We talk a lot about the various intricacies of designing and building websites here on the Echo Enduring Blog, but today I would like to look at a somewhat different topic – the concept of actually getting people to visit your website(s). After all, we put a lot of work into creating beautiful, intelligent and usable designs, but it doesn’t really accomplish all that much if nobody ever visits the site right?

Driving Online Traffic Offline

Of course, we frequently read about the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), and there’s no doubt that if you can hit it big with the right keywords on Google, you’ll see a ton of traffic coming in. But, unless you are specifically crafting your content to appeal to Google rather than your readers (not something I really recommend), it can also take a good amount of time to really get the search engine juices flowing.

I’ve been blogging her for over a year now, and it’s only recently that I’ve started to see a bit of a rise in search engine traffic. I’m still not anywhere close to where I’d like to be either. Granted, some people have done it quicker than I, but it’s still a difficult and competitive process.

We can also talk about the benefits of social media, which are many. While I haven’t hit it big on Digg yet, I’ve had a lot of success on niche sites like DesignFloat, DesignBump and The Web Blend, as well as more general sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit and Delicious – and to all of you whose votes have helped with that success, I am very grateful!

Again, however, as great as social media it is, it also has its limitations, and is somewhat reliant on a thriving online community. While this certainly exists for design, it is not always present in every niche or area of business, and some website will invariably struggle more than others to catch the social media wave and ride it to success.

Fortunately, while the online world is becoming an increasing part of our everyday lives, we do still live in an offline world, and there are still opportunities to market advertise here too. Today, I would like to discuss some of these opportunities for driving online traffic with offline techniques.

Collateral

Most businesses have a variety of real-world materials that are distributed to clients, prospects, associates and so forth. These would include business cards, letterheads, brochures, pamphlets, catalogs, reports and so on.

Your web address should already be on all of this material, anyhow, but if you really want to push your website, you might consider trying to make that address stand out a bit more. Here are some interesting and creative examples of business cards that do just that:

This card isolates the website address on one side

This one works by placing the website address on one side of the card, along with the logo. Everything else on the other side. This really isolates the website, thus increasing its visibility.

This card highlights the website address through its interactivity

This interactive, sliding business card places the focus on the website address by making it a part of the interaction. As you slide the moving part, it reveals and hides the website, directing attention to it directly.

This card builds the URL into the same area as the logo

These days, a lot of businesses are websites, and the basic URL is built right into the logo. This example isn’t quite the same thing, since six-speed is actually a creative agency, but the positioning of the domain certainly draws attention to itself!

You can use similar and analogous techniques on all kinds of different collateral and company literature, drawing attention to your address, and hopefully driving more traffic to your website.

Postcards

A more direct and immediate technique for driving traffic to a website might be to use some form of a web driver postcard. Postcards have always been a simple and affordable form of direct marketing that allow you to deliver a short, simple message. That makes them a perfect medium for driving web traffic.

Recently, I had the chance to work on a web driver card for Highland Marketing. I did all the design work on this spider-web-shaped card (based on ideas of my colleagues). Be sure to check it out!

Here's the front of the finished web driver card

Postcards can don’t have to be this elaborate though, and their messages can take many forms. If your website is primarily an online store, then you could advertise a sale or promotion to encourage people to do their shopping on your site. Though not necessarily in postcard format, I get this kind of direct mail all the time from Chapters Indigo, usually along with some sort of discount coupon as added incentive.

If you’re working on more of an agency, consultant or manufacturer type site, then a postcard letting people know about a free ebook or white paper available on the site could do the trick. People love getting free stuff – especially if it’s something that can help them become more productive, knowledgeable, efficient or successful in a particular area.

Postcards are also great for launching new products, services or a whole new site, or for letting people know about contests or giveaways running on your site. Whatever technique you decide to use to entice people to visit your site, a postcard is a great way of getting the message across.

Offline Advertising

Businesses like iStockPhoto obviously rely on web traffic for their business, since virtually everything they sell comes right off their website. They do not, however, rely exclusively on web-based forms of marketing. I am a member of NAPP, and as such am also subscribed to their Photoshop User magazine. In every issue I have ever received, iStock has placed a two page ad on the inside front cover. The exact ad varies from book to book, but it’s always there. It’s gotten to the point where I actually look for the ad when I get the magazine, just to see what the design is like.

Interestingly, it was through those ads that I was first introduced to iStock! I received my first Photoshop Usermagazine a couple years before becoming a NAPP member, as part of a promotion that was running when I first got Creative Suite 2. At that time, I was just entering into the design world and it was all very new to me, so when I saw the ad I checked out the website.

Since then, I’ve even purchased some imaged from them.

Offline advertising for websites definitely works. In fact, if I read, see or hear an advertisement for something that I’m interested in, the vast majority of the time I will head out and check out the website. Since getting my iPhone, I might even check it out right away (further suggesting it might be time for sites to start thinking about their mobile presence).

Granted, not everyone is like me (thank goodness), but I do think that my tendencies are reflective of a particular demographic of young (reasonably), tech-savvy professionals. If this is your market then good, well-targeted offline advertising can potentially yield significant increases in overall traffic.

Word of Mouth

Never underestimate the power of word of mouth. After all, it is the original form of social networking. In fact it’s the very reason I’m on Facebook. Before signing up, I had ignored tons of emails requesting me to join. It wasn’t until a friend that I trusted actually told me about it in a face to face conversation that I actually decided to go give it a try (and subsequently became addicted like everyone else).

Most people trust their friends and family, and if they receive a recommendation from one of these people, they are always more likely to take it seriously and maybe even check it out. If you can get your existing customers or users talking about your site to their friends and family, you can see significant returns in terms of traffic.

Of course, that’s the hardest part of all. There’s no way for you to actually control what people are saying to each other. All you can really do is operate under some basic assumptions – that people are going to talk about things that they find to be unique, interesting, meaningful, funny and entertaining. They are much less likely to talk about things that are mundane, boring and generally uninteresting.

So, while it may seem trite and cliched to say, look at providing the type of content that will get people excited and talking to each other. There’s really no guarantee when it comes to this type of marketing, but if you can hit it big in this area, the resulting traffic surge can be huge.

When I think of this kind of marketing, my mind always goes back to the story of Half.com, as told by Mark Huges in his book Buzzmarketing. Basically, the story is that they actually managed to change the name of Halfway, Oregon to Half.com for an entire year. The whole process caused a huge media stir, and Huges writes this of his results:

Before we spent a single dime in traditional marketing, we had captured the attention of the media and the Internet community…

And twenty days after our launch, eBay called.

Within six months, we sold the company to eBay. The price tag was $300 million…

In less than three years, I grew Half.com from zero to eight million registered users.

(Buzzmarketing, 23)

I don’t know about you, but to me that seems like a pretty successful venture. I certainly wouldn’t mind having eight million users here on the Echo Enduring Blog, and though I don’t have any intention of selling it, $300 million would probably start me considering.

Obviously, this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time, and trying to replicate that level of success would likely be a long, difficult and possibly fruitless exercise (though you never know). Still, it shows the enormous potential that exists in word-of-mouth marketing.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I know it’s a different sort of article from what you’d normally see here, but that’s okay right? It’s good to shake it up every once in a while. I think it’s an important subject though, as we are all looking for different means of increasing traffic to our websites, or perhaps to the websites of our clients.

If nothing else, I hope it at least works as a reminder that marketing is often a multi-faceted exercise, and that all of our online efforts can be complemented by simultaneous offline activities.

What about you? Do you ever use offline forms of marketing and advertising, or is all of your website’s traffic driven by your online activities? Is there another effective way of marketing websites offline that I didn’t touch on here?

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Let’s be honest – blog traffic is addictive. If your an active and committed blog owner, it’s never far from your mind, and no matter how far you come, no matter how much traffic you bring in over a given period of time, no matter how happy or satisfied you may be in a given moment, somehow you’re always left craving more, looking for a way to boost that traffic by just another degree.

I’m right aren’t I? If not, you’re either not human, not fully committed to your blog, or in possession of superhuman willpower and focus (we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the third).

What You're Already Doing to Bolster Your Blog Traffic

But why should traffic be so addictive? Probably because it’s the clearest indication of success, at least in it’s narrowest of forms. We all want our sites to be successful. Even if we’re giving away free information and resources, we want to see that our content is being consumed. Traffic stats are a good place to start, and probably one of the most readily accessible. Plus, while a picture is worth a thousand words, a good set of numbers and data can be worth at least that, and probably more.

Just ask a mathematician!

And that functions as a beautiful segue. I was originally considering calling this article something along the lines of “The Arithmetic of Increased Blog Traffic,” but I thought that such a title would scare a few people off. We are going to be talking about a bit of math, but it will be really simple, I promise!

Now, if you read at all about blogging, you’ve probably heard that common axiom: content is king. I’ve read this kind of thing so many times I’ve lost count. I’ve even written about it myself, in articles like 8 Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Start a Design Blog. I’m not going to try to contradict this concept. After all, content is the foundation of your blog. Without it, your site probably won’t go anywhere.

Instead, what I want to talk about is that other Q-word that always (and rightfully) gets trumped by quality: that being quantity.

Now, before you get up in arms, I am not suggesting – in any way, shape or form – that any blogger, design or otherwise, should make quantity their primary focus. It’s always better to create one quality post than five half-baked articles that say virtually nothing and exist solely for the sake of filling up space and driving up the number of posts on your site.

Personally, I do try to follow a posting schedule. I work towards getting two unique articles or other quality resources posted every week, in addition to my Echoes series and, most recently, Saturday Morning Cartoons (featuring The Brads). Most weeks I’m able to get this done, but sometimes I do fall a bit short. This past week was a prime example, as other commitments seemed to devour all of my time. I admit that, sometimes, it’s difficult not to obsess over meeting this schedule, but I’m committed to posting solid content and avoid cranking out some mindless drivel just to fill up the space.

If I don’t have something worthwhile for my readers, then I just don’t post.

So, bringing things back to the point at hand, this is not an article about going out and writing as much fluff and junk as you possibly can, all for the sake of quantity alone.

Rather, this is an article about the advantages of the quantity of articles that emerges from a commitment to sustained writing and authorship – something which I hope that you are already doing!

It’s about natural, organic growth.

Basically, I just want to encourage you to keep writing. As you produce more quality articles, you’re also creating a broader resource base for readers and search engines. This gives both people and bots more ways to find your blog, more pages to land on, and more articles to read if they choose to delver deeper into your site (through categories, popular posts or related stories).

It only makes sense that this would, in turn, lead to an increase in overall traffic.

In the six months that the Echo Enduring Blog has been live, I’ve actually actively experienced this trend myself. During the first couple of months, I would only get a few hits a day. In the first weeks, there were even some days when I wouldn’t get any traffic at all. Eventually, though, I started to network more and the blog started to get a little more attention. Today, some of the posts I wrote a few months ago are still seeing nice, sustained traffic, coming from a variety of sources.

The cumulative effect of this is that, even without strongly promoting a certain post over the course of a week, I still see a reasonable amount of traffic in a single day.

Probably the best way to visualize this is through some simple arithmetic. Let’s suppose that, on average, each of your posts gets visited ten times a day. This will obviously vary significantly, but ten is a nice round number, and will work well as an average for illustrative purposes.

Using a simple table, we can see how, based on the same average hits per post per day, simply continuing to write and add valuable content to your blog can actually have a dramatic effect on your overall blog traffic!

It’s pretty simple math (mere multiplication), but somehow it’s still striking to see these kinds of numbers laid out before us. I actually started thinking along these lines while doing some analysis of my own stats, and noticed that I was building a strong base of organic traffic on a daily basis. It was intriguing, so I grabbed my calculator and started doing some simple calculations based on the site’s current trends. What I saw was basically what you see in the table above.

So what’s the point? I think there are two. First, while quality posts are the most important part of a successful blog, it’s ultimately the fusion of quality with a growing quantity that will help increase traffic and lead you down the path of blog success (at least from a strictly statistical position). Wait. I know that some of you are already forming your counter-arguments against this whole quantity idea. You’re probably ready to cite any one of the number of blogs that don’t post all that frequently and don’t rely on quantity for traffic.

Are you sure about that?

Remember, we’re not talking about an all-out Post-a-poloza here, where you need to crank out post after post after post in an effort to artificially boost traffic numbers. Nor are we talking about going head to head with the big blogs (at least for the moment), many of which post at least once daily (and sometimes even more frequently than that).

What we are talking about is the organic nature of the internet, and how, as you continue to post new articles you are also creating new gateways for visitors to find your site. From where I sit, it’s a basic and fundamental mathematical principal, which can be applied to any kind of blog. Even if you only post once a month, that’s one more avenue for traffic to reach your blog than you had last month, and twelve more than last year.

The second, and perhaps more important point is that I’m writing this article as a means of encouragement for all you bloggers out there. The math speaks for itself and my hope is for you see that, even if your numbers aren’t quite where you want them to be today, that doesn’t mean that you can’t reach your goals eventually. Just keep writing and/or producing great content for your blog, and trust that you will gradually see your traffic increase through the organic nature of the internet itself.

Of course, you’ll probably still need to nudge it along here or there (and maybe even shove it from time to time). Promotion is still important. After all, the greatest content in the world isn’t going to matter at all if nobody knows it exists. So keep yourself out there on various social media sites, plugging your blog and your content wherever you can.

Be patient, though. If you provide good, quality content, visitors will start coming. More importantly, they’ll start coming back.

I hope this post makes sense, and that my main point is coming across here. What do you guys think? Has anyone else found this particular trend to be true on your own blogs? What about a different trend? I’d love to hear your thoughts/experiences/reactions!

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