“Attract more leads to your website today! ” “Order now! Guaranteed to increase your website traffic!” ” Triple your website traffic in 30 days!”

I get so tired of these offers, it reminds me of the “half naked girls” tactic.  Every year I travel all around the world to attend boat shows for my company. Without fail every show I go to has one ingenious company that has figured out the tactic to drawing a crowd – half naked girls. By strategically placing women in bathing suits on the boat the crowds grow. It always amuses me to see the crowds gather around, I can’t help but think how someone from that company must be saying “look at the crowds, what a great idea this is”.

The problem is that while there may be a crowd gathered around a) they aren’t there to see the product and b) they couldn’t afford it.  The tactic is attracting the wrong crowd.  This same principal holds true when it comes to attracting traffic to your website.

The quickest sign to me that you have no idea what you are doing is by making one of these hollow, senseless, traffic increasing claims. Gathering a crowd for a crowds sake is not what your business is looking for. Attracting more website traffic is not your goal.  Attracting more qualified website traffic is. One hundred interested, motivated and qualified leads are much more important than boosting your traffic stats. The reality is most sites already get enough traffic, it’s conversion to that next step in the sales process that they need to work on. However that’s not to say that you shouldn’t continually be working on ways of cultivating more qualified traffic to your site.

Magnetize More Qualified Leads To Your Website

So how do you go about building qualified traffic?  The tools that you want to focus on are many of the Internet Marketing ideas we cover at this website. Here’s a list of 9 specific ways you can increase traffic.

1. Search Engine Optimization – This is too complex of a subject to cover in a couple sentences, but know that working on optimizing your site for some key search terms should be a part of your strategy.
2. Blogs - This can help with #1 . It also allows you to connect with customers on a much deeper and personal level.
3. Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube) – These are all tools that can help you attract and funnel new qualified leads to your website
4. PR – Allow the press to help promote your company.  Target channels that are specific to your industry, channels where your customers are engaged.
5. Offline (Advertising, Events, Business Card) – These are obvious but don’t forget that they should attract customers to your website.  Does your business card have your blog URL? Twitter handle?
6. Commenting, Forums, Engaging – One of the best ways to seek out, attract and engage new customers is to go where they already are.  Find other websites, forums where your audience already is. Help, engage, converse – don’t go selling at your first encounter.  Develop a relationship, some credibility and build trust.  Then you will gain the permission to sell to them.
7. Online Advertising - Drive traffic to your site with highly targeted ad placement.  Targeted blogs within your industry are a great source of leads.  A banner ad that we advertise on an industry specific blog gets a 2% click through rate. That’s 100x better than the industry average.  The reason is because of the highly focused niche of the blog and its readership.
8. Podcasts – A great way to increase reach, dig deeper into subjects that are just too long for your blog or website.
9. Listening - Using Google Alerts, Twitter Search and other tools you can listen to what your customers are talking about and then engage them.

Don’t let this list overwhelm you, pick a couple of them and start focusing in on improving your knowledge and use of those channels.  Of course you need to frame everything that you do into your overall strategy, one that best works for your business.  However engaging in these channels plus putting in the proper time will result in attracting more qualified leads.

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