You've spent weeks, maybe months, creating a beautiful store, but no traffic is coming in and no traffic equals no sales. You hear people telling you about social media, but maybe you've tried it and your returns are awful. It feels like you're creating content for the social media platforms instead of bringing traffic to your store. Now you're wondering how to get traffic to your store without social media.
The good news is, there are plenty of ways get traffic to your store. After all, what did businesses do before social media? People may say that's a different time with different dynamics. That is true. Human nature, however, has changed little. It may surprise you. Some “old school” methods still work very well. Let's get into the methods of how to get traffic to your store without social media.
How To Get Traffic To Your Store With Content Marketing
Customers look for solutions to their problems. While they want your product, they also want advice and education. You can resolve this with content but not just any content. Create quality content that shows them how your product can solve their problems and more. Aim to instruct, help, guide, and advise and you'll find content marketing an effective way to drive traffic to your store. Especially if you apply search engine optimization to capture organic traffic and organic traffic is highly valuable. What kind of content can you create?
- Write informative blog posts
- Video content
- Infographics
- Teach a class
- Workbooks.
Just to name a few.
Contests and Giveaways
There are different giveaways you can use to get traffic to your store, but the type of giveaway here is where you give away something your ideal customers want (hopefully your product) and generating buzz around that. Same with the contest. When you do something like this, you want to make sure one way to qualify for the contest or giveaway is to have people share it so you can attract more traffic to your store.
What? I thought you said no social media. True. But in this case, your audience is using social media to promote you, not you. There is a difference. When others talk about you on social media, it carries more weight. You can do this with tools like Wishpond, RafflePress and Woobox.
Start An Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is a great way to get traffic to your store, generate sales and also reach customers that you otherwise wouldn't and couldn't. Having an affiliate program in place also makes it a lot easier to get into influencer marketing. It's also a better incentive for influencers.
Think about which is more appealing. Promoting a product for a freebie once or promoting a product where they could get paid over and over for doing the job one time? Besides, this also makes it more likely to re-promote you. The result-more traffic to your store.
Start A Referral Program
Wait. Isn't that the same thing as an affiliate program? Yes, and no. It depends on the context. Some people use referral and affiliate program interchangeably, but a referral program is more customer focused to get traffic to your store. For example, when you join Dropbox, you're encouraged to share it with your friends to get more storage space for yourself. Your reward is more of the product, not a check.
Also, affiliates are usually entrepreneurs or people who do this for a living or to supplement their income. Referrers are usually customers who are happy with your product, want to share it, and want more of it. That's truly one of the best ways how to get traffic to your store because it's being shared by fans. You can run both programs simultaneously. There is no rule to say you can't.
Guest Post For Other Sites
When you guest post to gain traffic, choose a site that has a bigger customer or audience base than yours. More important, they have to reach people like your ideal customer. This can be a bit of work, but consider this. Most blog posts or articles live forever. One excellent post can get traffic to your store for years. In addition, it's a fantastic way to build backlinks which again, help you rank on search engines.
Reach Out To Competitor's Referrers or Fans
When a customer loves your competitor's product, they could be interested in checking out your product, too. Where is your competitor getting traffic from? Who's talking up your competitor? You can find out with SEO research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush that tell you where your competitors get their traffic from.
You can also learn what keywords your competitor is ranking well for so you, too, can optimize your site or content for similar keywords. Also, you could set up a Google Alert to get notified whenever someone mentions your competitor's brand online.
Joint Venture Giveaway or Bundle
Know a few people who reach or want to reach the same audience? Reach out to ask them to contribute a product to a limited time giveaway. This way, everyone in the group is getting traffic from the giveaway and everyone gets exposed to each other's audience.
If you choose to make it a bundle – where people pay instead of getting all the products free, that's a great way to get traffic from people who are ready to spend and build a list of buyers instead of leads. Both have value to get traffic to your store, so try both.
Participate In Group Discussions
So many people start their own group these days but it's a lot of work to keep a community hopping and if it's not hopping, nobody wants to be there. It's a double-edged sword. Instead of building your own, get active in other people's groups. Many group hosts are also eager to get their group hopping and welcome active participants. Some group hosts are also incommunicado. They start a group, realize how hard it is, life or business takes over and before long, you hardly see them in the group.
Just be respectful of the rules and don't be there just to advertise. In fact, never advertise your stuff on other people's group. Always give value first, and if your product applies to the discussion, that's the time to bring up your product. This way, you're not advertising (yuck) but you're helpful (yay!).
In addition, active participants get noticed. You can even become more visible than the host itself and people begin to seek you out. The net result – you get more traffic to your store.
One more thing. Make sure the group is filled with your target audience. Otherwise, what's the point?
Work With Others In Related Industries
Your customers are not one dimensional people. They have other interests and concerns. Find out what other products they use or want. For example, if you make hand crafted bookmarks. Reach out to planner makers. Arrange a swap. You can swap solo emails to each other's list or swap thank you page offers. Get creative. Better yet, if they agree, it doesn't cost either of you a dime to get traffic to your store and… no social media required.
Today, when you ask someone how to get traffic to your store, most people default to social media to drive traffic and sales. Maybe because it's free, maybe because it seems like a given, and maybe because it's easy. But with declining reach, increasing distractions and rising ad costs on social media, it's becoming more difficult and time-consuming to get traffic from social media. Try these methods. You'll probably get better results for less work.
