How to Drive 1,000 Highly Targeted Visitors to Your Website Who Are Ready to Purchase

Ask any marketers what are some of their biggest marketing and sales challenges, and not surprisingly, you’ll hear all of them sing the same responses – driving more traffic to their website and converting them into leads.

Today, you’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of different methods of attracting traffic to your website. Some tricks easily drive more traffic to your site, while others take a little bit more work.

But, if you closely look at all these tactics, you’ll notice there are 3 key steps to driving more traffic to your website.

Step 1: Find profitable keywords

Step 2: Create compelling content

Step 3: Consistently promote your content

In this part, we’ll quickly go over all the details involved in each of these three key steps.

Without wasting any time, let’s get going.

Step 1: Finding ‘profitable’ keywords

Keyword research is the first and the obvious step to take when it comes to driving more traffic to your website. After all, getting better rankings for all the right (or wrong) keywords will eventually make or break your business website.

If you’re a complete newbie to keyword research, Moz’s beginner’s guide to SEO will provide you few great background information.

It includes useful tips and tactics about how to assess the keyword value, how to know the demand of long tail keyword, and what the keyword difficult score actually means.

Well, as you become more advanced in keyword research, it will become as much of an art as it is a science. There’s no bulletproof step-by-step guide to follow, and automated tools will only tell you little. Eventually, you’ll need to follow your hunch to carefully find and choose keywords that are worthy of your efforts.

Personally speaking, I find it useful to study real-world cases to learn more in situations like this.

For example, if want some “insider” tips on how to choose the most profitable content topics for your website, you should definitely check out Copyblogger’s real-world guide to keyword research. If you want to see how Brian Clark – the CEO and founder of CopyBlogger – perform keyword research, then you should definitely read this post.

While it’s a great thing to increase website traffic, you should also make sure that you’re driving the ‘right’ visitors. For instance, wouldn’t it be profitable for you if you focused on attracting 1,000 highly targeted visitors to your website who are ready to purchase than driving 10,000 untargeted visitors?

I think you “got” what I’m talking about here.

The decade-long debate of quality vs quantity is an ongoing issue in the Definitive Guide to Keyword Research post written by Brian Dean.

This insanely complete, 7 section guide to performing keyword research is jam-packed with tons of actionable tips and tactics. We highly recommend that you find some time to go over this in-depth and to plunge into Brian’s astonishing archive of digital marketing resources.

In his keyword research guide, Brian says, “It’s not always about bringing more traffic to your website, but about bringing more targeted and ready to buy visitors. With proper keyword research, you can easily and quickly forecast change in trends, repond appropriately to changing market conditions, and offer products and services that web searchers are looking for

Step 2: Producing compelling content

You probably already know that “content is king” when it comes to inbound marketing. It is the magnet that attracts targeted customers to your website, and persuades them to fill out a form, call you, or give their contact information.

Once you have found your target keyword list, you’ll have a very good understanding of the topics of content you need to produce for your website.

But here’s one more thing – if you really want to drive tons of website traffic to your website, you just can’t simply pump out 250-word half-assed blog posts. In other words, you’ll have to do your homework, and only publish content that are best.

Derek Halpern – the founder and CEO of Social Triggers – says, “Content is your secret weapon. Anything that is less than your best won’t be good enough.”

We couldn’t agree more – you have to produce valuable content to your readers if you want to stand out from others.

So, now you must be thinking how to create truly wonderful, valuable, and actionable content.

Few weeks ago, Brian Dean shared us few secrets to create truly awesome content that will cut through the noise and rank higher for any keyword.

You can check out that post titled “Expanded List Post” here.

It’s just another standard list post with a small variation. It aggregates the best content from already existing posts on the web, and combines them together to create a longer, more thorough, and actionable one-stop post.

If you want, you can check out a video where Brian quickly explains the expanded list post method.

Brian also another similar content creation secret called the “Skyscraper Technique.” It is similar to the expanded list method, however, the skyscraper post offers more in-depth detail and more actionable tips than any other recourse you’ll find on the web today.

In short, no matter which method you’re using, if you want to truly make your content be different from the rest of junk on the web you’ll need to ensure you are producing content that are highly detailed, well researched, and offers more value than what’s already out there.

This will go leaps and bounds beyond just posting blog posts.

While it’s true that blog posts and white papers are the most preferred types of content to employ inbound marketing, there are still dozens of content forms you can choose from.

Here are other different forms of content you should think about including into your inbound marketing tactic:

Memes
Videos
Infographics
Book Review
Guides
Product reviews
Interviews
Interactive content
How-to articles
Ebooks
Link Pages
Lists
Podcast
Case Studies
Cost / ROII Calculators
Research and original data

Long type content – skyscraper

In his super valuable post, Neil Patel shares 15 different types of content that will drive more traffic and also shows you how to pick the best format for your content.

Niel says, “I advise you to look at content not as formats but as ideas. The format the content finally takes is secondary. But the idea is the key. So, first spend more time on developing an idea. Then, figure out what/how it’s going to look like. There are a wide variety of content types available on the web. Heck, you can even invent your own content type these days.

Step 3. Promote the hell out of your content

The step where most inbound marketers fail is the content promotion.

You probably still believe that if you publish a great content, people to flock to your website.

We wish it was that easy.

If yo’re like most content marketers out there, then you probably post a new blog post, update your Facebook status, and post it on Google+. Then, you do nothing.

You get 100s, or even 1,000 of views for over a few days, and everything stops dead in its track.

If you look at most successful bloggers – Derek and Brian including – you’ll find that they spend a lot of their time in content promotion.

In fact, you’ve been brain-washed by “publish awesome content and people will flock to you” advice for a number of years, you’d quite reasonably be startled to learn about their content marketing tactics.

Rather than spending mind-numbing hours on pumping out more content after content, these highly successful bloggers do few things very differently than the whole mass of bloggers out there.

Derek – the founder and CEO of Social Triggers – suggest that you spend 20% of your time developing content, and spend 80% of your time promoting it.

“If you spent time flushing out great content, and you find that only 1,000 people are reading it, chances are other one million people in the world can benefit from that same content you wrote. Why, would you then spend more hours creating content when you have’ already published something that your ideal customers can benefit from?” says Derek.

“It is better to find additional 10,00 people to read what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more content on your website,” concludes Derek.

What this means is that you should definitely spend only 20% of your time creating a content, and then, spend other 80% of your time promoting what you’ve created.

The 80/20 rule is quite a shocking news for most inbound marketers who spend only few time promoting their content.

You’re already dropping your pants wondering how on earth you’re going to find so much time promoting your content.

At Buffer, Kevin Lee wrote a killer post “How Content Promotion Works for Blogs Big and Small: Our 11 Favorite Content Distribution Strategies.”

In this jam-packed actionable post, Kevin gives your 11 ways to promote your content that’ll boost your website traffic almost overnight. Here’s what those 11 strategies are all about:

Send your content to your email list
Share your content on social media
Syndication
Mention an influencer
Send an outreach email
Submit your content to a content community
Make it super easy for your readers to share your content
Connect with your peer/mentoring group
Focus on the places that generate best results for you
Repurpose your content
Paid ads and remarketing

Key Points You Just Learned

Before producing your content, make sure to perform keyword research. In other words, each piece of content you’ll create from now on will strategically target a particular keyword phrase.
Despite what you’ve been told for so many years, you just can’t create “great content” and expect a flood of website traffic to your site.
If you want to boost website traffic (from 1,000 views to 10,000), then you need to create link-worthy content that is updated, in-depth, actionable, and well-designed.
Spend only 20% of your time creating content, and 80% promoting it.
Backlinks don’t happen by chance – you’ll have to carefully reach out to more people relevant to your industry and ask them to link back to your content.