2 easy ways to drive traffic to your website

It is a never-ending chore to drive traffic to your website, isn’t it? Sometimes it feels like you’re chasing your tail, doing the same things over and over, with little to no results. If that’s the case, it might be time to switch things up, homie.

Below are two easy ways to drive traffic to your website: submitting your site to award or aggregate sites, and getting listed in directories. These are ways you probably haven’t thought of before, but they’ll definitely help you cover more ground in the quest for increased traffic.

Way #1 ( AKA a Story About Unexpected Traffic)

One day I was checking out Google Analytics to see how my latest blog post was doing, and I noticed we had quite a bit of traffic coming from a website name I didn’t recognize.

I did a little investigating and found that the source of this traffic was a site called CSSWinner, which showcases and awards well-designed websites.

My very smart boss had submitted our website to the site and, months later, we are still getting traffic from this. It was free to submit to the site, with very few requirements — a total win for us.

There are awards and recognition sites like this all over the Internet, and they are a great way to drive traffic to your site. Do a search for “best real estate” or “best church” or “best restaurant” website, and you’ll find lists for all.

Another Story About Traffic

A few years ago, I helped found a website for women. The site covered topics from food to DIY to celeb culture. One day, a friend who is big in the DIY world asked if we were submitting our posts to Craftgawker.

“Que?” we asked. “What is this Craftgawker you speak of?”

That was the day we learned how to increase our traffic from about 100 visits a day to an average of 5000+.

Make Your Content Visual and Gorgeous

Craftgawker is a site that posts images of craft and DIY projects. Visitors see an image they like, read a brief description of the project, then click through to the blog that tells them how to make said project. There are also Dwellinggawker, Weddinggawker, Stylegawker and Foodgawker, all of which function the same way.

The sites look a bit like Pinterest, but there’s a huge difference in how content is shared: Images have to be submitted and approved before they appear. Check out the images on Foodgawker:

[caption id=”attachment_1768” align=”aligncenter” width=”1209”] Photo: Foodgawker[/caption]

Obviously, this requires more effort than Pinterest, on which anyone can post anything. Sometimes it would take us a dozen attempts to have our image and post accepted to Craftgawker or Foodgawker, but we never gave up, because the rise in traffic was that astronomical.

What sites in the “–gawker” family have in common with both Pinterest and CSSWinner is the heavy emphasis on visuals as a way to attract visitors.

Images are super-important, and getting even more important-er. Check out this graph from the Pew Research Company showing the rise in social media platforms from 2012-2013:

Notice the increase in users of Pinterest and Instagram, which are both very visual platforms. We humans are attracted to beauty; we can’t help it. It’s the reason Kim Kardashian is still a household name despite having no discernible value to the world.

We like things to be pretty, and to draw us in. So if you’re thinking about buying that pricey camera, do it. The more you can add to your site visually, the better your results will be on Pinterest, on Foodgawker, on CSSWinner, on any site relevant to your niche.

Pro tip: Clearly, being visual works better for a bakery than, say, a law firm. But, thanks to photo filters, it is possible to make musty old law books look poignant, so go ahead and add them to your site.

Ask Around

The best way to find sites in your niche similar to the ones I’ve mentioned is to do your research, and ask around.

Do a search on Google or Bing for “awards” and the name of your niche or industry. Join groups on LinkedIn that have to do with your focus, and ask if they know about award sites or directories on which you can add your website. Ask on Twitter. Ask on Facebook. Ask around on the blogs you read.

Yes, it will require some time and effort on your part, but in the end, it’s worth it, isn’t it?

Way #2: Seek Out Directory Submission Services

If you just don’t have the time or inclination to submit your website to these sites, there are services you can pay to do it for you. For example, The CSS Gallery List will submit your site to 100 galleries for $49.

Have you added your site to any directories? Tell us in the comments how you found directories and awards sites to add your website to.