As of 2014, tens of thousands of new WordPress websites are created every single day. As the CMS platform makes it simple for just about anyone to build a website, it’s difficult to stand out in the crowd.

Although all websites start in the same place, the difference is the ability to generate traffic. This is, ultimately, what determines whether or not your blog or business venture is going to be successful.

Here’s 5 straightforward ways to generate traffic to your new WordPress site.

1) Produce high-quality content

Creating high-quality, optimised content is a great way to generate organic traffic from search engines. By writing articles with SEO copywriting in mind, you can create relevant content that your audience will want to read, and more importantly, share.

There is fierce competition online, whatever your niche, and producing high quality content is the way to engage and retain those readers. Although time consuming to create, it is extremely valuable to your business due to the simple fact that engaging content is the type of content that gets shared.

The quality of your website’s content also features heavily in Google’s ranking factors.

2) Utilise SEO Plugins

The easiest way to optimise your content in WordPress is to use SEO plugins. They allow you to write better content by optimising SEO titles and meta descriptions for your posts and pages through focused keywords.

Understanding SEO can seem overwhelming at first, but SEO plugins can help make your site appealing to search engines and visitors by guiding you through the relevant information needed to create and maintain an SEO-savvy site.

Yoast SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimisation with its ‘Page Analysis’ tool to let you know what you’ve missed. The user-friendly plugin will go through your WordPress settings to make sure everything is optimised properly and provide handy tips on how to make improvements.

Start an Email List

Email remains one of the best, and most cost-effective, ways to reach your audience and keep it engaged. Starting an email list is easy to set up, especially if you use a free service like MailChimp that integrates with WordPress.

The impact email lists can have on website traffic and revenue is huge. You may be surprised to learn that email marketing campaigns continue to outperform social media campaigns due to the algorithms social media sites follow.

For example, having 1,000 email subscribers and 1,000 Facebook fans is not the same thing as only a small proportion of your Facebook followers will ever see your posts in their newsfeed. However, the average open rate for email is 21.73%.

What’s more, a study by McKinsey & Co found that email marketing acquired 40 times more customers than Facebook and Twitter combined!

Be active on Social Media

Although harder to convert on social media, it’s important to have an active presence on the main social platforms – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Many people will use Twitter to find trending topics and you can directly interact with your target audience on the platform, such as through retweeting.

Facebook is another social media platform worth investing in. Although the reach of Facebook pages appears to be declining, Facebook groups are also a good way to get traffic. By joining existing groups and posting links to your own Facebook page or website, you can steadily build up a presence.

For those who provide b2b services, then LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find paying clients. With over 450 million members, it is a valuable tool for business networking.

And if you’re business venture lends itself to creating high-quality visuals, Instagram and Pinterest are also worth considering.

Network online

Building relationships with influencers will help your site get ahead quickly. There are several ways to do this, such as following other peoples’ blogs and contributing to the discussion by providing value and a link to your own site.

You can also reach out directly to influences or people in your niche via email or social media to encourage re-tweets of your own content. Be sure to add value to them first and build up a good rapport before any self-promotion.

Starting a new WordPress site is exciting but daunting because it requires a lot of effort to be successful. These traffic generation tips are just the beginning of a journey of discovering. Over time, you will better understand what your audience wants and the most effective ways to satisfy their requirements.

If you require any help with your WordPress Site, WP Tech Support are on hand to ensure it stays secure, optimised and backed up daily. We have a range of monthly payment plans and we don’t tie you into long-term contracts. Contact us to find out more.