10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Freelance Writing Website
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The only way to grow your business is to make it known. It’s useless having the best site if you don’t drive traffic to your website. In fact, for any online business, be it small, medium or large, traffic is everything. This is because traffic means conversions.
In other words, if your potential clients don’t know about you, you’ll have trouble finding freelance writing clients. It’s like having a store open 24 hours a day and not having a single person crossing the door.
That’s why it’s essential to know how many people visited your website, see what your competitors are doing, use the right keywords, optimize your web pages, and promote your content to increase the number of people aware of your services. The more traffic you receive, the more opportunities you have to convert your visitors into clients. Indeed, with more traffic you’ll get the following benefits:
- Achieve more visibility and sales, as well as greater prestige within the writing niche.
- The chance to convert anonymous visitors into leads, then follow up within an inbound marketing strategy.
- Increase the sale of your services and grow your business.
So, how to get freelance writing clients? What do successful businesses do? You have two main choices: drive organic traffic to your website by optimizing your content and website, or pay for traffic through campaigns on Facebook or Instagram, for example.
Although this sounds difficult, it doesn’t have to be scary or complicated. On the contrary, with the right tools, you can get traffic to your website without complications. So, we’ll show you 10 ways to drive traffic to your freelance writing website, and specific tools to promote your existing content.
1. Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Writing Services
A landing page is a page within a website, developed with the single objective of converting visitors into clients. It usually has a simpler design with just a few links and some basic information about what you’re offering. In addition, it has a sign-up form to get visitors’ data so you can contact them later and hopefully convert them into paying customers.
If you have an agency dedicated, for example, to content marketing or copywriting, a landing page can help you impress your visitors. They will then leave their email addresses so you can write to them regularly, generating constant traffic to your website every time you publish a new article or blog post.
A great tool you can use to create and manage your landing pages with a drag-and-drop feature is Unbounce. With Unbounce you can create landing pages without any design know-how. Through a dashboard, you can modify elements like buttons, titles, and images; and find more than 125 types of customizable templates.
Unbounce is not free, but you can try it out for a 30-day free trial period. This try-out will even let you integrate with Salesforce or HubSpot to manage your existing clients’ data without having to code or perform complex tasks.
2. Harness the Power of Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to capture new contacts and nurture them to create loyalty to your freelance writing services. However, you have to add real value to your audience and write regularly to keep them engaged.
Driving traffic to your website with email marketing is easy when you have the right tool. One of the best is GetResponse.
GetResponse is an online software for creating flexible sign-up forms to capture the data of visitors that show an interest in hiring you.
You can then use this data to perform sophisticated automation and segmentation processes for email marketing. Write to your subscribers and encourage them to interact with your blog, share informative emails with them, and later, promote your writing services.
3. Identify the Right Keywords to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Adding the right keywords to your website will help you rank better in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). In fact, when you start working on your website, focus on finding keywords that represent what people are looking for in your niche, and prepare your content accordingly.
For this purpose, you can use Keyword Tool, which improves your SEO by giving you the exact keywords your audience is searching for on Google. In other words, it gives you an insight into what the internet user is interested in.
With this information, you can generate a large volume of traffic to your website’s content for free. Just make sure to use the right SEO strategy. When you’re starting your writing business, it’s important to pay special attention to longtail keywords because they are more specific and usually have less search volume, which means less competition. So it’s easier to rank for these keywords and you’ll know what your visitors are looking for.
You can use most of this tool’s features for free. However, if you need more powerful capabilities like 70,000 keywords per day or analysis of your competitor’s keywords, you might be better off paying for the Keyword Tool Pro Plus Plan.
4. Optimize the Readability and SEO of Your Writing
There is no magic formula for getting to the top spot on Google. Instead, you need to optimize different aspects of your website, like readability and SEO. For this reason, you’ll need a powerful and specific tool like Yoast. This is a plugin or extension to improve all possible aspects of organic positioning (SEO) of your website. It also helps you optimize, analyze, and enrich your content.
With Yoast, you can analyze the readability of your writing with the Flesch Reading Ease Score that will tell you how understandable your text is for your reader based on the average length of your sentences, use of passive voice, and distribution of subheadings.
It will also perform SEO analysis to highlight the number of internal links and external links, and use of the keyphrase in your text. As a result, you’ll be able to write great blog posts.
If you have all your content optimized, you will get more clicks and increase the CTR (Click Through Rate) of your blog post. Plus, Google will notice that your page is relevant and useful for users. This will improve your ranking in the SERPs, increasing the likelihood of getting more traffic to your website.
5. Check Your Website’s Ranking in SERPs
Getting relevant data on your website’s performance is critical for making changes and adapting your marketing strategy to your clients’ needs. So, for this task, you’ll need a tool like Semrush for your web analytics.
You can increase the traffic of your website and get more potential clients to see your writing samples and services with Semrush’s features, such as:
- Backlinks analyzer. Backlinks are essential for the search engine to identify the authority of your site and your content. Also, it identifies links that come from authoritative sites and point to your domain, bringing credibility to your site. With Semrush you get a backlink analysis report that determines how domains bring traffic to your site.
- Position Tracking. Compare your domain with those of your competitors, and measure your performance on the SERP.
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These features are essential to driving traffic to your website organically. With Semrush, you can also analyze traffic from other sources such as social networks or ads. By the way, you can get started with an Semrush free account. But you’ll be limited to 10 searches per day and no analytic tools. This might not be enough, so try its seven-day free trial or pay for the pro version.
6. Drive Traffic to Your Website Using Social Media
Posting on several social media platforms at the same time is a great way to generate visibility and powerful content to reach your audience’s emotions. And increasing web traffic through social networks is easier than you might think.
A great tool for managing various social media platforms at the same time is Buffer. Buffer allows you to schedule your posts on different social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram) and reach a wider audience. It also saves you time compared to publishing all your content manually on each platform.
However, you still need to answer posts and invite your audience to check out your writing services to generate engagement.
Just keep in mind that the most important thing is to maintain communication with your audience. This is because you’re dealing with people, and your audience will love the human interaction and getting to know more about you.
You can try out Buffer for driving traffic to your website from social media by using their free plan of three social channels and up to 10 scheduled posts at the same time. But, if you need more flexibility and capacity, you can get a pro plan.
7. Get Inspiration from the Advertising Strategies of Your Competitors
Fortunately, nowadays you can copy the advertising strategies of your competitors on platforms like Facebook. This is because Facebook Ads Library promotes the transparency of the ads on Facebook.
This way, people have more information about the ads they see. But, you, as a freelance writer can also use this tool to optimize your marketing strategy; and drive traffic to your website by imitating the most successful ads in the Facebook Ads Library.
In other words, incorporating Facebook Ads Library into your digital marketing strategy will give you a better understanding of your competition. It’ll also give you ideas to improve your own online advertising and increase your chances of driving more traffic to your website; in case you decide to use paid ads.
The good news is it’s completely free and is a must-have when running ads for your writing services on Facebook. It’ll help you compare your ads to your competitor’s ads so that you know how to improve your advertising.
8. Exploit the Power of Visual Advertisement
Unfortunately, the organic traffic reach has decreased considerably in recent years, and if you’re just starting out, you can’t wait years to have enough content on the internet to drive organic traffic to your website. Another option if you want to immediately drive high-volume traffic to your website is to pay for it.
Besides, advertising is always evolving, and today, visual ads perform well. So, using platforms like Instagram business will allow you to reach millions of active users and potential clients.
With Instagram, you can show your work and offer your services in a visual way, and get greater exposure to your brand because Instagram has more than one billion active monthly users. Actually, you can promote your writing services with images and videos, and benefit from visual content as it generates more engagement than just text.
If you’re not completely convinced yet, here are some reasons to run Instagram Ads:
- Effectiveness and segmentation. Advertising through the platform is highly effective and segmented. That is, you can choose the right audience for your services, such as people who spend money on services online or are interested in writing courses. Your ads will be shown only to users who demand similar services.
- Evolution. Instagram is continually evolving. Almost every month they release new updates to improve the UX, adding new features so you can better interact with its users.
Finally, consider that your investment in running ads will depend on the industry, age group, country, season, and other variables. Some marketers estimate that Instagram ads cost anywhere between $0.20 and $2 per click, but in developing countries, the cost is lower. Also, remember that paid traffic is transitory. When the investment is over, the flow of visits is over too.
9. Keep Yourself Updated with the Best Advice to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Knowing the new trends in marketing is priceless for getting visibility on the internet. And if you have access to the best tips and tricks, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors.
QuickSprout is a free tool that lets you know what you’re doing wrong with your website and how to optimize your content to get more clients.
Specifically, QuickSprout will teach you how to optimize your blog, ads, hosting server, copywriting, email marketing, and many more strategies to drive traffic to your website.
So, updating your knowledge and keeping traffic flowing is easier than ever. You don’t need to return to university. Just follow the advice of experts using tools like QuickSprout.
10. Benefit from Influencer Marketing and Measure Your Performance
Every freelance writing business needs content that stands out, generates engagement, and adds value to its readers. For this reason, tools like BuzzSumo help you intelligently create the best content by measuring your own progress and connecting with influencers.
You’ll be able to discover which content is shared; track brands, competitors, and backlinks; and identify influencers to promote your content and give you referral traffic. This way, your content will reach new audiences and you’ll get readers interested in your services.
BuzzSumo can also help you increase the authority of your site. And, it will analyze your backlinks and those of your competitors to improve your position in search engines. So, if your writing business is growing, this is an awesome tool to drive more traffic to your website.
Are You Ready to Drive Traffic to Your Website?
Making your business grow and increasing your traffic is not easy. You need a plan to be competitive and get the right people to visit your website. In fact, it’s not just a matter of getting visitors, but rather getting qualified leads to raise your conversions.
When you create a website that’s tailored to what people are looking for, and you promote and analyze your content using some of the tools covered here, you’ll be able to drive a lot more traffic to your website. The next step is making sure you’re getting the right audience who will convert into clients and grow your business quickly.
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