Mar 30, 2018

How to Drive Free Traffic to Your Landing Pages

How to Drive Free Traffic to Your Landing Pages

Isn’t it a great thing to be discovered by your audience?

Being known by many is something that every marketer dreams of. Website traffic is as valuable as walk-in customers of a local mall.

Though not every person makes a purchase, it still matters to you that people show up. This gives you time to get closer to them, build a relationship, and along the way convince them to become your customers!

Traffic is important, especially if you’ve built a special landing page to collect new leads and get your existing subscribers to follow a specific action.

On your landing page, you have a great headline, a unique value proposition, and a lead magnet or incentive to give in exchange for your audience’s email address.

But you have a problem: No one knows that your landing page exists! You know that any landing page is useless if it doesn’t get traffic.

Attracting traffic to your landing page can be a challenge but it’s never impossible.

The thing is some marketers immediately resort to Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to get traffic because they believe that just because they spend money, they can expect visitors to come flooding in.

Even if you’re sure about the keywords you use in your ads, there’s no guarantee that you’ll occupy the top positions of Google. All these keyword bids to boost the performance of your campaign can leave you wasting money.

And once you stop your budget, your traffic also stops.

Since the amount you spend on advertising doesn’t guarantee conversions and sales, it’s good to learn some free ways to generate landing page traffic.

I’ll introduce you to 6 simple techniques in this article.

1 – Engage with your social media followers

Many businesses care about growing their social media audience. However, only a few of them think about really engaging their followers.

Why is social media engagement so important, anyway? The power of engaging your followers cannot be underestimated when it comes to generating traffic. Interaction breeds trust. When people trust you, they become receptive to your invitations and messages.

Sparking engagement in social media shouldn’t be difficult. Give these tactics a try:

1.1. Use hashtags in your posts

What if you don’t have that many followers yet? In that case, you need hashtags. Hashtags make your social media content discoverable. For example, when someone types #yoga, Instagram or Facebook shows you the latest post with that keyword.

So, your posts that link back to your landing page or invite followers to check out your Instagram bio link (in the case of Instagram) should be accompanied by hashtags.

Start looking for hashtags that are related to your business. This increases the chance for your target audience to find you.

1.2. Create posts that resonate with your audience

The harsh reality is that social media is saturated with business posts that compete for an audience’s attention. One of the reasons why people ignore these posts is that they’re hard sells. It can also be that a brand keeps talking only about themselves.

So, it’ll take more than a clever post to get the landing page traffic you so desire.

Take the spotlight away from you. Instead, focus on your customers and brand advocates. Focus on delivering value to their lives, thinking more about how they can benefit from you.

The screenshot above shows Gary Vaynerchuk, a famous entrepreneur, and speaker.

As you can see, his Instagram post, “Hard to be taken advantage of when you’re giving without expectation” is thought-provoking. It connects with his ideal audience’s emotions and makes them realize something they hadn’t before.

This post makes him much more interesting, to the extent that a person who sees this for the first time will want to check out for more.

Similar to Gary Vaynerchuk, invest in your audience by sharing valuable posts every now and then. Once you’ve established that relationship, you can start pointing them in the direction of your landing page.

1.3. Use Facebook Live

You can create the most engaging experience for your customers by leveraging Facebook Live. When it comes to video content, Facebook Live trumps pre-recorded videos. It’s in the moment and it’s real. People can communicate with a brand as the video takes place.

Great ideas include stream live videos to conduct how-to tutorials and hosting Q&A sessions.

Martha Stewart uses Facebook Live to show a DIY holiday decorating tutorial. In her live video tutorial, she occasionally mentions where viewers can buy the materials.

You too can create such engaging live videos. Lead your audience to check your landing page out by including a link in your video description. Like Martha Stewart, talk about the landing page and the freebie that awaits them.

2 – Tap into existing communities

Targeting groups that are related to your niche is one way to tap into a new traffic channel.

Such communities include social media groups, forums, and Q&A websites. In these communities, people share their interests and sentiments.

You’re given the chance to jump in and share your thoughts. The responses or answers you write, given that they’re compelling and well-researched, help you catch people’s attention and compel them to visit whatever link to your website you leave.

The trick to generating landing page traffic is to write something that piques people’s curiosities.

Imran Esmail leverages Quora, a popular Q&A website, as his traffic driving machine. He uses a tactic which he calls Don’t Sell the Farm. This tactic entails giving away valuable answers to Quora questions but not giving too many details. It’ll leave readers wanting for more.

To show you how Imran Esmail did it, he chose to answer a Quora question:

“I would like to generate relatively passive income of $500 per month through an online enterprise (e.g. a blog, affiliate marketing, etc.). I have about one year to do it. What should I do?”

He answers this question by outlining a four-step process.

In his Step 2: Become a Best-Seller (6 months), he doesn’t give all his tactics away.

Instead, he includes a link to his case study “How I make $2700/month on Auto-pilot by Publishing Kindle Ebooks.” On that page Imran Esmail would collect people’s email addresses if they wanted to stay updated on his series.

Imran Esmail said that his landing page generated 78 new email subscribers. He shows his Google Analytics’ data:

SOURCE: SMARTBLOGGER

You can use the exact same strategy to drive landing page traffic. Just remember that when participating in forums, groups, and Q&A sites, target conversations that are getting a lot of engagement.

3 – Require your audience to share your landing page in exchange for an incentive

Most marketers feel content with getting people to arrive at their landing page. Only a few think about giving it a viral boost.

But is it really possible to make your landing page go viral in a way that one subscriber results in one, two, or more subscribers? Yes, it is!

The strategy is to promote a contest on your landing page.

If you know the story of Harry’s, a New-York based grooming brand for men that sells shaving products, you would want to apply the same technique they used to gather 100,000 emails in one week on their prelaunch.

To get more people to discover their landing page and signup, Harry’s required each visitor to share their page using a unique share link. In exchange for sharing and getting their friends to sign-up through the link, they incentivized people with their own products.

Whatever incentive you feature on your landing page, it has to immediately get people involved. Don’t forget to incorporate a unique invite link as this is the mechanism by which you gain more landing page traffic.

Start promoting your landing page contest to your social media audience. Tell them that you have something special to give. Make it clear that all they need to do is share the page with their friends and that their friends sign-up to get the chance to win.

To help people launch contests that have the potential to generate more traffic in less time, we created UpViral. UpViral is an easy-to-use viral referral application that integrates with your existing landing page.

Brad Costanzo, an entrepreneur, used UpViral to launch a contest to increase awareness and generate leads for his new coffee business. In just two weeks’ time, his campaign was able to attract 6,073 visitors. Out of that 6,073 visits, 3,015 converted into leads.

4 – Optimize your landing page for SEO

Ever thought of making your landing page search engine friendly? SEO is not something you can ignore if you ought to drive landing page traffic from the number one search engine, Google.

It’s smart to capitalize on the billions of searches that take place on Google each day. As of today, the number is at least 3 billion.

Using SEO as one of your tactics, you’ll be tweaking specific elements of your landing page. Doing this increases the likelihood of your landing page to show up in search results.

So for example, if your landing page is about project management, your ideal audience should see your landing page at the top of search results if they type in the query “project management.”

Here are some tips to ensure that your landing page becomes appealing to Google:

4.1. Research your keywords

To this day, keyword research remains to be one of the foundations of SEO success.

Start by thinking of seed keywords (or basic keywords) that best relate to your landing page. Enter a seed keyword into a keyword research tool like KWFinder to generate a final keyword. Pay attention to keyword difficulty and average monthly search volume.

Let’s just say that you have a landing page that offers a PDF guide about personal loans to people with bad credit. So, you use KWFinder to research a good keyword using the seed term “personal loans.”

Based on the results above, you’d want to choose the keyword “bad credit loans” because it has a low difficulty score and a high search volume – 299,852 monthly searches.

Before using your chosen keyword, check whether the results that come up when typing in that keyword brings up pages with the right search intent. Being sure about your keyword intent guarantees that you attract qualified traffic.

Include your target keyword in the following areas of your landing page: Title tag, meta description, header tags, image file names, and landing page copy. Avoid keyword stuffing.

4.2. Write a compelling meta description.

The meta description is a snippet that provides a summary or overview of a page. It shows on SERPs when a searcher types in a keyword that the meta description itself contains.

Google has made it clear that meta descriptions are not a ranking signal. But because they influence your click-through rates, consider them important.

Make your meta description as interesting as possible as if it were an advert for your business. Use an active voice to engage any potential visitors. Yes, it would be necessary to include keywords since keywords point out to people that they are looking for the right page.

4.3. Build quality links to your page

Google and users discover your landing page by following links. Link building is an effective way to attract traffic, not just rank.

The first step to link building is finding the best sources for links. You’d want to start reaching out to bloggers with an engaged following. Approach these potential partners to pitch a guest post. Consider partnering with an influencer who can get you more traffic in less time.

5 – Email your subscriber list

Have you thought about the traffic that you already own? Don’t put all your focus on getting new traffic that you forget the subscribers that you already have on your list.

After all, you have other reasons why you’re driving traffic to your landing page aside from building your email list. You might be wanting to promote awareness of your product, drive sales, or get more participants for your webinar.

Emailing your subscriber list about your recent landing page is a simple way to drive traffic and increase your conversions and sales.

To demonstrate how you should craft your email to drive subscribers to your landing page, here’s an email I received from Jeff Goins:

Jeff Goins shares his landing page where he introduces a program he created for aspiring writers. He calls his program “The Writer’s Studio.”

Looking at Jeff Goins’ email, you can gain some valuable tips to effectively promote your landing pages:

5.1. Write a personalized and short subject line

Jeff Goins’ subject line reads “Let’s grab coffee!” This subject line uses personalization. Goins is a writer himself and knows that most writers love coffee, and so he uses the topic of coffee to entice people to click through. Notice that the subject line uses only a few words so it doesn’t get cut off when recipients read with their mobile device.

5.2. Focus on one topic

Don’t try to make your email about several things. This takes away the focus on a single landing page. In Goins’ email, he sticks to the topic of his writing course. Use this strategy to get your point across and avoid confusing your audience.

5.3. Get clear on the benefits

“What’s in it for me?” is the question you should always be prepared to answer. Goins doesn’t just mention all the things that you’re going to get by joining his course; he starts off his message by introducing a problem. A situation that conveys a need among your audience will make your benefits even more meaningful.

5.4. Add the link to your landing page more than once

Lastly, incorporate the link that takes your subscribers to your landing page. Goins does this twice. He uses two anchor texts – the first one which reads “The Writer’s Studio” and the second one which is “Find out more about The Writer’s Studio.” Adding your landing page link more than once reminds readers to visit the page. Below is a screenshot of Goins’ landing page.

6 – Do guest blogging

I briefly mentioned about guest blogging as an SEO technique to generate landing page traffic. I’m going to expound on the idea of guest blogging right here.

Let me tell you that guest blogging is one of the best traffic and lead generation strategies. Writing an effective guest post will help you generate a handful of audiences for your landing page not only once but even years after your post has been published.

Below are the 3 basic steps of guest blogging for landing page traffic:

Step 1: Find good sources

You can’t qualify guest blogging websites based only on metrics like domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA). While these metrics are great to consider, they do not show the real picture of a site’s engagement level. Pay attention to the number of comments a site gets especially with their newer posts. Most importantly, target websites with topics that are relevant to your landing page.

Step 2: Engage and send your pitch email

Before you send your pitch, engage with your target site. Comment on their posts while adding value. Doing this will help you get noticed, which means that it’ll be easier for the site owner to respond to your email pitch. Make sure that you suggest a title and an outline based on the website’s guest post guidelines.

Step 3: Write a great piece and link to your landing page

When you finally write the guest post, keep it simple and understandable. Since you’re linking to a landing page where you want conversions to take place, be sure that your entire piece aligns with the subject of your landing page. Use a relevant and low keyword density anchor text.

Final Thoughts

There is no point in having a landing page if it has no specific purpose. Whether your goal is to increase your email signups (this one’s a given), make money, invite attendees for your webinar, etc., traffic is the secret sauce that will make your landing page goals come true.

Once you get traffic to your landing pages, you would want that traffic to keep coming. A continuous stream of traffic means more leads and more opportunities to generate sales.

For the purpose of achieving unstoppable traffic, we created UpViral. How do you use UpViral? How does it work?

Let’s say that you have a landing page where you feature an attractive lead magnet. Every time a person signs up to get a hold of your lead magnet, you can have that person spread the word about your landing page first.

To compel each landing page visitor to bring in more people, you incorporate a unique invite link using UpViral. Require them to share your page and get people to sign-up. If they are able to do so through their unique invite link, they get more chances to win your lead magnet.

The overall result? Your visitors multiply. 5 can become 10, 10 becomes 20. When your visits increase, so do your leads.

As you can see, receiving landing page traffic without leveraging paid ads is possible with the simple techniques above. Get started today and let me in on the results!