Boy, is it crazy how things have changed! Just a few years ago, getting traffic to a website was basically a guessing game. Sure, there were strategies that worked, but there wasn’t an easy, end-all-be-all traffic generation technique.

That was before the social media explosion.

Now, flooding targeted traffic to your site is easier than ever. There are four specific marketing techniques that work together to bring huge volumes of traffic to your site. In today’s post, we’ll be going over each one of them, then in future posts, we’ll be going over each one individually.

Search Engine Optimization

We love SEO – no secret! Ever since Google’s inception, SEO has been one of the best ways to bring traffic to your site. And not just any traffic… targeted traffic that’s looking to buy. What more could you ask for?

And this still holds true today. This is why we highly recommend everyone learns as much about SEO as possible. Yes, some people may argue that SEO is hit-or-miss, and Google can slap you at any second.

But as we argue with our “New SEO” philosophy, SEO actually hasn’t changed since the very beginning… it’s just now Google’s technology is sophisticated enough to actually enforce their original ideas. This means you either play within Google’s rules, or you don’t get to play at all.

It’s actually a good thing, though, because the guidelines Google uses to rank a site are exactly the same as what it takes to run a successful website. So if you follow “New SEO” tactics to the letter, you’ll get good rankings and also optimize your site, big time!

Content Marketing

A crucial part of SEO is content. But content isn’t what it used to be. No, content is now a marketing method in and of itself (well, maybe it always was). The idea behind content marketing is simple: create the best content possible for your audience, and post it frequently and consistently.

By providing massive value through your content, you satisfy Google’s biggest requirement, which will help your SEO out as well.

Social Media Submissions

But another aspect of content marketing is social media. This is where it really begins to shine. Not only should you be writing content every single week, you should also be submitting that content to sites like Reddit and Hacker News. By submitting your content to these sites, you’re essentially guaranteed traffic. And, if your content is good enough, it can go viral, bringing you MASSIVE amounts of traffic, and potentially making your business for a long time coming.

Just remember… the whole core to both content marketing and social media submissions is quality. If the quality is there, you’ll get great results. If it’s not there, you probably won’t get any results. It’s worth it to make sure every piece of content you’re putting out is the best content you’ve ever created.

Email Marketing

Lastly, whereas SEO, content marketing, and social media bring in the traffic, we need a way to capture that traffic. This is where good old email marketing comes into play.

Like content marketing, if you want your email marketing to really make it happen for your business, you need to provide a lot of free value. People need to get something out of your email list that they couldn’t’ve gotten without opting in. This is what will make them opt-in in the first place.

We’ve written on this before, but we highly recommend using a basic 7-part email series to capture visitors, gain their trust, and then, after providing significant value, sell them on your product or service.

By doing this, you dramatically increase the number of customers and make sure you have a way to capture all the awesome traffic your other marketing efforts are bringing in.