How to drive traffic to your website.

1. Clarity is more important than intelligence.

When we try to be clever, we compromise clarity. We think a concise headline or line of text will grab people’s attention, but often it just confuses them. Confused people never buy.

This is one of the most common marketing mistakes I see entrepreneurs make and have made countless times myself. Our instinct is to highlight what’s smart or unique about our brand, but in doing so, we run the risk of confusing our audience with a confusing message. Your marketing should make it very clear what your brand does and the problem you solve for your audience.

Next time you write copy for your brand or compose a marketing message, ask yourself if it needs to be explained. If so, go back to the drawing board and simplify.

2. Use the “want to” test.
Once your message is clear, the second filter your marketing must pass is the “want” test.

The best titles complete the sentence: “I want …….”. Insert your title or key phrase into that sentence and see if it is something a potential audience member would actually say. I want to “multiply time”. I want to “drive traffic to your website”. If you find yourself nodding your head at these statements, it’s because those titles are working.

Johne had two titles he was working on: Workplace Jazz and Productivity Intelligence. Put them to the “I want” test and the winner is immediately clear. “I want Workplace Jazz” or “I want Productivity Intelligence”. Productivity Intelligence is concise, clear and tempting. We all want to be more productive.

What does your audience want and how can you give it to them? The answers to these questions should be immediately clear when reading your marketing.

3. Paid traffic is predictable traffic.
Many treat not using paid traffic as a badge of honour. But paid traffic is the only traffic you can control; paid traffic is predictable traffic. If you rely solely on organic traffic, you will always be at the mercy of an ever-changing algorithm and the whims of a mercurial audience.

It is impossible to measure the success (or lack thereof) of your posts empirically and objectively when you rely solely on organic traffic. If a post goes viral, there is no way of knowing exactly why it worked. Every post or marketing initiative becomes a gamble. And while paid traffic is still a gamble (all things in business life are), it is much less risky. You know you’ll get traffic because you’ve paid for it, and you can quickly see what’s working and what’s not. For every dollar spent on traffic, you can (and should) track the clicks that result from it.

Don’t be afraid of paid traffic: there is no medal for living at the mercy of algorithms and audience preferences. Paid traffic gives you the opportunity to take control of your own destiny and grow your brand in a predictable way.