Driving Traffic To Your Site After the Initial Spike by ZURB

Driving Traffic To Your Site After the Initial Spike

You've got an kick ass product. You've launched and had a wild spike in traffic. You're back down to low traffic levels after the initial spike. What do you do to maintain and improve your traffic? You could buy ads but it's expensive and you don't know your ROI on this type of investment yet, its a young product. You want to build more inbound links to your site to help your SEO and traffic. How do you do so? Here are some great ways which helped us build traffic to our own site without ads.

Publish resources for people to use.

Got chops? Know something cool in your industry? Share the goodies with others! We publish all of our technical tutorials and resources on our ZURBplayground. You can find anything from the latest JQuery and CSS3 tricks to iPad stencils on our playground. All these resourses help people create better websites while in turn helping build awareness of our brand.

Publish opinions about current events.

Got an opinion about what's going on in the news? Voice it on your blog, ask others to contribute! We recently asked some influencers if they'd buy Facebook stock after the Goldman Sachs news came out. We published their answers on our blog. This sparked a great discussion with many new and old readers on our blog.

Publish case studies.

Run a quick case study about a trending topic and publish the results from it. Make the topic interesting enough for people to engage with it. After the news about the new Starbucks logo came out we used Verify to poll people on which Starbucks logo they preferred and why. We published the results on our blog. This sparked tons of comments and engagement from readers and other publications on our blog.

Get influencers to speak.

We run a kick ass ZURBsoapbox speaker series where industry leaders come in and share their lessons learned. It's a way for the team and local community to learn from people that have accomplished great things building a product. People like the Head of UX at Google, Head of Design at Facebook, CTO and Pandora share their tips and tricks. We document the event by summarizing the key points from the talks and publish the podcasts on our blog. This is yet another way to share useful lessons learned which others will engage with and ask for more.

So go out there, share some useful information with people, and build your audience ad free!

6 comments

Greg says

Great article Dmitry, some good tips and advice. You make some great points about how to develop new content to post on your site to keep your target audience coming back for more.

*Running a series of articles, similar to the series of "shorts" that Brian ran last year
*Being consistent with your publication, i.e. don't leave your reader wondering when you might post again

Any other techniques you have found useful for maintaining engagement?

Dmitry (ZURB) says

@Greg Thanks! I agree - short posts are really nice to get folks engaged. Don't have to bargain for too much of their time. It's always a delicate balance between summarizing everything you want to say and making the post as short as possible.

Consistent publication - yes totally. It shows action, enthusiasm, excitement. Don't know about you, but whenever I come to any blog the first thing i do is scroll through and see when the most current post was written and how long before that the older post was written.

Dmitry (ZURB) says

Some other ways to maintain engagement, hmm. A few things come to mind:

Trying to spark action in the reader with your blog posts is something that prompts excitement on their part. So thinking through your blog post content and asking yourself what you want the reader to do afterwords helps create posts that engage with readers.

Soliciting questions from your readers and answering them in a post or in comment form again helps the engagement on the blog with your readers.

I'm going to turn it around - have you seen any other ways to maintaining engagement?

Sean Coleman says

Writing guest blog posts for popular blogs is a huge way to keep sustained traffic (and provide a large initial spike). Start by researching some related blogs to your domain expertise and reach out to the editors via email, or preferably on Twitter. Throw out some ideas that you could write about in the form of a title. Blogs will generally give you a short bio with a link back. This link below your name can drive a significant amount of traffic.

However, make sure the relationship is mutually beneficial. Don't start writing guest blog posts for some random startup that has little to no traffic or isn't something you respect. Blog editors know that people write guest entries to get backlinks and traffic -- which is fine. If you don't know if a blog is popular enough to write for, check out compete.com and see their traffic. I'd say an absolute minimum should be 500-1000 visitors/day. Remember, you can only publish your entry once, so you can't shop it around to other blogs for republishing (except for maybe your own personal blog).

Dmitry (ZURB) says

@Sean - Thanks for the comment and the reminder! Forgot to mention this incredibly powerful way to get traffic back to your site. Collectively as a team here at ZURB we're written many guests posts across many blogs with very fruitful results in linkbacks and traction back on our site.

Glad you mentioned that research is extremely important when pitching to be a guest poster. The blog needs to have at least three articles which relate to your area of expertise. As an example of this tip in action: we have been guest posters on SmashingMag for a while now.

ZURBapps

ZURBevents

ZURBexpo

ZURBjobs

ZURBlog is where we discuss product design, business and strategy.