Increasing your traffic is more important now than ever, but that can be difficult in today’s market.
In today’s post, you’re going to learn 8 great ways you can generate more traffic and more leads either spending no money or maximising the money you’re currently spending.
1. Lead magnets
This is a great way to entice your audience to your website or product and turn your fans and website visitors into leads. A lead magnet is a valuable offer that you give for free in exchange for someone’s contact information. Lead magnets can include things like checklist, resources lists, video series, webinar, or an ebook.
You need to offer something both valuable and relevant to your niche and to your audience. If you’re wondering how to make these lead magnets and make them look very professional and fun at the same time, you can use tools like Crello or Canva.
Another useful tool you can use is Beacon, Beacon lets you turn your blog post into an ebook. That is done in just a few minutes! Their premium version allows you to create checklists, resource lists or any other type of lead magnet. But don’t limit your imagination to just downloadable stuff!
Remember that a lead magnet can be anything that provides true value to your customers, like product demos, free consultations or free trials.
Another type of lead magnet that is popular and engaging is quizzes, this is a great way to engage and try to interact with your audience. It will also help you collect information on the needs of your target audience so you can target them later with personalised ads and emails. We’ve got a couple of tools that can help you create quizzes easily, regardless of your niche. Those are tryinteract and leadquizzes. The best part about these two tools is that you don’t have to think of questions for your own quiz (this can be quite exhausting, believe me!). They both have templates for quizzes organised by industry, so you can create your first quiz in just a few minutes!
2. Content Distribution
So what do you do with your lead magnet after you’ve created it?
Well… you need to put it in front of your audience, wherever they are, so you can get as many leads as you can using your free channels.
However, what most people do, is that they really focus on creating this lead magnet – and once they do it they put it on their different social media channels, which is good, but not nearly enough. Here are some less common channels that you can distribute your content.
Facebook groups: In order to use Facebook groups properly, you need to go to your facebook account and put in some relevant keywords in the search bar and select groups. Also, make sure that the groups you ask to join all have high engagement rates. You can figure that out by checking out the last 5 or 6 posts.
Linkedin groups, which work in a similar way to Facebook groups. The best part about Linkedin groups though is you’ll be able to send personal messages to anyone who is in that group.
Just a word of warning though when it comes to groups on either Facebook or LinkedIn: you need to ask for permission from group admins before you publish anything on the group that is even slightly promotional. Having said that, there shouldn’t be any problem here, since what you’re offering is free and highly valuable to the group. But just to be safe, check with group admins to avoid getting banned from a group.
Quora: If you don’t know what Quora is, it is a question and answer platform. Whenever someone has a question, they go to Quora and post it there and wait for professionals in that field to answer. That means that you can do the same with your audience. The best way to do this is first go and analyse the lead magnet you produced earlier. Ask yourself: What questions or problems does it answer?
Then, use the same keywords to search for questions that are related to your lead magnet. Using the content from the lead magnet, you can give comprehensive answers to any relevant questions and then put a link at the end for them to download your lead magnet.
The key thing here is to avoid giving very short answers and just linking back to your lead magnet. Quora will see this as spam and may block your account. You can do the same with Reddit as well, there is a subreddit to almost everything.
3. Influencers
After using all possible free channels, if you want to increase the reach of your lead magnets – then you can partner with influencers in your niche, so they can help you promote your lead magnet to their audience, who you wouldn’t be able to reach on your own.
A few helpful tools here are Feedly, scrunch, and buzzsumo.
Feedly allows you to follow the most popular blogs in your niche and compiles them into one feed so you can see how frequently they post, the popularity of each post and the type of content that they produce – all in one place. From there you can contact the most relevant ones later-on through other media.
Scrunch, on the other hand, is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform. It helps you discover influencers, and it also tells you how many followers they have on social media. The premium account allows you to contact those influencers from scrunch itself.
Buzzsumo is similar to Feedly and Scrunch, it helps you discover influencers in your niche, and identify the number of followers they have on social media, and the engagement they get on those platforms. The best part is that all of these tools have either free trials or starter accounts for free – to get a taste of what you can do with influencer marketing.
4. Landing page
Landing pages are where you will put your lead magnet, so when people click on your link or ad, they can go to a landing page that is designed specifically for conversion.
You might be asking “what’s the difference between a landing page and a normal page on my website?”
Well, the difference is huge, at least in terms of conversion.
According to Omniture, a landing page increases conversions by 25% compared to a normal website page. Why is this the case? Well, because a landing page has only one goal in mind, which is conversion. And that converts to the design of the page, when you go to a landing page you will not find any navigation bars or more than two call-to-actions.
This means visitors are not distracted by any other options to click on the page, as you are left with only one option – which is to opt-in to get your free lead magnet. Compare that with a normal website page which has several buttons you can click on, and leads to fewer conversions because the visitor can be distracted easily by any other link on your page.
Your next question might be “how can I create a landing page without spending money on developers and designers?”
Luckily there are drag and drop tools that can help you design your landing page in minutes. You can use any of the following tools depending on your budget. There’s leadpages, unbounce, and instapage – all 3 of these offer a free trial. So you can try them all and choose the one you like best.
5. Promote old lead magnets over time
To get the best out of your lead magnets, you need to promote them over time – and not just once! You worked very hard on your lead magnet and got very excited over it, and put it all over your social media, and 14 days pass and you run your campaign – and then that’s it! You move onto your next campaign. This is a huge asset you’ve created and you’ve only used it once!
Do you think that it reached all of your potential audience? What about the new people that have followed you two or three months since then? Do you think that they saw it? Of course not! And that’s why you need to promote it at least once per month! So you can maximise the reach and conversions from all of your lead magnets.
This whole process can be automated using a tool like missinglettr, which helps you promote your content over a 12 month period so you consistently promote every piece of content that you worked so hard for over a longer period of time instead of just once, never run out of content to promote.
6. Referral marketing
Referral marketing is one of the most underused tools in digital marketing today because most people associate it with offline marketing that you don’t have any control over.
Just think about it… if someone likes a product or service and talks about it to their friend, what can you do about this?
Nothing, right?
Wrong!
This is actually how Dropbox and MailChimp have grown to be as big as they are today: by capitalizing on referral marketing.
The key thing that I want you to remember is to make sure that you offer enough value to the person who refers to their friend, as well as to the person being referred.
Why do you need to provide value to the person being referred?
Well, the main reason why people don’t refer friends to products or services to their friends is that they don’t want to spam their friends. However, If they can offer them something that is truly valuable that they wouldn’t be able to get from anyone else, other than their friend, your customers would be more eager to share your content.
And remember, this is not about your paid product only – it can be done for your lead magnets too! So you can get more and more leads, without spending more money!
Referral marketing can, unfortunately, be a mess to manage. Fortunately though, there are a few tools that can help you out. We recommend that you check out viral loops and upviral to automate this process and run referral campaigns easily and quickly.
7. Strategically placing opt-in forms within your website
If you have a low visitor-lead ratio on your website, then, this one is for you!
Placing opt-in forms throughout your website on relevant pages will help bring your visitor’s attention to your lead magnet and the value he can receive from it when he’s on a relevant page. For example, if you have created a lead magnet as a checklist for “what to do if your dog is depressed”, then you can promote across any other articles that discuss “dog health” or any related topic that this lead magnet will be relevant for.
Here, you can use pop-ups, sidebar signup forms, and other types of opt-in forms. These can be a great call-to-action to your website visitors and allows you to gain their contact information in exchange for (usually) a downloadable item.
If you want to learn more about the many types of opt-in forms you can use on your website, you need to check out this article that delves deeper into the pros and cons of each type of opt-in forms available today and helps you choose the perfect one for your business.
8. Retargeting Ads
Lastly, let’s turn our attention to paid advertising.
Retargeting through Facebook and Google’s display network can help you maximize the amount you spend on ads. What retargeting basically does is use that traffic that you generated when you were distributing your lead magnet and content in the way that we just described, and retarget them with personalised ads that are relevant to what they’ve seen, or the pages they’ve viewed on your website. You can even exclude those who downloaded your lead magnet so you can reach out specifically to those who didn’t.
Retargeting is a huge topic that I cannot cover, but we are working on another article that will show you exactly how to use facebook’s retargeting capabilities to get the best out of the money you spend on Facebook ads – so look out for that article soon.
These are the tips I have for you today, did I miss anything?
Which techniques are you using? What do you find gets you great results?