We all could use some more eyeballs on our work.
But like a busy city, the internet is crammed full of noise and lots of people clamoring for relevant attention.
There are a lot of opinions and ideas about how to get more internet based traffic to your online gallery or portfolio website. But which ones are the most effective? Which ones are worth actually doing? You could spend a lot of time trying out a number of different ways to get more people to your site, but at the end of the day, which traffic-inducing methods are really worth your time investment?
In this article I’ve assimilated a number of ideas which you can use to get more traffic to your site. Instead of throwing a grab bag of random ideas at you, I thought that I would start with the ones that are easy to implement first. While these may not send a slew of rabid fans at you, they get the ball rolling and seem to be a worthwhile time investment.
When you’ve implemented this first set of ideas that I talk about in Part One of this series of posts, you can begin on the ones that take a bit longer to do and to come to fruition, but that may give you a better return.
So, without further ado, here’s the list! (If you would like to know when part two comes out, then sign up for the mailing list and you will be the first to know when it’s published!)
1. Submit your site directly to the major search engines.
As the search engines crawl through the web, they have to scan and index millions of sites each day. It helps them out if you submit your site directly to them along with a basic description. This should help fast-track your site being indexed, as it can take months for them to notice you and put you up on a search result page. It still may take awhile, but this way you’re ensuring that it happens as quickly as possible… and it only takes a few minutes!
NOTE: You may find that there are sites that will claim to automatically submit your site to lots of search engines for free. I do not recommend you do this: it’s usually a spam tactic.
2. Submit your site to online directory sites.
Online directory websites were more of a thing awhile back, and are less of a thing now. But they still can be a source of traffic for you, and don’t take much effort to implement. In some cases you’ll find sites that require a link back to them from your site… you can make a page on your site as a resource page or something that points back to them.
The following are paid directories if you are interested in trying them out:
3. Submit your site to blog aggregators.
These sites require you to piece of HTML on your site to verify that you’re the owner, and then you will need to wait for someone from the aggregator site to check out your site for verification. When your site is approved, you will have a nice link from them back to your site.
Here are a few of the top aggregator sites, they have a very high page rank and high traffic:
4. Sign up for HARO.
HARO stands for “Help A Reporter Out”. When you sign up as a news source (which you can do here) you will be asked what your interests and experiences are. You will then get several emails to your inbox per day from HARO with requests from reporters asking to interview people that fit your interest and experience profile. (You can also sign up as a reporter, too, if you’re an author and are looking for stories from people.)
If you respond to a particular story that fits your profile, then the reporter will contact you directly and ask for your story. It’s a great way to get exposure, as long as you don’t mind getting the emails daily and sifting through the requests.
5. Link your posts to your social media accounts.
If your online gallery or portfolio website it a self-hosted wordpress site (which is what I recommend) then you can set it up to automatically push your posts to the major social media sites. That way, you just publish the article and the social media sites are already done for you, you just need to check them and tweak as needed. Be sure you set the featured image for the post, and that it is properly tagged with keywords and description, because that is the image that will get auto-shared on the social media outlet.
But even if you don’t take the time (or can’t) set up your wordpress site this way, just be sure to go behind and take the few clicks needed to share your stuff after you create it.
Start With the Easy Stuff First… And Get The Ball Rolling!
Hopefully everything on this page did not take you more than a couple of hours to do. Even so, the relative small time investment should pay off for you in some increased traffic to your site! And great thing is, you should have only had to do them once as opposed to every time you make an addition to your gallery.
In the next post, I’ll cover a few more of the more time-intensive things you can do to get more traffic. Again, you can sign up for the mailing list if you would like to know when that post comes out. Look for it soon!
If you have any other suggestions for things that don’t take much time or effort to implement, please share them in the comments below this post. I’m excited to see what has worked for others.
Regards,
Mike
