What is the Best Way to Get Traffic?
Listen on the go by downloading the audio of today’s video here.
- In this video, Matt will explain AutoGrow’s Rocket Content Formula, which has helped grow traffic exponentially.
- Included are actionable tips that you can follow to boost your own traffic.
Hi, my name is Matt, the founder of AutoGrow.co. Today I'm answering an audience member's question, which is a fundamental, since your funnel will not work without this one thing. That question is: what is the best way to get traffic?
Now, there are a lot of different ways we could answer this question, so let me tell you our process for approaching this.
I've grown our website, AutoGrow.co, from scratch with no advertising. We went from zero to 31,000 visits, the latter of which we just crossed this month. In the last six weeks alone, we've really started to accelerate. In tomorrow's video, we’re going to share the three lessons learned from growing to 30,000 visits per month.
To answer the question, I'm going to be drawing from my own experience based on what I know has been the deciding factors in us getting to this point, and what I believe will continue to help us grow and even accelerate to the next level. I'm also going to try to balance that, because you should know that the risk of taking advice from anyone at all can be self-reinforcing.
In other words, if you ask someone for advice on how to do something, that person is often going to give you advice based on their perspective or choices that they have made. Even if they aren't happy with those choices, they may still recommend that you take the same course of action. No one wants to be outdone, and no one wants to face that maybe they were wrong and they could have made a better decision about anything, whether it's marketing or their personal life.
So in this case, I'm not only going to be drawing from my own experience, but we’ll balance it with what I've read has worked from other successful marketers out there. Where appropriate, we will cite case studies and name names. So let's get going.
How AutoGrow Boosted Traffic: The Rocket Content Formula
What is the best way to get traffic? Well, from our experience, starting at zero and bootstrapping this company to the point where we're getting 31,000 visits, and we've built an email list with over 26,000 subscribers, most of that traffic we've built has been organically.
In other words, we just started writing and putting out these in-depth detailed guides that answered a specific question or targeted a specific keyword or keyword phrase. Sometimes we would accidentally find keyword phrases that would then later grow in popularity.
For example, we wrote about growing your Facebook likes organically, and featured a video case study with Lawrence Watkins, a friend.
I'd also read other in-depth case studies with examples about sales funnels, for example, and we started to grow from that really quickly, because there wasn't a lot of content out there at the time. It is that evergreen content where we would write about a topic really in-depth, to the point where people often wanted to download the whole blog post as a guide and refer back to it later for a specific need they might have had in building and growing their own marketing funnel, that served us well.
From there, it was just rinse and repeat: put out high-quality content that takes us anywhere between 10 to 20 hours of labor to actually put together, edit, write, rewrite, and then promote. The promotion part of it — which we've really only scratched the surface of — we haven't been that successful yet. For now, we will just promote it on social media, like we'll tweet it or we'll share it, put it on Pinterest, post it on our Instagram account, et cetera.
Maybe we'd even tweet out about the same post a couple of times to kind of drip out additional tips and get as much mileage from that blog post as possible. Then we would promote it to our email list as well. We would send a newsletter saying, "Here's the new post. Here's what we're teaching. Here's why it's valuable. You should click over and read it on our blog. It's worth your time. Here's what you're going to learn, ABC."
This is the process that has worked for us. In a nutshell, we call it The Rocket Content Formula. We go into great detail about it in our Six-Figure Funnel premium course on our website.
Now, let’s refer back to what is working for us right now and what I believe is going to help us get to the next level based on what I've read from other marketers like Brian Dean, Neil Patel and Derek Halpern. This is also based on what I've seen work, as we've kind of incrementally improved our process. That's how I personally like to work; I like to kind of build a process and then make it better and better over time.
That is kind of reflected in our traffic, too. We never really went from here to there instantly. It's always been very steady, predictable growth, which, hey, if it gets results, right? Just keep doing it. Now we're at a point where this year we're committed to our goal of 100,000 monthly visits.
It's scary just to say that to you, because that just recommits me every time I say it, to making sure that it happens. What I've seen in how we grew by over 6,000 new visits just in the last five weeks is that there's new traffic coming in now where we crossed the 31,000-visit mark.
What has also worked for us is putting out more content more frequently. Instead of publishing once per week, we're also putting out these Matt Hack videos with an edited quality transcript with images, and often related content upgrades and lead magnets so people can download the resource related to it. We're doing that four times a week on top of our once-per-week in-depth article and guide.
Publishing more frequently seems to be helping. What else I think will propel us to the next level is getting our hands dirty and understanding how our brand fits in with the different social media channels that we've chosen to focus on, namely Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Now, in my Matt Hacks yesterday, we gave you a behind-the-scenes look at our social media using some very basic best practices where we're posting daily. We also showed you that you shouldn't believe the hype from any of these case studies, and that if you only use the best practices, you should not expect to get stellar results, especially when you're just starting out.
So yes, we're really just going to have to dig in and understand how we get each of these channels to work, as well as how to get more engagement and attract more followers, fans, likes and shares.
I think that's what's going to take us to the next level. You have to think outside the box, too. For example, we're going to reach out to people directly through email and ask them if they will be willing to share our content if we mention or feature them, or if we're trying to promote a specific post that maybe is similar to another post that they've read and promoted, we’ll ask if they can promote it in the future on one of their social media channels.
Link building is another channel and process that we haven't developed or focused on much at all. I think that that is really what's going to help take us to the next level, continuing to publish frequently, but also just doing more, and innovating more and trying more things, both the best practices and trying to think outside the box in various ways, as you'll see if you continue to follow along with these Matt Hacks.
I believe this year, we're going to hit that 100,000 visits per month mark. If we continue at the rate that we're at now, we would probably end the year at around 60,000 or 70,000 visits per month, but, obviously, we're committed to that 100k goal.
So those are my thoughts on what the best ways are to get traffic. Obviously, you could pay for it with ads, but it's much more economical and sustainable, and you don't have to pay for every visit if you're building it organically like this.
Also you want to have traffic coming in from multiple sources, so if you have a big ad budget and you're willing to burn through some money in order to figure out how to get ads to really work for you, you don't just want traffic that's going to come to your website, you want traffic that's going to convert.
So that's what's worked really well for me, that's what's worked for the other people I've cited who are seeing millions and millions of visits to their websites every single month. If you have your own question, I look forward to being able to answer it for you in an upcoming video. Leave a comment with a question or what has worked really well for you as far as the best way to get traffic to your website.
Until next time, my name is Matt Ack in the Matt hat, delivering your daily dose of Matt Hacks. Keep hustling and stay focused. Bye.
