Three ways to grow your traffic and capture audience

[simonjulian1]

Originally published at: https://www.sitepoint.com/grow-traffic-capture-audience/

Introduction According to a number of studies published over the last 12 months, only 25% of all websites get more than 5,000 unique visitors per month, which (unfortunately!) means that 75% of the internet aren’t reaching anywhere near their traffic (and therefore their monetisation) potential. For context, at SitePoint we tend to try to measure the performance of our articles based on a minimum of 5,000 views per article – granted we have a few more articles in the publishing pipe than normal sites, but it gives you a bit of context. For that 75% of sites who aren’t achieving what they’d like to achieve, some thoughts on what you can do. Understand who your audience are Yep okay, this one sounds like it should be pretty self-explanatory, but it is the basis for everything else that you might like to do to make your site a success. Knowing the audience you want to speak to and creating content that works well for them helps with every subsequent suggestion and is the entire basis for a great website with good levels of traffic. Don’t understand your audience? Don’t get your tone and style right for them? Don’t create content that is of interest to them? Forget any other suggestions, you’re not going to hit the mark – and if you’re doing anything like paid search you can cost yourself a lot of money into the mix. Ultimately this should be test and learn (like everything else you do with a digital business!) – try different…