Website Traffic Strategies

Do you need more traffic to your WooCommerce store?

In this article, I am going to be showing you a few ways that you can generate free traffic to your website. I’ll also explain the math so you can figure out how much traffic you need, to get the number of sales that you want.

Something that is not very well known, is that cold traffic only has a 1% to 3% conversion rate. Typically, with a new store this is more likely to be 1%.  If we do the maths, that means for every 100 people that come to your store, on average you’re only going to get one purchase.

Let’s say that your goal is to get 10 sales every single day. Then that means you are going to need at least 1,000 visitors to your website every day, to hopefully get those 10 sales.

At first that may sound intimidating, but there are a few different ways to drive more traffic to your WooCommerce store and we are going to go over some FREE traffic generating strategies now.

The first one is social media

Social media is a great way to send free traffic to your site through your social posts, Instagram shop links, as well as working with influencers and getting them to send their traffic to your site as well.

Whether you choose Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or Pinterest to find and connect with your audience, make sure that you are regularly showing up on your chosen platform. This helps with social proofing by increasing your brand awareness and over time builds trust as you connect and engage directly with your community.

It is a whole lot easier to sell your products to people that KNOW, LIKE and TRUST you.

Your goal is to nurture ‘cold’ prospects (people who have never heard of your brand), and ‘warm’ them up through regular contact and brand exposure. When people recognise your brand, they feel more confident to purchase from you.

Social media influencers

Another strategy is to join forces with a social media influencer and have them promote your brand and products.

Sometimes an influencer will just ask you to send them free product which they will use, photograph and then promote to their audience. Others may want an affiliate commission for any order that is placed on your site, or sometimes they want to be paid money up front to promote your brand and products.

When you contact an influencer, you will find out exactly what it is that they are looking for and how it aligns with your goals.

My main tip for choosing an influencer, is to avoid going after that huge million plus subscriber base, because that’s going to cost you a lot of money and their followers are often not the most engaged audience. Instead, look at micro and nano influencers.

Micro-influencers generally have a subscriber base in the 1,000 to 10,000 range and their followers are usually quite interactive with the influencer.

Nano influencers are often just getting started and have an audience of less than 1,000. These influencers are very connected with their audience and most likely their audience following is made up of a lot of friends and family. So it’s often a ‘win win’ for you both.

These micro and nano influencers are going to be cheaper for you as well, which is always helpful when you’re just getting started.

One last tip, before you contact an influencer, make sure that their followers are in your ideal customer range and that they have lots of engagement on their posts – either likes, comments, or sharing posts. This is important because you want their subscribers to more readily click on the link and to purchase from you.

Email marketing

You may have heard the expression ‘the money is in the list.’  No truer words were ever said, and no matter the various trend shifts over the years, email lists are still the cheapest and most effective ways to build a subscriber base of warm prospects.

The other really important thing to note, is that an email list is an asset YOU OWN. Unlike social media accounts which are owned by Facebook or Pinterest and can be shut down if you violate their terms.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

The next way of getting more traffic to your site, is to invest time into optimising your website for search engines. A well optimised website over time is a great source of quality free traffic. When people are searching on google for something, they are actively looking to buy, so if they find one of your products and click on the link you have a high chance of converting that visitor to a customer.

You can learn more about SEO by reading my other two articles here: 10 Tips to Improve SEO on WordPress and WooCommerce SEO for Product Pages + Checklist.

Content collaborations

If you have some area of expertise, you can connect with other people that are either in your industry or niche by reaching out to them and find ways you can collaborate on a project together. It could be you provide them with content for their blogs or podcasts with links that will bring people back to your website and your products.

Bloggers, Podcasters and YouTubers, are all looking at ways to generate more content for their audience. Sometimes it can be hard to consistently put out content all the time. If you approach someone with a content idea for them and it’s more of a collaborative effect of how you can work together, then they may be more likely to work with you on that content and promote your products and your brand.

You definitely are going to need to do some research here and find people that are going to align with your goals, but it’s a great way to get your store out there and build a brand when you have a little bit more time, than money when you’re first starting your store.

Lastly, paid advertising

While free traffic strategies may not cost you financially, they do take time to build momentum and start working. So patience is key here.

If you don’t have the time (or patience) to do all these free traffic strategies, or you just need to bring in lots of traffic quickly, then you will of course need to consider using paid advertising. But you can get started without spending a ton of money upfront and there are quite a few different platforms that you can advertise with such as Google Ads, Google Shopping Merchant, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Website conversion strategies

So far I’ve talked about different ways to bring in traffic. But it is just as important to make sure that your site is properly optimised so that that you can capitalise on that traffic once once you’ve got them to your site, to make sure that they don’t just disappear.

There are a few things I always recommend you do to increase your odds of having people purchase. The first one is to make sure you have a way for people to sign up to your email list. You want at least one, and ideally two or more sign up forms to capture email leads.

Think discount coupons, free shipping offers, downloadable checklists embedded in blog posts, you can also setup an ‘exit intent’ pop up to entice a visitor to buy before they leave your site. So if they don’t purchase from you as soon as they come to your site, the next best thing is that they sign up to your email newsletter, so you can email them later about your different offerings.

You also want to make sure that you have abandoned cart set up. So, if they do add a product to their cart and they don’t purchase, you can then send them an automated abandoned cart email within 24 hours to remind them and hopefully recapture that sale.

Also, for shops selling consumable products such as skincare, cosmetics, pantry staples, health supplements and fashion etc., I really recommend doing loyalty rewards programs. It’s a really effective way to incentivise people to come back regularly and buy from you, as well as build up a loyal customer base.

And the last way that I recommend in terms of capitalising on people that are already on your site is by doing upsells on your site. If they are already interested in one product, they may be interested in purchasing another one from you, and you can increase the total order value. You can do this from a product page, the cart or even just after they exit the checkout page.

Final thoughts…

I hope this article has been helpful for you. And if you’re interested in learning more about traffic strategies or optimising your website for conversion, make sure to comment below and let me know.