Sure, I had a great product in a growing industry, but I lacked the number one thing a website needs to succeed: traffic. That's when I started googling things like "how to get more traffic" and "increase website traffic." Unfortunately, most of the advice that I read didn't work. You know the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Create a Facebook page, start a blog, share your content on social media. And look, this kind of advice isn't horrible or anything, but it's not going to send thousands of targeted visitors to your site. Why, because everyone in the world is using these exact same strategies. So after trying dozens of different tactics I decided to try something new.
Specifically, I set out to test a bunch of different traffic techniques myself. It wasn't easy but over time I discovered a handful of untapped traffic techniques that actually worked. And once I started using these techniques my traffic shot through the roof. Hey Mom, I'm getting so much traffic. Your boy's going to be famous. And now it's time for me to reveal these proven techniques and show you exactly how to use them to get more traffic to your site. So let's jump right in with technique number one, the upside down guest post. Here's the deal, when most people read your guest post they completely skip the author bio section and I can't blame them. Most author bio boxes are buried at the bottom of the page like this, which is a huge problem. If people don't see your link in your author bio they're not going to visit your site. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this problem, the upside down guest post. Here's the step by step process.
First, write an awesome guest post just like you normally would. Awesome guest post, done. Next, include helpful resource sections throughout the post. These sections should link to two to three useful resources on the topic you just covered, here's an example. Finally, include your content as one of the helpful resources. For example, here's a guest post that I published a while back. As you can see, I strategically linked out to my content as one of the resources to check out. And that link brought in 78% more traffic than my author bio link. Pretty cool. And that leads us to strategy number two, use "Click to Tweet" links.
This is one of the best ways to get more traffic through social media. In fact, click to tweet links are one of the main reasons that this post from my blog has over 6000 social media shares. With that, let me show you how click to tweet links work. First, find something tweetable in your content. This could be a technique, strategy, quote or statistic. For example, this post from my blog listed a bunch of list building strategies. So I considered each strategy on the list "tweetable". Next, create a click to tweet link. To do that just head over to clicktotweet.com and write your tweet and the tool will generate a special link for you. Finally, add that link to your content. Whenever someone clicks on the link they get a prewritten tweet for easy sharing. It's that easy. Moving right along to our third technique, publish more list posts. There's no way around it, when it comes to driving traffic to your website, list posts work great.
And there's evidence to back this up. BuzzSumo recently analyzed a million articles to see which types of content worked best. And they found that list posts crush other content formats. As you can see in this chart, list posts get six times more shares than how-to posts and 40 times more shares than infographics. And when I look at my own content, I notice the same thing. List posts generate a ton of traffic. For example, this massive list of SEO tools is one of the most successful pieces of content I've ever published.
To date this list post has generated over 18,000 shares, 900 comments and 331,000 visits. With that, it's time for technique number four, overhaul and upgrade old blog posts. This simple strategy landed me 50.95% more traffic in seven days. Here's exactly how I did it. First, I found a piece of content on my site that was out of date. And I found this guide on my blog that was really outdated. Next, I updated and improved the post. Specifically I added new screenshots, sprinkled in new strategies and techniques and eliminated old strategies that didn't work anymore. Finally I updated the post to make the changes live. And just like that traffic to that page shot up like a rocket ship and this wasn't a fluke. I recently followed a similar process with this post. This time, instead of just updating the content I updated it and relaunched it like a brand new post. So I shared the post on social media and sent out an announcement to my email subscribers.
Which lead to a significant boost in traffic, including almost 5000 visitors in one day. So let's keep it moving with technique number five, add "Share Triggers" to your content. In my experience content largely succeeds or fails based on one factor: whether or not the content has share triggers. So, what are share triggers? Share triggers are things that you include in your content that push people to share it.
A lot of these principles were first discovered by behavioral scientists like Dr. Jonah Berger and Dr. Katherine Milkman and they have proven in the lab, what I discovered through trial and error. When you include share triggers in your content, people are significantly more likely to share and link to it. For example, one of the most powerful share triggers is known as social currency. Social currency is the idea that we share things that make us look good. Looking good. And this share trigger is a large part of the reason that this infographic that I made for a client a few years back did so well.
In fact, this infographic generated thousands of targeted visits in the first two days. Now there are dozens of reasons this infographic did so well, from the design to the content promotion campaign. But a good chunk of it's success was due to one simple thing: it contained the social currency share trigger. I'll explain. At the time I made this infographic, lots of people were up in arms about inflation. And my content backed up their rants with solid data. So every time someone shared my infographic, it made them look good. In other words, it boosted their social currency. So they shared it, again and again. In fact the infographic even got featured in google news. And it's all thanks to the social currency share trigger. Let's dive right into technique number six for getting more traffic, go on podcasts. Podcasts are blowing up right now. In fact, one survey found that 24% of Americans regularly listen to podcasts. Does that mean you should grab the nearest microphone and start a podcast, no. Instead, I recommend going on other people's podcasts as a guest. This strategy works so well that I try to go on at least two podcasts every month.
In fact, over the last few years I've appeared on over 75 podcast episodes. And these episodes have brought me tens of thousands of visitors. For example, I once got 984 laser targeted visitors from a single podcast episode. As a bonus you usually get at least one backlink in the show notes which can help you rank higher in Google. Let's move right along to technique number seven, create predictably viral content. Is there a formula for creating content that goes viral, no. If there was, everyone would use it. That said, there are four things you could do to increase the odds that your content goes viral. First, viral content tends to contain lots of visuals. This can be a bunch of images, or an infographic, or a video. The type of image doesn't really matter.
The important thing is that you use visuals in your content. Why? Industry studies show that image rich content gets 94% more social shares compared to content that's nothing but text. Second, viral content tends to have a high utility. Utility simply means that your content is useful in some way. Maybe you show people how to seed broccoli. Or maybe you teach people how to nail their job interview. Either way, research shows that extremely practical content has a very high chance of going viral. Third, long-form content tends to go viral more often than short articles and blog posts.
Like I mentioned earlier in this video, BuzzSumo recently analyzed a million articles. Well in that same study, they found that long-form content tends to get significantly more shares and backlinks than short posts. In fact, as you can see, content that's at least 3000 words gets 208% more shares than short articles. I've noticed the same thing, myself. For example, here's a long-form article from my blog, a giant list of SEO techniques. This post weighs in at a staggering 6,525 words. And the simple fact that my post is insanely long is a big reason that it's been shared thousands of times, and those shares have sent boatloads of traffic to my website.
Lastly, viral content needs an initial push to get going. Why? Well according to wordpress.com 2 million blog posts come out every single day. So for your content to stand out, you need to promote it. For example, entrepreneur and backlinko reader Chris Gimmer, published this post on a site a while back, and it went viral. In fact, that single piece of content generated 17,000 visitors to his site in one day. And it wouldn't have happened if Chris didn't promote his content on sites like reddit, which led to hundreds of visitors, within hours. Let's keep things rolling with technique number eight, post on social media at strategic times. So, CoSchedule recently analyzed the best times to post on social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.
So, what did they find? They discovered that these are the best times to post on each network. And now it's time for our last tip, get more traffic with content transformation. Content transformation is simple. Instead of starting from scratch, convert one of your articles into another format, like an ebook, video, infographic or podcast. For example, I published this case study on my blog a while back, as you can see, this post generated lots of social shares and comments. But I knew that I could squeeze even more value out of this content. So I turned that post into a YouTube video. That single video has over 90,000 views and has brought me hundreds of website visitors. All from a piece of content that I published years ago.
You could republish your older content on sites like LinkedIn and Media. For example, I published this study of YouTube ranking factors on my blog about a year ago. And I republished that same piece of content as a LinkedIn article, which along with my other LinkedIn posts, led to a decent chunk of targeted traffic. That's the power of content transformation. Now before we end this video I want to show you a cool bonus technique, steal your competitors traffic sources. Imagine that you can see exactly where your competitors get their traffic from. That would be a goal of mine, right? Well your competitors probably aren't about to send you their Google Analytics password.
Fortunately, you don't need it. That's because you can see all of their top traffic sources for free with SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb not only shows you a nice overview of the sites traffic, but exactly where they get that traffic from. So, what can you do with this information? For example, let's say that you noticed that one of your competitors gets a big chunk of their traffic from guest posting on a particular site. Well you can guest post there too. Or let's say they're driving lots of visitors from YouTube, it might be time to set up a YouTube channel. You get the idea. Either way, with this approach you don't need to wonder what the best traffic sources in your niche are. Instead, you get a list of sites that you can get targeted traffic from. Let's end this video with one more quick bonus tip, drive traffic from forums. Forums are a very underrated source of traffic. When you become an active member of a forum, you built a funnel. A funnel that brings people back to your website.
Let me walk you through a real life example. When I first got started with the Backlinko blog, I was starting from scratch. I had zero followers, zero visitors and zero email subscribers. And I knew that SEO and social media can be great ways to get traffic but they take time to kick in. So, to give my traffic a head start I became an active member of a popular marketing forum.
I answered questions that people asked on the forum, and I even posted some original content. And this led to a solid influx of visitors to my brand new blog. So, there you have it. Nine techniques to help you get more website traffic. If you learned something new from today's video then make sure to subscribe to the Backlinko YouTube Channel, right now. Just click on the subscribe button below this video. Also, if you want exclusive SEO traffic techniques that I only share with subscribers, head over to Backlinko.com and hop on the news letter. It's free. And now I'd like to turn it over to you. Which technique from today's video are you going to try first? Are you going to start writing more list posts? Or maybe want to drive traffic from forums? Either way let me know by leaving a comment below right now.
I feel like I could do like ten more videos right now. zool. Oh it's a slide anyway, what am I doing? All right so this one I'm calling my mom. So nervous, man. But a good chunk- agh. How many ways can you squeeze a lemon? .
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