You want to generate traffic to your financial website. That is understandable. Who wouldn’t want that? After all, without traffic, you won’t be able to gain traction with your site or blog. The truth is, getting traffic to your website is easy. In a day or so, you can get a lot of traffic.
Which would you rather have, 100 people visiting your website looking for quality finance related information, or 5,000 average idiots who won’t recognize a stock symbol from a hieroglyph? You have likely chosen the 100 relevant visitors.
Perhaps you can boast to your friends that your website received 5000 visitors. But bragging rights do little to build a long-term financial website, one where people revisit it frequently. That’s a true test of a successful financial website (or any website for that matter), how many people keep coming back! How many people subscribe to your newsletter? And the real “litmus test” is how many people buy products or services from you?
How to get relevant traffic
Before you make your fingers bleed by writing a bunch of useless articles or blog posts on your blog, take a step back and ask what you want to accomplish with that. What are your goals for your website? You should not proceed without having formulated this basic information. Otherwise, you’ll be filming in the dark, selecting random subjects that won’t make much of a difference in generating traffic, let alone targeted traffic.
Once you have an idea of your goals for the site, ask yourself who you want to visit. You will read about phrases like avatars of specific clients or clients, etc. Whatever it’s called, it’s a way to determine the demographics of your website.
You can obtain this information by consulting who visits your competition. Find a competitor’s Twitter profile and visit the Twitter feed. Find out who follows that company or website. Those people are part of your target market. You can do this same exercise with any social media platform.
Don’t get too obsessed with demographics. You can refine the process later. Just have an initial idea of who you think would be the best target audience you want to visit your website.
Is the financial blogosphere too competitive?
There are thousands upon thousands of financial websites and blogs. In another year, there will be thousands and thousands more. It makes you wonder if it’s worth continuing to maintain a finance-related website.
This is the good news. Just because there are thousands of websites dedicated to financial topics, most of them are rubbish. These websites contain sales pitches or contain junk content that turns away visitors. If you can rise above this garbage and give readers what they want, you will open the floodgates not only to traffic, but beautiful, targeted traffic as well. It’s the kind of traffic bloggers dream of, but most don’t get.
Creation of excellent financial content
To stay away from the digital crowd, you need to create content that captivates your readers. That is essential. Otherwise, your finance site will be like the rest, lost in the virtual abyss!
The big question of the day is how do you create great content? It can’t just be good. It has to be great. Now for some bad news, it won’t be great when it starts. Let’s be honest; most people are not good writers or content creators. It takes practice like anything else.
One way to quickly speed up content creation is to emulate what the best bloggers are doing. This does not mean copying them word for word. You want to get an idea of the tone and style of your websites and adapt it to your own style.
What about keywords and SEO?
Bloggers are too familiar with the terms keywords and SEO. Keywords appropriately mean which keywords your target market will use to find the information they are looking for. SEO is a bit trickier for the uninitiated. It is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. They are techniques that are supposed to help search engines figure out what your content is about.
The biggest problem with both concepts is that they change all the time. The Master of the Search Engine Universe (Google) changes these rules just like the other less significant search engines. What worked two years ago can make your website the never-never land of search engines.
An underlying concept that has withstood all the changes search engines make is quality content. In other words, don’t worry so much about keywords or SEO. Just write from the heart and do it consistently. Write what you think will be of value to your readers. Nothing else!
Another common tactic is to get other bloggers from the financial world to guest post on your blog or website. Preferably, you want to choose people who are moving up the ranks of influence. Although these influencers are competitors, the web works best when everyone works together to offer readers the best possible value. Everyone wins when this happens, including all participating competitors.
If you don’t have time for content creation but still want to drive quality traffic to your website, consider outsourcing the task. You may have to go to a few subcontractors to find a few that will do a great job for you. But, once you find them, as long as you’re willing to keep them happy ($$$), you won’t have to keep looking for them.
On this note, don’t skimp on price when looking for a quality writer. They are qualified for a reason. If you fish bottom, you will constantly be looking for new writers. When you find a good writer and pay them a lousy rate, it won’t take long to find another better paying client.
Its writers are worth paying for. When you give them what they deserve and are fair to them, you have them for life. You’ll get a return on that investment if you increase the right audience for your financial blog.