AP 0989: How Do I Drive More Traffic to My Site?

AskPat 989 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 989 of Ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question coming in today from Dom, but before we get to that, I just wanna thank quickly today's sponsor, which is DesignCrowd, a website that's there to help businesses crowdsource custom graphics from over a half million designers worldwide. If you're stuck on ideas on how to develop your website or logo design or anything design-related, check out DesignCrowd. You can go to DesignCrowd.com/askpat to learn more and download your free guide to crowdsourcing great logos, graphics, and websites for your business and you'll get $100 off. Just go there, DesignCrowd.com/askpat. Make sure to enter the promo code “AskPat.”

Alright, here's today's question from Dom.

Dominick: Hey, Pat. This is Dom from PeaceofMindFinances.com. I first off just wanted to say thank you so much for all that you do. I listen to all your podcasts and really love all the advice that you give out for free and everything. I read your book, which was great. I just wanted to know, real simply, how are you able to drive more traffic to your site? I just recently started my site and I want to be able to drive some traffic, and get some more likes on my Facebook page so that the business looks a little more legitimate, and I'm able to drive a little more traffic and then hopefully start to monetize it in the future.

I'm writing about company's earning reports that are published on a weekly basis, and are gonna give that information out for free, but I wanna at least start to build the traffic so that, in the future, I can try to monetize it a little bit better. What do you recommend to start driving traffic to your site? I know that you can do paid Facebook advertisements, which is gonna be something down the future that I do, but I was wondering, for a brand new website, what is the best way to start advertising it for free or for very, very low cost to start to get people to like your Facebook page and your site?

Thanks so much.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Dom, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. The best way to begin to drive traffic to a new website is to first think, even before the website goes live, what you can do to really make a big deal out of the event that is the launch of your website. You wanna launch with a bang and if you actually go to SmartPassiveIncome.com, go to the search bar at the top with the little magnifying glass and then type in “launch website with a bang,” it'll drive you to a blog post that was written a while back that's still very relevant about how to really do this, how to utilize your network, how to make an event out of it, how to get some of the champions in your audience or in your network already to really go a little bit further to help you make this well-known, how to potentially even build an email list beforehand; that's something you could do.

I've taught this many times for other people, that way on launch day they've already gotten a number of people to share it for them. One thing I like to do is to do these roundup posts, especially when I'm just starting out a new site in a new space. I did this with FoodTruckr.com. I collected fifty answers from fifty Foodtruckrs to the question, “What's one thing you wish you knew before you started your food truck?” I got fifty food trucks to answer and I put them all on one post and I shared that. That just became the meaty post that I shared on day one. I came out with multiple posts on day one, because you want to do that when you launch anything new. You want to have multiple things that people can get access to and consume. I did that, but that was the main one that I really pushed out there and shared, and I shared on my own platforms and my own personal Facebook page and those kinds of things. It eventually got picked up and it went viral. Somebody found it and put it on Reddit. It just did very well and it still continues to be the top-visited page on the site, the very first post that I did. It's also one that's found very high-up in the rankings for food truck-related keywords, too. SEO and those long-tail things, those things will come. That's not anything you have to worry about right now. You obviously want to create foundational SEO practices in the posts that you're publishing at the beginning. But really, it's gonna be about the relationships that you build. Building those relationships, whether it's with your network who's gonna help you push that out on day one, or if it's gonna be people you promote and feature on that website, that's why utilizing those roundup posts are great. Then I also had fifty people, not all of them did it, but many of them did share the article as well, and it allowed the article and the website to be placed and put in front of people who would have never found it otherwise. That's how I feel that you can do it.

Additionally, you may wanna reserve a little bit of a budget to begin to start driving some paid traffic there, perhaps through that, again meaty post—if you have the ability to collect email addresses off of that, too, which I didn't do that on FoodTruckr . . . I did have emails come in as a result of already having an email list hooked up and having the ability to subscribe at the bottom of the post but also in the right-hand side in the sidebar, but nothing related to that post specifically, in terms of a lead magnet or something, a content upgrade. That's just, again, an extension of that post. It was just a different offering that I had that wasn't quite the best. Paying for a little bit of traffic coming from targeting people on Facebook can work out very well, especially if you know that you're gonna be collecting emails. You can see if it's actually converting for you or not. You don't even need a product at first to see if it's actually working, because what you want are those emails, and then those emails are gonna be really important because that'll help you drive new traffic to your website for the next post that you come out with.

There you go, Dom, just some quick tips for you. Again, make sure to look up “how to launch a website with a bang” on Google and/or on Smart Passive Income and you'll see some more information there in written format. That's one of the earlier, most popular blog posts I've come out with, too. Just really high-quality stuff that's gonna get shared, that's really what it comes down to. Dom, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. I wanna send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show.

For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thanks so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Maya Angelou. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” True that. Alright, guys, take care. Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Leave a review if you have the time on iTunes for AskPat. I appreciate you for that in advance. To those of you who've already done it, just love you guys. Thank you so much, cheers, and we'll see you soon. Bye.