We received an email asking the question, “how do I get more unique people to my website?” Since this is a pretty hot topic these days, we figured we’d share our response to help everyone get a better understanding of the broad digital strategies one can use to generate awareness for their website.

To generate awareness for your website you have a couple broad options.

  1. Digital Media Purchases – This would include things like purchasing CPC or CPM banner ads with re-targeting (not to be confused with re-marketing) on niche websites, Google Adwords, and targeted Facebook ads.
  2. Content marketing – Essentially, building valuable content on your company blog and then promoting it to the right websites and social media influencers to gain new traffic sources and the added benefit of search engine rankings for a second source of traffic.
  3. Guest Posting – Similar to content marketing, but the difference is that you reach out to authoritative blogs within your industry to write content on their website so you can leverage their audience in exchange for your knowledge and insight.
  4. Social media marketing in the context of joining conversations online where people are talking about issues within your industry. In a broad sense, these conversations are happening on the typical social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn plus forums, Q&A websites, video sites, etc.

The Biggest Mistake We See Brands Making on Social Media

A major mistake we see many brands making is relying on posting to their social network feeds before they have an established audience and thinking that is enough to power their social media strategy.  When you’re still trying to become known, you have to actively pursue the conversations and build your network.  Only established brands have the luxury of posting something on the feed and instantly have people respond to it, gaining back links, new sales, etc.

Pros and Cons

As I’m sure you guessed, each of these 3 strategies have their pros and cons depending on your offer and brand.  Each one has different long-term and short-term costs along with timelines for how quickly they start generating traffic.