Growing Your Website

You are going to use social media as your primary vehicle for driving traffic to your website. You will do this by sharing links to your website content on your social media properties. However, you are going to have to have content to share before you share it.

Remember that brainstorming list you created early on? Well, it’s time to pull it out. You are going to use that list to come up with content ideas for your website. If you skipped that step, you should probably revisit it and get cracking on it now.

Following along with the “fly tying” example I’ve used throughout this guide, you might want to start off with an easy piece – an article that talks about fly-tying and explains what it is and why you enjoy it. There’s really no need to “sell it” – just talk about it like you would with someone in conversation.

Since fly-tying is a hobby of yours, you should enjoy writing about it and have lots of personal information and opinions to offer. Producing an article of 500-1000 words should actually be very easy. You may even be able to produce a multi-part series without even trying.

For example:

  • Part One: An Intro to Fly-Tying
  • Part Two: Why I Enjoy Fly Tying
  • Part Three: Tying Your First Dry Fly
  • Part Four: Tying Your First Wet Fly
  • Part Five: The Top 5 Flies for Trout Fishing

The list could literally go on and on. You get my point.

Once you’ve got 5-10 pieces of content published on your website, you can begin sharing them on your Facebook and Twitter pages. What this will do is populate your social media properties so they don’t look empty when you finally start sending traffic to them.

You’ll want to add a few pieces of content to your website on a regular basis – two or three times per week is probably sufficient. The regularity is what’s important because you want people to know that there is always new stuff to read. Just make sure the content is well-written and stay away from PLR if you can. Although PLR “can” work, I’ve found that personalized content that is written by YOU with YOUR personal touch is far more interesting to readers than the clinical feel of PLR.

To be honest, you don’t even need to ALWAYS use your own content. If your hobby lends itself to video, you can even post links to YouTube videos. In our example hobby (fly-tying), there are LOTS of fly-tying videos on YouTube that you could embed into your website. It’s a good change of pace from simply publishing just articles and your visitors will enjoy it.