want to approach them focusing on this, what’s in it for them? And what your list owner is going to be looking for is either that your product is complimentary, and one that they really be happy to endorse, because it benefits their customers, and or that there’s some type of financial payoff for them recommending it. And that’s how you borrow traffic.

Now the final way you can get traffic to your website is you can buy traffic. So this is where you do paid advertising. Now the one that most people know about is Google Adwords for generating page traffic, pay per click advertising; PPC. These days I get most of my paid traffic through Facebook, that’s where I do my pay-per-click advertising, and the reason Facebook works better for me with my audience is I can target right down to demographics.

So Facebook enables me to target women versus men, or a certain age group, or people with certain preferences. You can’t do that with Google, because with Google you can target people who are already looking for something, so the ad pops up after they’ve typed something into the search engine.

Either one may be best depending on the process that your client goes through as they are working through the process of thinking of becoming a client. So bottom line is are you selling something that people know they need, and are likely to come, and type a question into a search engine to try and find it? Or is it, you are selling something where you may first need to educate people that they need this product or service, in which case the pay per click advertising would probably work better for you.

So those are our three main ways of getting more traffic to your website. You can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can create it. What I would say about buying traffic is it’s best to do that after you’ve tested out your conversion strategy, and you know that when people come to your website they’re buying. If you don’t know that yet, if you haven’t had a chance to test out whether what you’re offering is really working, and something that people would buy, you’re probably better off starting with creating traffic.

And while you’re here you are very welcome to sign up to my email updates, I’ve got so much more to share with you, and would love to give you more tips, and advise on what you could do to be better in your business.