WARNING: In 2014 2015 2016, relying heavily on SEO to drive traffic to your website is a recipe for failure!
Okay, that might be a bit harsh… maybe SEO isn’t dead, but things have changed and you need to look beyond SEO to drive traffic to your website.
If you put all your eggs in Google’s basket by focusing only on SEO to generate traffic for your SaaS app, you could end up with much less traffic – especially quality, qualified, relevant traffic – than you’d like, which means fewer trial signups, fewer customers, and less revenue!
But don’t worry… there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website besides SEO and I’ve put a list together just for you…
So the times are changing, and when it comes to attracting the right crowd to the marketing site for your SaaS app, you need to embrace these changes.
Rise of the Growth Hacker: Drive Traffic to your Website in creative ways
In fact, there’s even a new ethos that has taken hold in Silicon Valley – that of the ‘Growth Hacker’ – and if you aren’t familiar with the term, Andrew Chen wrote a great piece and said “Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing.”
Andrew even proclaims “No traditional marketer would have figured this out” when talking about Airbnb’s super-slick Craigslist integration.
This is why Marketing VPs everywhere this year quickly changed their business cards and LinkedIn profiles to “Growth Hacker” because, c’mon, it’s just too darn sexy to pass up…
… and no one wants to be thought of as a “traditional” marketer!
In today’s world (vs. yesterday’s or tomorrow’s), that action starts by thinking outside the proverbial box…
…doing things that move your company forward in leaps and bounds – often with some type of Viral Expansion Loop – that are different from what everyone else is doing.
Even more, it means REALLY knowing your audience (target market) and doing things to get them to take action and get invested in your product.
Leverage Growth Hacking and Viral Expansion Loops to drive traffic to your website
For Airbnb, it was finding a super cool integration that would add virality to their product AND additional exposure for their users’ properties.
Another example is HitTail – an SEO keyword tool – where this “growth hacking” (knowing your customers and doing awesome things to reach/help them) resulted in the discovery that customers churned out because they got great SEO data, but didn’t have time to write content around it…
… so HitTail is doing an integration with Textbroker’s API to allow HitTail customers to order articles/blog posts on-demand based on keyword data!
But You Just Need to Drive More Traffic to your Website, right?
But the truth is that, while these integrations are cool and can help a lot, there’s a more basic complaint I still hear time and again and that is “We need more traffic!“
Well, traffic is something any Growth Hacker worth their salt should be able to get in droves, right?
But not just any traffic will do!
A successful sales process for your SaaS app starts by attracting the right audience…
… which is why I put together a presentation called “Traffic Hacking: 43 ways to get quality prospects to your site” to help you become the Growth Hacker I know you can be.
Look, attracting the Right Audience in the form of a steady (or steadily increasing) flow of relevant traffic to your marketing website is absolutely required for the scalable and sustainable growth of your SaaS or Web App company…
…and this one hour and 20-minute video presentation is pure, unadulterated traffic-getting awesomeness that will help you achieve that!
SaaS Providers: How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
WARNING: Before you spend a lot of time or money getting traffic to your site, make sure the site – and your app – are designed to engage and convert; otherwise you’re wasting effort & money!
Okay, now… because my presentation is so awesome (IMHO) – seriously, it’s 80-minutes jam-packed with a ton of my secrets that I’ve only ever shared with my clients – I want to keep it a little bit secret still… just between you and me.
So here’s what you need to do to boost the traffic to your SaaS marketing site:
1. Download and enjoy the slides from the presentation (PDF) – 54 slides of Traffic Generating awesomeness – or you can check them out on Slideshare (below):
2. Then watch the 80-minute presentation, but please note that since I presented this back in May 2012 I’ve updated the slide deck a few times – and yes, I fixed the Pinterest spelling error (as well as a few others).
3. Profit. (No guarantees, of course… but this should help)
