Yesterday, I had the privilege of participating on the Ask the Experts panel hosted by Liz Gaige of Market Navigators (Liz is the Vancouver chapter leader of Ladies Who Launch). The topic was “Driving Traffic to Your Online Store” and each of the panelists were asked to provide a five-minute intro and tips for the informal session before Q&A kicked off.
I kicked off my introduction with these points:
1. Content is King. It doesn’t matter how many people come to your site if your site’s content is irrelevant or – even worse – relevant but boring. Make sure your site offers something of value so that your efforts in capturing that audience don’t go to waste.
2. Be authentic. Don’t talk “AT” people – have conversations. Stop blasting your Twitter followers with irrelevant messages. They’ll unfollow you or at least ignore you. Instead, engage in conversations. @reply to interesting comments raised by your Twitter followers. RT good content. Make the voice on your web site real and engaging (again, see point 1). As Jonathon Narvey, my co-panelist said, “people are behind businesses”.
After that I espoused probably the most valuable thing I learned while working for that large Canadian media company (I’ll credit Mike Sukmanowsky for this one, although he may have not made it up): GEL, which stands for “Growth, Engagement, Loyalty.” When deciding what you should focus on when driving traffic to your web site, your strategy should consider one of these three tenets:
Growth factors in the new visitors to your web site. If you have a new site like VancouverMom.ca, this blog’s sister site, then likely your key focus is to raise awareness about your site and capture an audience. First and foremost, the best and most basic way to attract visitors is to (a) write content that people are searching for and (b) optimize your site and content so that search engines like Google will find you and raise your rankings. (I’ll go through some of my SEO rituals in a follow-up post). Other tactics for attracting new traffic can include social media initiatives, like Twitter, forming relationships with bloggers that relate to your niche by commenting on their articles or even writing a guest post.
Engagement refers to how deep a visitor goes into your site once they have arrived. Do they bounce off the first page? Try to encourage deeper visits (and therefore more opportunities to sell) by creating little “traps” for them. Set up Related Content links. Merchandise similar products together (e.g. customers who bought this, also bought…). Essential make it as easy as possible for your visitors to discover that your site has more than meets the eye and to explore deeper.
Loyalty refers to returning visitors. You know how it goes: it’s much easier to maintain and service existing customers than to go find new ones. Set up a newsletter right away (one will be added soon to Go Go Mama Go!) – this is one of the tried and true methods of getting traffic to your site. Make it easy for people to follow you on Twitter. Engage with them on a regular basis.
My point: think about the most important aspect that you’d like to focus on when driving traffic to your web site and then devise specific tactics for each of them.
Happy to hear other ideas that people have to drive traffic to your web site! Please share. 
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Thanks for all the tips on this post!!