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Quotes: Blogging

Blogging is an inbound marketing strategy that truly works. You can generate more qualified leads through blogging. Recent statistics reveal that marketers who blog consistently will acquire 126% more leads than those who do not.

Neil Patel,
co-founder of NP Digital and Subscribers

Quote taken from https://neilpatel.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-blog-posts-that-rank-in-googles-top-10/.

Driving real traffic and not just any traffic is one of the key goals for growing your business online. What is real traffic, and how does it differ from website traffic? Why is it good? How do you drive real traffic to your website?

Let’s get started.

What is website traffic

Website traffic pertains to the web users who visit a website. It is measured by the number of visits or sessions people make to a website. Website traffic is one of the ways to measure how effective your website is in attracting users and how effective your marketing strategies are.

What is real traffic

While high website traffic is good, it may not necessarily result in productivity. Real traffic is the type of traffic that generates results. Real traffic covers qualified visitors who could become actual leads, subscribers, and customers.

What are the benefits of real traffic

When you get real traffic into your website, you will benefit from the following:

• more leads,
• more website interaction,
• more signups,
• more customers,
• better SEO search ranking score, and
• revenue growth.

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How to drive real traffic to your website

There is no one-time big-time way to drive real traffic to your website. It takes a combination of strategies and tools to get the right people to visit your website.

Here are some effective ways to help you drive real traffic to your website:

1. Website traffic generator

Many do not recommend using instant website traffic generators, since they are known to generate fake visitors or bots. Many of these visitors are also said to be not targeted. However, there are website traffic providers that actually work.

Simple Traffic, for instance, has been rated positively by customers in Trustpilot and Sitejabber. Simple Traffic is a visitor forwarding software that redirects quality traffic to your website from a group of domains that it rents or owns. It works by determining the visitor demographics of their domains and forwards directly to your site those that match your targeted demographics.

(Noted: We can confirm that Simple Traffic can really bring in traffic; we yet have to update this regarding conversion as we have not seen significant conversion coming from this source yet. We are testing different tools as part of our ongoing learning and experimentation,. Once we would find this as a valuable tool in our marketing arsenal, we will add this as part of our digital marketing recommended tools: https://www.brodneil.com/recommended-digital-marketing-tools/)

Google My Business is another tool that can generate traffic to your website along with other uses in managing online presence across Google.

(Note: This is something we can confirm both across the sites we manage.)

2. SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can slowly but surely drive real traffic to your website. As long as you make an effort to come up with effective SEO tactics, such as quality and relevant content, descriptive and concise meta-description, and more, you surely will attract real traffic to your website.

(Note: This is tried-and-tested. SEO is not dead when done properly.)

Click here to learn more about SEO.

3. Backlinks and guest blogs

Backlinks are links from another website that lead to your website. They can greatly help promote your website through the larger audience exposure you get. One of the ways to get backlinks from other websites is to do guest blogging on another website. You can also request a backlink in exchange for an organization’s backlink from your website, too, or other agreed deals.

(Note: Great for getting direct traffic and increase search engine rankings as well. However, do backlinks and guest posts, not for link building, but for promoting your site to real targeted traffic. This will do you better results.)

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4. Social media

Use social media to get real traffic to your website. You can share your blog post, promotional landing page, or other useful pages from your website on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. B2B companies may benefit from posting and being active on LinkedIn since it is a business networking channel.

When you consistently post the right content on social media, you may gain more followers. These followers do not only turn into leads but may also share your content on their social media accounts. That gives you an even wider reach and helps bring you to your target audience.

(Note: Tested to drive traffic. Should be done with conversion in mind, not for the sake of activity and just driving traffic.)

5. Hashtags

Speaking of social media, always remember to use hashtags on your posts. Hashtags are used by social media users in searching for certain products, services, or trending topics related to your content or business. Not only will hashtags give you a wider reach by giving you an opportunity to be discovered, but also promote real traffic in your social media accounts and your website.

6. Paid advertising

Paying for online advertisements can make your website more visible and can attract real traffic. You can do Google search advertising, Google maps advertising, social media advertising, and display advertising on certain websites related to your business, among others.

(Note: Tried-and-tested. The fastest way to get traffic, but can be expensive when not properly executed.)

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7. Directories and online review sites

People go to online directories to find businesses that provide the products or services they need, so be sure to get listed on Google My Business, Yahoo, Yelp, Foursquare, and the like so your audience can find you there. People also go to review sites to learn more about different businesses.

These online directories and review sites will usually provide a link that directs people to your page, which will bring quality traffic.

8. Online communities

Last but not the least, do not forget to join online communities in your industry. Facebook groups, Reddit, Quora, and many industry-specific forum sites are a great place to be. Your target audience are most likely in these online communities, so be active in answering queries and promoting your content and your website. This way you can drive real traffic to your website.

You can also help bring quality traffic to your website by doing email marketing and creating relevant shareable content in the form of infographics, GIFS, images, podcasts, and more.

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If you are interested in knowing how to buy website traffic, read this post: https://www.brodneil.com/buy-website-traffic/

It can be frustrating to spend so much time trying to find someone’s email address to no avail. In this post, we will share with you some secrets on how to find someone’s email address on the web in seconds, as well as other helpful recommendations to find email addresses.

Table of Contents

1. Email/lead generation tools
   • AeroLeads
   • Clearbit
   • UpLead
   • Snov.Io
   • Anymail Finder
2. Other recommended ways
   • Google it
   • Use Twitter
   • Reach out through the website’s contact form or generic company email
   • Subscribe to their mailing list
   • Make a guess
3. Conclusion

Email/Lead generation tools

Email and lead generation tools are a great way to find someone’s email address on the web almost instantly. Apart from generating emails, many of these tools can also be useful for your other digital marketing strategies.

There are similarities and differences with these tools. It is important that you pick one with features that best fits your needs and your budget.

1. AeroLeads

AeroLeads is a lead generation software that can generate lead details, including email addresses almost instantly. This software is great for B2B businesses that can help find emails in bulk. Other features include:

• real-time and quick extraction of data using Chrome plug-in
• marketing-automated
• generates data from LinkedIn, AngelList, Xing, and other supported social networks
• can be downloaded as CSV file
• can be integrated with different CRM platforms, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, MailChimp, and Zapier
• generates useful information whenever available like email address, company title or position, company name, industry, company contact information, company location, business phone number, company website, personal contact details, and social media profiles.

AeroLeads offers a free trial. You can also subscribe to their services starting at $49/month. Check out their video below on how you can find someone’s email address on the web in seconds.

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2. Clearbit

Clearbit is a marketing data engine that you can also use to find someone’s email address. This Gmail and Outlook extension can provide contact details, name, location, and address of prospects quickly and in bulk.

Clearbit also features other benefits including the following:

• analyzes customer needs
• identifies other possible prospects
• integrates with other tools like Zapier, Salesforce, Marketo, Segment, Connect, and Slack
• offers a variety of packages for different business needs

Clearbit offers a free package with up to 50 credit searches. Its paid subscription ranges between $199 to $999/month.

3. UpLead

UpLead is another B2B marketing platform available as a Chrome extension that lets you find someone’s email quickly. This app is great for your marketing outreach campaigns with the following features:

• has searchable lead database
• offers 50+ data points
• data enrichment availability
• allows you to search the entire database and simply filter out the leads that you don’t want to reach out to
• integrates with CRM platforms, such as HubSpot, Zapier, Outreach, Zoho, Pipedrive, and more

You can try UpLead’s free plan with 5 credits and enroll with their paid plans starting at $99 per month.

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4. Snov.io

Snov.io is a great tool for finding someone’s valid email address. It is able to verify generated email adds by categorizing them into valid, invalid, and Catchcall emails (guessed emails). Other features are as follows:

• lets you find email addresses in bulk
• comes with Chrome extension
• charges only for verified email addresses

Snov.io packages range from $19 to $199. You can try their free package with 100 verified email addresses per month.

5. Anymail Finder

Anymail Finder is an email finder tool that claims to be 97% accurate in generating emails. In fact, they only charge for verified emails that they are sure won’t bounce.

The software offers the following helpful features:

• available as a Chrome extension
• offers searchable database
• lets you find emails by job titles
• API available

You can try Anymail Finder for free with 20 credits. You can continue with your subscription ranging from $18 to $149 with up to 10,000 search credits per month.

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Other recommended ways

If you think you don’t really need any of the lead generation or email finder tools, there are still some ways you can find emails of people. These tips are especially useful if you only have an occasional need of finding other people’s email or contact details. You can also use these tips to find someone’s email address when you cannot find it using your email finder tool.

1. Google it

This has worked for me many times. If I could not find a specific person or department’s email address on their company website, I try my luck with google.

You can do the following query formats:

• [name]+email/email address
• [name]+contact/contact me/contact details

If you know the company name or website of the person or department you are looking for, you can also input it on the search box.

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2. Use Twitter

There are two ways to use Twitter to find someone’s email address. First is to simply reach out to the person or company and ask for their email address. The second way is to do advanced search. While the first one is self-explanatory, let us talk about doing the advanced search.

Simply go to “advanced search” or if you are in the Twitter home page, just go the search box found on the upper right corner, type in any word or character, and press enter.

Once you are in the results page, click on “advanced search” on the right.

In the advanced search, type “at” and “dot” on “all of these words” under “words”. Under “accounts”, type in the twitter account on “from these accounts”. Press “search”.

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3. Reach out through the website’s contact form or generic company email

Another convenient way to find someone’s email address on the web is to directly ask the company through their contact form found on their website. You may also email the generic company email and ask for the specific email address of the person you wish to keep in touch with.

4. Subscribe to their mailing list

If the above tips don’t work, you can try subscribing to a website or person’s mailing list. Pretty soon, they will be sending you an email. You can then reach out to them using that email address they used to email you.

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5. Make a guess

Making guesses can actually lead to some results. While this can be time-consuming, you can give it a shot. Compose a message in your email and type in your guesses in the “to” field. Move the cursor over each email address. The one that pops up with an associated Google profile should be a valid email address.

You can make guesses using the following formats shared by ahrefs.com:

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Conclusion

Finding someone’s email address on the web instantly is possible using email finders and lead generation tools. If you are not into using these software, you can always know someone’s email address using Google, Twitter, the company’s contact form or mailing list, as well as simply making guesses.

Which strategy have you tried using? Tell us about it in the comment section.

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Digital Marketing does not need to be difficult or expensive and can often be run on a sensible budget without high management fees and still produce a reasonable return on investment.

Whilst it’s very straightforward to say that, in practice, it may be difficult for someone with limited or no digital marketing experience, but fortunately there are some free digital marketing tools available on the market to help your digital marketing activities be a lot simpler.

Let’s take a look at some of the tools and how they can help you.

Google Analytics

This free digital marketing tool is one of the holy grails and gives you incredible insights into the locations, journey, and usage of users to your website.

Google Analytics gives you key facts at a glance, the total number of visitors, average time on site, average pages per session, and your bounce rate – All key information that can help you better identify and measure the success or changes to your website.

Google Analytics gives you insights into specific pages, such as how long someone is looking at a specific and what the bounce rate for that specific page is. This is good information, especially if you notice a page has a time on site of just a few seconds and a bounce rate of 90% for example – It could indicate a problem with the page.

But how do you find out if there is an issue with the page?

Firstly, you can check the page yourself in different browsers across desktop and mobile devices and see if there is anything obviously wrong.

Secondly, you can use a special tool called Inspectlet.

Inspectlet

This handy tool allows you to record visitors on your website and see them clicking about and interacting with your website and web pages.
Using this tool, you can check the pages and data for that Google Analytics highlights as having an issue and see what the issues are with real website visitors.

By watching back the recordings, you will see if people are scrolling down a page or just seeing it load and then bounce, whether there are any slow loading times or loading issues, and then make any necessary changes.
The tool won’t tell you if there’s an issue with your content, such as if the content is boring, but if you have a wall of text and find people just skimming through and there’s no imagery or headlines to break everything up, then that could be your first port of call – To make the page more engaging or ‘sticky’.

Optimising your website for conversions is key, after all, the changes and issues you identify using Analytics and Inspectlet need to translate into better figures such as more signups, more sales, more people falling down your funnel.

So, how do you manage your conversions and what is a conversion?

A conversion is when someone completes a goal within your website, for example buying a product.

Let’s say you sell a widget and 100 people visit your website. Of these 100 people, 1 person buys your widget, that gives you a conversion rate of 1%.
So, by tweaking things on your page e.g. imagery, colours, text you may get 3 of those 100 people to now buy your product, giving you a conversion rate of 3%.

Google Optimiser

This tool allows you to run tests on your website. You can create two variations of a page and on one variation make a change, such as using a different image and send 50% of your traffic to one page and 50% to the other page and seeing which variation creates the most conversions/sales for you.

You can find Google optimizer over at: https://marketingplatform.google.com/intl/en_uk/about/optimize/ however it can be a little complex and you may require the help of a web designer to set up the initial code if you aren’t able to do so yourself, after that, you can run tests, run variations and measure the success of these new pages.

You may find that you have a page speed issue and that your website is taking a long time to load – Usually, anything over 4-5 seconds is considered slow – so you may want to improve your page speed.

GT Metrix

GT Metrix is a free tool that scans a web page and tells you the total load time as well as issues such as too slow servers, too large image files, and a list of other items that you can improve to better improve the speed of your website.

You can even measure the speed of your website from different key points around the world and see how fast your website is for international visitors.

GT Metrix also shows you a really cool waterfall, so besides getting a grade out of 100% you can also visually see what elements are loading in which order on your website and potentially slowing your website down.

If your website is taking 10 seconds to load and 8 seconds of that are a blank page because it’s loading a chat app before the rest of your website content for example, then re-ordering your scripts so that your website loads in the first 2 seconds and the chat in the last 8 seconds would be the first step to improving usability.