No one will see your beautiful website unless you do these 4 things

If you build it, they will come

It being a beautiful, fancy website and they being people who are ready to buy everything that you have to offer.

If Kevin Costner were to build a website instead of a field, in a sequel to Field of Dreams, the movie wouldn’t have such a happy ending. There are 500 new websites that launch every minute. That’s crazy sauce. 500 new websites, every minute.

Maybe now you’re thinking, “Okay, then why should I build a website? There’s so much competition. Why should I even try?” Well, I am going to show you what the solution is. How to build an audience and then invite them to view your website so that people will actually see your beautiful website.

So what is the solution to this problem of nobody seeing this beautiful website? You may have spent thousands of dollars to have it created, or hundreds of hours to create it yourself, and no one sees it.

I’ve been there and it can be incredibly discouraging, like crawl in bed and put the covers over your head for a whole day and binge watch your favorite TV show kind of discouraging. Right? Why even try?

Well, I am here to tell you that you should try. Sure, there are 500 new websites that are launched every minute, but very, very few of them do any of the four things that I am going to teach you today.

4 ways to drive traffic to your website

The solution to building a website that no one sees is to find people who want to see it and invite them to it. There are 4 ways that you can do this. I suggest that at some point in the future you do all 4 of these, but for now I want you to pick just one.

Done is better than perfect and these are all fairly big things. It’s going to take some time for you to master them and do them well. The four things are:

• Social media
• SEO
• Collaboration
• Paid ads.

These are four ways that you can capture the attention of the right people and then invite them to come to your website. This is called driving traffic to your website, and that’s what I want you to start doing.

#1 – Social Media

So let’s start with social media. How do we use social media to drive traffic to our websites?

Step 1 – Solve a very specific problem for a very specific group.

If you are too broad on social media, you are not going to capture anyone’s attention. But if you solve a very specific problem for a very specific group of people, you will start to see people talk about you.

One of your followers will have a friend and that friend will say to them, “I have this problem.” And your follower will say, “I know who has the solution.” If you’re super broad, it’s going to be really, really difficult to capture attention of people online.

Now you may be thinking, “yeah, well I know so-and-so she has 700,000 followers and she’s a lifestyle blogger and she talks about everything.” It is very possible that she started 10 years ago.

The social media world is saturated and you must solve a very specific problem for a very specific group of people if you want to stand out on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, any of the social media platforms.

Step 2 – Talk to that very specific group of people about that very specific problem.

There’s a lot of noise on social media; a very small percentage of your followers are actually going to see everything that you create. Don’t worry about overwhelming people, but create content for them often, at least daily.

Step 3 – Invite them to view your website.

Once you’ve got people starting to follow you on social media, whether it’s 2,3, 10 or 100, I want you to invite them to view your website.

Put a link to your website on your social media profile and invite them to come see your website. If your website is built using my MAP Method, then it is built to make you money and to help your people. So if you can get them to your website, they will find solutions to their problems and you will make money.

Step 4 – Ask them to engage

Be someone they want to interact with. Ask them questions about themselves/their business. Ask them to share your website and/or your social media profile so you can continue to grow the number of people who view your website.

#2 – SEO

This is a super important way to drive traffic to your website. SEO stands for search engine optimization. And what it means is that there are certain things you can do in order to increase your chances of turning up in the search results.

We all want our website to turn up as the #1 result for some phrase on Google. For example, for me it would be someone searching for ‘How do I design a website?’ I would love to be the very first website that came up for them. There are things you can do to increase your chances at that. That’s what SEO is. Search engine optimization.

There are three search engines that you should be thinking about, or that you can think about.

1. Google (and other similar search engines like Yahoo and other things).
2. Pinterest. You may not think of Pinterest as a search engine, but it is, it’s not really a social media platform. It is a place where we go to find an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. I know you’ve done this. How do I make strawberry shortcake? And you type it in the Pinterest search function. 
3. YouTube. YouTube is also a search engine run by Google, but it’s a video search engine.

There are two different things that you can do to increase your chances of showing up in the search results.

On Page SEO

So you take one page of your website and you optimize everything you can on the actual page.

You have certain words and certain things in your heading and you have certain links and there’s a whole list of things you can do. This is where you are going to have the most control. You want Google to know exactly what every page is about on your website so that they know what problems that page solves and what questions that page answers.

Backlinks

These are links from other websites to your website. Google wants to know, are you popular? Do other people trust you? Do other people in your industry trust you? Do big people in your industry trust you? They figure that out by who links back to your website.

SEO is a long game. The things that you do for your SEO today will not have immediate results. It will take months or even years for SEO to really have an impact on the traffic you are getting to your website, but SEO is also fairly permanent. Once Google really trusts you and knows that you solve very specific problems, they will continue to send you traffic.

If you want to dig deep into SEO and really focus on this on your website, then you need a course called Stupid Simple SEO. This is not a course that I’ve created, but it is the course that I have taken and highly recommend.

#3 – Collaboration

What do I mean? And how do I suggest you go about collaborating with other people?

Well, I want you to initially find people who are about the same size you are on social media. If you’ve got 1,000 followers, you’re probably going to want to find people who have 500-2,000 followers. They’re about the same size you are.

Then you are going to do things like going live together on Instagram or Facebook, doing a Roundup where you create a blog post where you highlight 10 different people that you like and how they can help your audience. You could do a blog post on their website. You could be a guest on their podcast. You could co-host a challenge or a giveaway or a webinar. There are all sorts of things that you can do to collaborate with someone. So find people who have the same audience that you do, but solve a different problem.

I target Latter-day Saint women, specifically moms with kids who are still at home, and the problem I solve helping them to make money from a website and an online content marketing business. So I might collaborate with someone who helps Latter-day Saint women make money, but through MLMs or somebody who helps them make money through a physical product business.

There are probably people in my audience who would prefer a physical product and probably people in her audience who would prefer a digital product, which is what I help people with. We could collaborate because we help solve a different problem for the same audience. 

The best way for you to do this is to become their friend sincerely and genuinely learn about what they do. Get on their email list, follow them on social media and comment, respond to an email, compliment them. This is how you are going to begin to get on their radar, build a relationship with them.

Once you have a relationship, then say, “Hey, I would like to do XYZ with you.

And I think it will help your audience in this way.” You want your invitation to collaborate to be a benefit to them. Obviously, it’s also going to be a benefit to you, but you want to highlight and really think about how it’s going to be a benefit to them.

Once you’ve done this a few times with people that are right around the same size as you, then you can start reaching out to bigger accounts and say, “Hey, I worked with Jane of XYZ and she really benefited from this collaboration” and you’ve got a testimonial there you can share. If you’re around 1,000 followers, you can start reaching out to those who are around maybe 10,000. A little bit bigger than you.

This is how collaboration works. You are growing each other’s audiences and inviting those audiences to visit your website. 

#4 – Paid Ads

Now, a lot of people want to jump right into paid ads, and if you have money to throw at it, it can be a good thing. The first $3,000-$5,000 that you spend on ads, you probably won’t make a whole lot back.

Hopefully, you at least break even but what you’re really doing is paying for data. So I suggest you don’t run paid ads until you are able to collect that data. You should have a freemium, or lead magnet, which is a gift that you give people when they join your email list. You should have a welcome series in your email. You should have a product that your people are offered immediately after they join your email list, a low price product so that you can track what happens.

For example, say I have these two ads running and when I run ad A, I get more email signups than when I run ad B. But when I run ad B, I sell more of that small little product than when I run ad A. Then you can look at the details, “I changed the picture on ad A and that increased my sales.” Or, “Oh, I changed the picture on ad B and it decreased my sales.”

Ads are how you collect data about what’s really working with your people. So I suggest that you start driving traffic through things like social media, collaborations, and SEO while you build that funnel. 

The very smallest funnel is a freemium, a gift that you give people when they join your email list. A small product that they’re offered immediately after, like on the thank you page, immediately after they join your email list. And then a welcome series of emails where you can still sell them that small product, if they didn’t purchase it. You want to track those stats.

Funnels can get a lot bigger and a lot larger and more complicated. But at the very least you should have that set up before you start running ads. Otherwise it could be a real waste of time because what you’re really doing is paying for data.

You spend a few thousand dollars to pay for that data, and then you’ll have an ad that, converts really well. Maybe you learned that you need to change the name of your freemium, or the description of it, or the picture that you have for your product. You’re going to tweak a lot of those things as you run those very first ads and if you don’t have something to tweak and change and track, then it’s a waste of money.

In Summary:

Four things you can do to drive traffic to your website:

1. Social media
2. SEO
3. Collaboration
4. Paid ads

Once again, I suggest you pick one of these to start with the one that feels the least overwhelming to you, get good at it and then figure out the next one.