4 ways to get people to visit your website

If you’ve been following me for awhile you might have occasionally had the thought,  “Great Misty, you talk all about building a really awesome homepage, but how do I get people to that homepage?” If you’ve asked that question, then this post is for you. 

You know that I believe your homepage is an essential page on your website. It is so important because it is typically where people go after they have already had an initial interaction with you.

A question that I often get is, “Okay, great Misty. You’ve taught me all about this homepage. I’ve learned all about your MAP method and I’ve built this homepage according to that method. I know it’s going to make me money and help people. Now, how do I get people to see it?” That is a great question.

4 ways to get people to visit your website

There are four different gateways that I want to talk about – ways that get people to visit your website.

#1 – Personal interactions with you

I have had this happen at the grocery store, or my kid’s dance studio, where somehow the conversation turns to what I do for a living. I am able to tell people, “Well, I help Latter-day Saint women make money from home through effective websites. They inevitably will then ask me, “Oh, do you have a business card?” You should have a business card. 

And then, anytime people ask you, you need to have a very succinct answer to the question ‘what do you do’ that focuses on the problem you solve.

#2 – Social Media

I hope that you have picked one social media platform, just one to start with, that you are going to get to know inside and out and do really, really well with. I want you to give a lot of thought to what you write in your profile on that social media platform. It should, again, be a very succinct description of the problem you solve.

And here’s why, earlier this morning, in the Marco Polo group that I have for my workshop attendees somebody asked a question. One of them said, “I want to know more about Reels.” Somebody else came on to answer their questions. She says, “I don’t know about reels. I don’t know the answer to your question, but I know who does, his name is Brock Johnson. All he does is talk about reels and Instagram all day long.”

#3 – Referrals from people who know what problem you solve

“I don’t know the answer to your question, but I know someone who does because all they talk about is _ all day, every day.” That’s what you want people to be able to say about you, which means you’ve got to niche down and solve a very specific problem.

If people have problems with their websites, especially their tech, that’s when people refer them to me. “Oh, I know who can help you with that tech question, Misty Marsh.”

#4 – Your blog posts. yes, they are still a thing.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to write a whole bunch of blog posts. I personally create podcast episodes and then they’re transcribed and added to my website as a blog post. You can do the same thing with a YouTube video. So if writing isn’t your thing, if you’d rather teach or talk out loud, like I do, then start with a podcast or with a YouTube channel.

Make sure that you transcribe those and put them on your website because what this does is it gives the opportunity for people to find a gateway into your website through lots of different mini problems.

I mentioned earlier that the big picture umbrella problem that I solve  for people is I give Latter-day Saint women the opportunity to work from home through websites that are effective. But underneath that, there are lots of mini problems. We’re talking about one of them today.

One of the things is ‘how do I get people to visit that homepage that I’ve built, that website that you’ve helped me build Misty? How do I get traffic to it?’ Because if you don’t get traffic to it, you can’t make money. So that’s a mini problem inside the bigger umbrella of the big picture problem that I solve for people.

You can write hundreds of blog posts about these types of mini problems. And these are the types of mini problems that people go search for. They type it into Pinterest, they type it into YouTube, or they type it into Google, looking for an answer to a very specific mini problem.

When you have an answer for them and they click on that blog post title, and they come over to your website from their search results and they read your blog posts, it actually solves that mini problem. Guess what they’re going to do next? They’re going to click over to your homepage.

So the four gateways again are:

1. A personal interaction with you.
2. Your social media profile where you state the exact problem that you solve for people.
3. Recommendations and referrals from other people.
4. Your blog posts.

5 tips for writing an effective blog

I want to dive just a bit deeper with you into how to write an effective blog post. I have five tips for you.

#1 – Start with the Problem

If you go back and read my blog posts, 85-90% of the time, that is how I start my posts. It’s telling you what problem I am going to solve in that specific blog post and I do this on purpose.

I do it as a service to you, to be honest, so that when you start listening to that podcast episode you can  decide if you need to listen to it or not. Do I have that problem? No. I can skip this one. Do I have that problem? Yes, I have that problem. You want to do this with your blog posts. It’s even better if you can highlight that problem through telling a story, something that your people really understand.

I just wrote an email yesterday and the very first line of this email says, “Learning how to make money online can feel like buckling a toddler into their car seat while they scream ‘I DO IT MYSELF.’ That is a problem that you can, most likely, relate to. Even if you don’t have a toddler right now, you’ve probably had one at some point and you know the frustration and the panicky feeling that can set in when you’re in a hurry and you’ve just got to get the buckle done, but they won’t do it.

That’s how it feels. That emotion in our body when we’re trying to make money from our website and we really need to, but we just can’t figure it out. We can’t make it happen. If you can highlight a problem with a story, that’s an even better way to start your blog post or podcast episode or YouTube video, whatever it is you’re creating.

#2 – make sure that it is easy to read

It should be short. So even if you’ve created a really long podcast, you may consider splitting that up into two or three shorter blog posts.

There is one exception to this, and this is what’s called your cornerstone content. This is an SEO term. SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ So you’re trying to optimize your blog posts so that it can be found by search engines and search engines really like structure.

They like to see categories and they like to see something called cornerstone content. So what this might be is a page on your website. So I might have a category about website design and every single one of these posts that I’m creating right now debunks some sort of a myth about website design.

I could have all 16 of those blog posts linked back to another article that talks about what the 16 myths are. So that is what a piece of cornerstone content is. It’s where you link a lot of different blog posts back to it.

Those posts tend to be very long. They’re very in-depth, they’re extremely helpful to people and they’re there for people when they’re ready to dig deep. But most of your blog posts should be on the shorter side, at a minimum they should be 500 words. 

But in general, if you have a very, very long topic, you are going to want to either make it a cornerstone content post, where lots of other posts link back to it or split it up and make it shorter blog posts.

The reason for this is that it becomes easier for your people to read, and if you can solve problems for them quickly and easily, without them having to read a 30 minute blog post, you are going to win their trust and then they will be more willing to go read those cornerstone blog posts where there’s more information in depth. 

The 500 word minimum that I mentioned is for SEO. Search engines, like Google, are not going to return search results that don’t have at least 500 words.

Let’s dive just a little bit deeper into what I mean about making your website scannable. This is part of making it easy to read.

• You need to use headings and subheadings.
• You need to use lists; bulleted lists, numbered lists.
• You need to use indented quotes.
• This makes it easier for our eyes to scan and determine if we want to read something.

So make sure that you make your website or your blog post is easy to read by making them scannable and short, except for your cornerstone content.

#3 – include internal links

Again, if you have a fairly short blog post, you probably are not going to be teaching someone everything there is to know on a certain topic. So a good idea is to actually link to other articles in your website, other blog posts that are helpful, particularly cornerstone content.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, search engines like links. They like structure. They like to know what this blog post is related to. That’s how they figure out which blog post is going to be the best to return for that specific search result. So linking to other articles in your website helps that.

In addition, it actually helps serve your people. So you’ve written this shorter article 500 to 1500 words or so, and they’ve decided that they like it. Well, they would like to click somewhere else. And one place we hope that they click, at some point, is your homepage, but getting them other places where they can go to get more information about something that really stood out to them in that article is a service. It helps keep them on your website longer and continue to build that know, like, and trust factor.

#4 – make sure that there is a call to action in your blog post

There should only be one and 95% of the time it should be inviting them to join your email.

#5 – make your content shareable

The two main places to make it shareable are Twitter and Pinterest.

If you use Elementor Pro, like I recommend, to build your website you can pull a quote out of your blog post, center it, make it catchy, and if they click on it, it becomes a tweet and they can easily tweet that quote from your article.

Number two is Pinterest. Pinterest is a search engine in and of itself. And every single one of your blog posts needs to have a Pinterest image attached to it so that people can pin it to Pinterest, add it to their Pinterest account, and other people can see it and search for it.

So those are my five tips. Number one, start every single blog post with a problem. Even better if you can do it with a story that highlights the problem. Number two, make sure that your articles are easy to read. Number three, make sure that you include internal links. Number four, include a call to action, which the majority of the time should go to your freemium, inviting people to join your email list. And number five, make it shareable.

If you do these things, your blog post will be highly effective. And I promise you that as people read through them, benefit from them, learn to trust you, they will eventually click on over to your homepage which is focused on making you money.

If you would like more help building an effective homepage, one that actually helps people and makes you money, then you need the MAP Method. Click on over to my homepage and you can find out more about it there.