6 Five-Minute Tasks to Increase Web Traffic
Increase web traffic. It’s one of the most frustrating things a marketing director can be told, because let’s face it, it doesn’t happen overnight.
That’s why so many companies turn almost immediately to search engine marketing as a solution to their traffic needs. Why invest countless hours and resources in figuring out the byzantine mazes that are the Google and Facebook algorithms when you can just pay for web traffic?
If time is of the essence, this makes sense, but there are some other quick tricks you can use to drive new traffic to your website. Here are six that take less than 5 minutes and will result in at least some new traffic.

Post Free Content to Industry Forums

Ever write a blog post and watch it sit there attracting little or no traffic? You’re not alone. Plenty of businesses invest big bucks and plenty of time into creating admittedly very good content only to watch it stagnate on their site, not generating many if any shares or comments.
The problem isn’t the quality of the content but the targeting. With very few or no changes you can fix this. Create a list of the specific forums and social groups where your audience spends the majority of its time. This includes Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Communities, and traditional forums.
You’ll get significantly better traffic if you drive 200 hits out of a LinkedIn group instead of 1,000 hits from generic Google searches.

Submit Your Name to Guest Blogs and Podcasts

Get your name out there and drive web traffic back to your best content by promoting your expertise. Guest blogging is a great way to do this, but can be time intensive. A faster and slightly less exhausting way to generate the same exposure (and backlinks) is by being a guest on podcasts or radio shows.
Networks like RadioGuestList.com or InterviewGuestsDirectory.com allow you to list yourself as an expert on certain topics, but also reach out to hosts who are actively looking for participants. This takes only a few minutes and the response rate is generally very good – 5-10 emails will usually net you one or two bookings. Each booking means big exposure to a new audience.

Interact with Thought Leaders on Twitter

There are two ways to do this. First, you can actually send messages directly to people in your niche who have big audiences. Twitter is fantastic for this because you can directly message anyone in the world, regardless of how famous they are. Whether they respond or not is a different matter, but through careful targeting and smart marketing, you can generate a big response.
Just like Dan Barker did a couple years ago when Matt Cutts posted a relatively benign message:
Dan Barker Matt Cutts Tweet Response
It was funny, it got picked up big time and Barker got some heavy exposure for his quip. This kind of thing happens all the time.
The other way to do this is to embed highly trafficked tweets about topics related to your niche on your website. By embedding the tweets, you may be listed as a referring site with the tweet on Twitter. If that tweet goes viral, you might be privy to a bit of additional traffic yourself.

Create a List of “Toppable” Content

This one is tricky. The act of creating this list will only take five minutes, but generating the content listed will take much longer. Toppable content is essentially any authority or thought-leader level content on the Internet that you think you can do better.
The problem with content marketing these days is that everyone is doing it. The bar is very high and that means you can’t just publish another blog post covering a familiar topic in a familiar way. You need something big, long, and very detailed (or very targeted).
Use AHREFS Content Explorer or BuzzSumo to find the top performing articles or pages for a specific keyword or topic. Evaluate which content pieces you could do better than those at the top. Guaranteed you’ll find more than a fair share of good toppable pieces.

Share and Be Shared

I’m not a big fan of automation in social marketing (it often backfires and frequently gets shut down), but in certain instances it can work. Sites like JustRetweet or Viral Content Buzz reward you credits for sharing other people’s content.
Those credits then let you post your content so that other people can share it on their Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn feeds. The sharing isn’t automatic and you choose what you share and when. So it’s no different than what you’re already doing, except now when you share something, you gain from it. This is a powerful way to build a larger audience, and it only takes 5 minutes a day.

Run a Freebie Giveaway and Post to Facebook Groups and Twitter Feeds

One of the most frequently curated topics on social media is free stuff. If you offer a free giveaway, contest, or other freebie, combined with the right hashtags and keywords, you can generate significant traffic to your site.
The key is to create a list of Facebook Groups and Twitter accounts that curate this type of content. There are different groups and accounts based on your audience and the type of content you give away (there are hundreds of Kindle book giveaway groups for example), so make sure to research the ones that best fit what you will offer.
When done properly, you can generate hundreds or even thousands of visits from this type of promotion of your content.
While some of the follow up tasks for the actions listed above will take you longer than five minutes, the act of creating a solution to your problem of low web traffic will be much faster. The key is to identify the way in which you can improve your efforts quickly and take action immediately. Now get out there and take action.