The three (100% free) things you need to do today to start building traffic on your website
Back in the late 90s, pretty much all you had to do to get traffic on a website was...have a website. Times have changed, friend. Now there are more websites on the internet than there are souls on Earth, so we need to be a bit smart about how we get our names out there. Heres three things to start today, that are guaranteed to work faster than search engine optimization, to drive traffic to your website, and (hopefully) sales to your Etsy shop.
1) Social media sharing.
Dont lie! You know you spend 2-3 hours on facebook every day“liking” funny pictures of cats. Nothing to be ashamed of—everyone does. Your task, as of today, is to take just 15 minutes of those 3 hours youre wasting on social media and do something productive with them. Heres what to do:
On Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest (bonus points for Instagram), post 1 thing of general interest (e.g. how to clean scuff marks off of leather), and one link to an individual item from your BeesWax website (gorgeous leather macbook holster).
The one:one ratio helps you build a social media audience with information thats relevant to everyone, while enticing people who are interested in your shop to click on links to whatever youre selling. This is one of the fastest ways to build traffic to your website and shop; do this well and you can expect to see hundreds of clicks per day, over time.
Pro tip: On Twitter, you can repost the same thing multiple times per day, to make sure youre reaching your maximum audience—be sure to hashtag your stuff well to increase your reach and engagement. #HandMade and #Etsy are good tags to start with, but research other tags to increase your traffic.
2) Use your mailing list:
After you start driving traffic to your shop, you will start to see mailing list signups. Youre not required to send anything to folks who sign up to receive newsletters, but its wise to do so. They told you they wanted to hear from you!
Veteran marketers consider mailing lists to be the most valuable asset of a website—even above sales and visits. Thats because mailing lists contain the contact information for people who have definitely told you “I want to hear more“.
So tell them more....
All BeesWax websites include an automatic mailing list signup with an email capture that can be exported to a commercial email service (we use mailchimp). The wonderful news is that most commercial email services will let you send emails to a few thousand clients a month, before they even begin to charge you. So keep your customers happy and engaged by sending them a newsletter at least every couple of weeks (every week is optimal). It takes about an hour of time to set up, and the rewards are just incredible.
3) Start a blog
A blog on BeesWax is as easy as falling out of bed to get started with, and each blog post contains a permalink back to your website. Keep your website fresh every week with useful and relevant content, and youll build a bigger audience than you ever thought possible.
Add these posts to your social media sharing schedule, and youll build both your brand, and your traffic simultaneously. Plan on spending about 1 hour a week on blogging. Its time well-spent, because the traffic benefits accrue the more blog posts you do, and the more you share your posts on social media, the better traffic you get, and the more interested people will show up on your site and sign up for newsletters and buy things! Its a win-win-win!!
Questions about getting started with a blog? Contact us!!