1. Joint marketing

A good tip to boost your traffic is to find a partner who has a similar sized business to you. You advertise to their email database, they advertise to yours. It’s simple – and no money swaps hands. “The best strategy for this is to advertise an online offer that’s so compelling, people won’t be able to refuse,” says Return On Digital’s Levine. “Once they’ve bought something, you can then work on their ‘lifetime value’.”

2. Register spelling mistakes

Here’s a clever trick to boost your traffic: optimise your keywords for misspellings, too. Common mistakes – for example, verruca being Googled as verucca – can generate great traffic opportunities.

3. Give stuff away

Dominic Monkhouse, UK managing director of server-hosting firm PEER 1, set up 48-hour Twitter promotions where he gave away free stuff like Playstations, Nintendo DS consoles and the odd server package every Wednesday. “It’s a really easy way to reach our online audience and bring more eyeballs to our page – and it doesn’t make our followers feel like they’re being advertised to,” he says. “We sell around £5,000 worth of kit each time and followers are up 400 per cent in six months.” 

Neil Phillips, director of cosmetics firm Distribeauty (which trades as www.eyeslipsface.co.uk), tells us he ran a special “free shipping” day last November to celebrate the company’s second birthday. “We cross-promoted the deal on Facebook and in email alerts,” he says. “Our web traffic rose from an average 6,500 views a day to 17,000. And the total number of orders jumped from an average 300 per day to 2,358 – so sales were up 450 per cent.”

4. Start a blog

If you want to boost your traffic, you must remember that search engines like lots of content and websites that are frequently updated. A blog is a great way of doing this. “Host the blog on your own website using software such as WordPress, so when people link to your articles, your own website builds credibility,” advises digital guru Guy Levine. To make your blog even more effective, use a service like www.ping.fm to post your blog updates to over 35 social media sites.

5. Launch a viral video

YouTube is believed to be the second largest search engine in the world and has an estimated 24 hours of video uploaded every minute. This makes it a prime candidate for generating traffic. “Social medialite” Guy Levine tells us that videos are 50 times more likely to appear on the front page of Google than a website. Colchester-based Armadillo Scooterwear created a viral video last autumn called Tough Enough to show off its garments. The “hero” of the clip puts his Armadillo jacket to the test by biking through fireballs and explosions and defying pie-throwing clowns. Michael Bonvillain, famed for TV series Lost, Cloverfield and most recently Zombieland, was director of photography. Brand awareness has sky-rocketed – the viral has been viewed 22,000 times.

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