Help directing traffic

[Raymond Jones]

I am an independent associate and I have websites and a blog, I also use facebook and google plus. I'm not sure how to make the most out of these sites. My niche is legal and I would appreciate any advice on how to better drive traffic to my site for free.
After I have built my business I will then be able to invest money into making more traffic.

Thanks for any help

[lisadlastdegree]

Hi Raymond
What do you want to get out of driving traffic? Is it leads and customers?
If so you need to have a sales funnel set up.
Perhaps focus on driving traffic to your website. Make sure there is some form of capture page to collect emails/name/phone from potential clients. Best way is to attach a blog to your website (even if you are only blogging once a week or fortnight) and syndicate it to your Google plus and facebook to keep them up to date. For your niche I would definately be focused on SEO as most of your traffic will be "organic" Google referring customer seeking a solution to a problem hence the benefit of blogging about those problems.
I hope that helps,
Lisa

[Raymond Jones]

Originally Posted by lisadlastdegree

Hi Raymond
What do you want to get out of driving traffic? Is it leads and customers?
If so you need to have a sales funnel set up.
Perhaps focus on driving traffic to your website. Make sure there is some form of capture page to collect emails/name/phone from potential clients. Best way is to attach a blog to your website (even if you are only blogging once a week or fortnight) and syndicate it to your Google plus and facebook to keep them up to date. For your niche I would definately be focused on SEO as most of your traffic will be "organic" Google referring customer seeking a solution to a problem hence the benefit of blogging about those problems.
I hope that helps,
Lisa

Thanks Lisa
I do have a landing page for collecting info, and I use a contact manager. When you say attach a blog to my website, do you mean put links on my blog for my website.
Is syndicating to FB and G+ the same as sharing?
What is SEO and what do you mean by "organic"?
I do understand what you mean about blogging about legal problems since that is my niche.

Do I have to register or associate my domain name and blog to google/yahoo/etc in order to be found by the search engine? Or would just writing in my blog daily do the trick?

BTW what's your opinion on VBLOGs, and is youtube a good way to get traffic?

[windydavis]

Wow, that's a lot of questions.

I'll try to offer my input a bit until Lisa gets back with you.

I believe she is saying - yes, make sure your website has links to your blog.

Syndicating to FB and G+ would mean that anything you write would be posted to those sites. Yes, it is sharing but setting it up to do automatically makes sharing easy.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. You would get "organic" traffic if somebody types ..for example.. your location zip code and the type of attorney you are into Google and you show up in the listings. This is a great way to get free traffic.

You can go to google and type - site: xxxxxx.com - xxx's being your site name and you can see if Google is indexing it.

Yes, videos are a great way to get traffic but try not to overwhelm yourself with too many options right away.

Getting some SEO work done on your blog & website would be a great place to start.

Good Luck,

Windy

[Create Your Wealth]

Raymond

There are some great suggesions for you here. SEO is a great choice, but beware of paying someone to do this for you. There are many out there who will claim that can make you #1 on google... but it is a scam. You complete SEO yourself.

A blog is also a great idea, but it carries the same problem as your website. It needs traffic. The key to getting traffic to your blog is a little thing called distribution. You can distribute you blog posts on FB, not only to your own page, but to others as well. Start joining different groups that are closely related to your line of legal work. (This will take a while, as you just cannot go join a 100 groups in a day; otherwise, FB will put in in timeout.) Look for groups that have 500 or more members. Once you have your groups joined you can use a little ap called PostPlanner to help you distribute your blog to those groups you joined. Keep your distribution relative to the group purpose. Start small and keep building. In other words, start distributing as your are buidling your groups.

I hope all of that makes sense and helps. If you have a question, feel free to PM me.

[Ecaffiliate]

I am slowing working on the strategies people are talking about here. Social Media, article writing, video marketing is getting a lot of attention right now. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is lots to do with keywords and how you utilize them in titles, tags and content. One thing I didn't hear much of is Social Bookmarking. You register to a site and upload your content (article, video etc.) with a description. Commenting on people's work can also provide backlinks.

[sabatek]

Banner ads, solo ads, social networks.

[veronica.l]

Lots of good suggestions already. Here are my favorite ways to drive traffic to my sites:

-Organically by using onpage and offpage SEO
-Article writing
-Videos
-Sharing your content on social media

[ccole]

Visitors coming to the site by typing site name directly in the Adress URL box of the browser are termed as Direct visitors. In case of GA, some sources of traffic which are untraceable are also counted as Direct/none traffic (this also includes bookmarked visits).

[Mike.Koller]

Wow. These are great suggestions for getting traffic.

It sounds like some of you guys are great at getting in front of your audience and making it easy for them to find you. That is such an important skill in this biz.

Thanks for the great ideas, guys. Please keep sharing.