As of June 2018, there are more than 1.5 billion websites in the world.
A billion. As in 1 followed by 9 zeros.
This is not good news if you were planning to make your business more visible online.
Oh, but don’t worry! You need to be patient. Visitors will come to your website.
Really?!
With more than 1.5 billion websites in addition to yours, you still hope that being patient is what you need to do to attract more visitors to your website?
The Bad News
The bad news is that patience is the wrong advice. With that amount of online websites fighting for your customer’s attention, you don’t need patience. You need a strategy!
Why Do You Need Website Traffic Anyway?
Your goal should be to increase your website traffic. But this is not a “vanity” metric. Why?
Because when you increase website traffic you increase the opportunity to acquire an audience.
And an audience who likes your message will buy your products and services.
Oh, But I Pay for Advertising! And It Works. Well, Kind of … Not Really
True. Advertising works. Or, maybe I should say: advertising still works. If you’re happy with the cost of it.
When you’re only source of traffic to your website is advertising, you might have noticed that the costs of it have gone a little up. All right, more than a little.
PPC (Pay Per Click), Facebook, and Instagram advertising costs have increased significantly. And, we’re not even talking about advertising on LinkedIn.
Not only that the costs of advertising are higher, but the results don’t always follow. You might have attracted the wrong audience. Or, the audience you have attracted was the good one, but they were just not ready to buy.
In both cases your budget has gone to waste.
I Have Unlimited Advertising Budget
Said no one ever.
But let’s assume that it’s true.
Your ads are all over the internet and in the right places.
So what?
Ad Blockers
Yes. The nightmare of every advertiser.
What are they? Nothing more than a type of software that can remove or alter advertising content from a web page, website, or a mobile app.
Bye bye, ads!
Ad Blindness
When was the last time you saw an ad online?
Not as in: seeing it and being annoyed by it. More as in: seeing it, reading it, and clicking on it?
You can’t really remember, can you? Well, that’s ad blindness explained.
What If
What if, instead of pushing your message to an audience already saturated with promotional noise, we could find a way to pull our customers in, with a message that is interesting or entertaining or educational or useful?
What if, instead of talking about the features of our products, we start talking about ways our customers can solve the problems they are looking to solve when they buy products and services similar to ours.
Would that be interesting for our customers? Would they stop and listen?
You bet!
From 0 to 5,000 Website Visits per Month. With $0 Advertising Budget
When we set up our online magazine, we had no audience and 0 visits to the magazine’s website.
And we didn’t want to spend money on advertising.
We tried, failed, and tried again until we notice that the articles we were publishing were attracting the audience we were looking for. And, the more interesting the article, the more audience we had. Obviously.
What was unexpected was to see that our articles attracted more visitors (for free) than our rather expensive ads.
What was even more unexpected was that most of the articles we have created continued to drive traffic even when we stopped sharing them on the social networks. Our audience started doing it for us. And Google.
That kind of situation never happens when you stop advertising. When you stop advertising, the traffic to your website will also stop.
The Heresy
Selling products and services with content (written articles, explanatory videos, podcasts, etc.) instead of using advertising is still considered a heresy. But, the heresy works.
It worked for us and it also worked for those we have taught how to do it.