How to Get Traffic to Your Online Course Website

One of the biggest challenges of running an online course business, or any other kind of online business, is getting traffic to your website.

Getting traffic to your website is an art.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a a typical “Top 10 ways to get traffic” type of an article which leaves the reader’s questions unanswered. I’ll be telling you the exact method that I use to generate traffic.

First of all, there are only two types of traffic sources: Paid Traffic and Organic Traffic.

Paid traffic refers to traffic that is generated when you pay for it, the most popular example being running advertising campaigns like Facebook ads or Google ads.

Organic traffic refers to free traffic that comes to your website through search engines, social media, customer referrals, guest posting/interviews, etc. The most popular out of all these is getting traffic via ranking on search engines like Google by writing good quality content on your website. Blogging is one of the best methods to get organic traffic.

But here’s the thing you have to understand. Both paid and organic traffic have their advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest advantage of paid traffic is that it’s quick. You can literally get traffic on the first day of opening up your website if you are willing to pay for it. The obvious disadvantage of paid traffic is that you have to pay for it (duh!).

The biggest advantage of organic traffic is that it’s free and repeats itself on its own. For example, a great article that you write on your website can generate a large of amount of repeat visitors for a lifetime. The biggest disadvantage of organic traffic is that it takes a lot of time and is a slow process.

So what is the solution?

The solution is to use both types of traffic in a way that one complements the other.

Let me give you an example of this.

Let’s say you are selling an Online Yoga Course. You decide to promote this course by doing a live webinar. So you create a webinar registration page on your website.

Now you need traffic to come to this page so people can sign up for your webinar.

In this case, the obvious choice would be to use paid traffic since you need to sell your webinar seats quickly.

So let’s say you run Facebook ads to fill up your webinar.

Now you start to get traffic on your website and your goals are being achieved. But what happens when your webinar ends? You’ll again be back to square one because the traffic will dry up eventually.

This is where you have to understand the importance of a particular tool which will help you to turn this paid traffic into a steady supply of returning traffic – that tool is called an E-mail Marketing software.

When your webinar registrants signed up for your webinar, they should be added to your email list so you can reach out to them again and again and generate traffic to your website. That will make sure that your effort of doing that webinar and generating that paid traffic brings you benefit forever and is not rendered futile after the webinar finished.

But how does this help in complementing organic traffic?

Let’s take an example. Suppose after the webinar, you wrote a detailed article on the benefits of Yoga. You send an email to your subscribers (webinar registrants in this case) and give them the link to this blog article. You will instantly get some traffic.

But here’s what you have to understand. The traffic you get from email marketing will not directly result in organic traffic. Because an email software is a paid tool and hence it’s not considered completely organic.

But how it will help you in getting organic traffic indirectly is because the more the number of people who read your article, the more the probability of it ranking on search engines like Google in top positions. Why? Because of the following:

Search engines like websites where more people are spending more amount of time. It signals to them that the website has quality content and that pushes your rankings up.
Search engines tend to rank those articles higher which are being shared by more people. So when you send more people to your blog post and your subscribers share that post, it sends a good signal to the search engines and your website ranking improves.
Sharing also means you start to get traffic from platforms wherever the article was shared.
If your article is really good and it catches the eye of another website with a good authority, they can put a link to your article on their website. This creates what we call as a backlink. Backlinks are like votes for your content and search engines like Google pay a lot of attention to backlinks. The more the number of backlinks you get to your website from other good websites, the more the search engines push your rankings up.

And when your rankings go up on these search engines, it automatically means your traffic will increase because the higher rankings will mean more fresh traffic starts coming to you from search engines like Google.

The more fresh traffic you get, the more subscribers you will get. The more subscribers you will get, the more traffic to your website when you send them an email. As we saw before, that in turn will lead to more fresh traffic since it will send the right signals to search engines like Google.

Are you able to notice the snowballing effect of this strategy? Let’s summarize this:

Paid traffic is turned into a list of subscribers.
Content sent to subscribers via email is turned into traffic on website.
This traffic on website sends good signals to search engines.
The good signals result in higher ranking of your website.
The higher rankings on search engines result in more fresh traffic.
This fresh traffic can again be channelized towards increasing your email subscribers.
As your list of subscribers increases, you get more traffic every time you send an email.
This again sends good signals to the search engines and your rankings go up.
That again brings even more fresh traffic.
And the whole cycle keeps repeating.

This is how you turn paid traffic into sustainable organic traffic eventually, with email marketing being the bridge between the two.

This is why I always say that email marketing is one of the most vital things of your business.

Here are some additional points that will make sure that the cycle I mentioned above runs smoothly:

Get good with paid advertising because that will start the cycle. To get good with paid advertising, the most important thing is to focus on one advertising platform. Paid advertising is a serious skill so you should only try to master one platform first. For example, if you want to use Facebook ads, learn everything about them and master them first. Don’t use all types of different ads in one go. If you focus your efforts into mastering one advertising platform, the returns will be much higher. My recommendation would be to learn Facebook ads.
Since the “bridge” between paid and organic traffic is email marketing, you have to make sure you use a good quality email marketing software. A good email marketing software will make sure your emails have a higher chance of reaching the subscribers inbox and not go into spam. Click here to see which email marketing software I use myself.
When you write any article or a blog post on your website, make sure the quality is good and you’ve taken the effort to write a detailed article that helps your subscribers. If you write a substandard article, your subscribers will not spend time on it and will not share it, thereby denting this overall process. A good quality article can actually bring you traffic in the long term even if you don’t have subscribers. So one of the best things to do for your website is to always maintain a blog (or a vlog) where you regularly create quality content.

Once you master this art of generating traffic, you’ll combine the best of both the worlds – the pace of paid traffic and the sustainability of organic traffic.

It’s definitely not going to happen overnight but it’s still a faster way to generate traffic than simply relying only on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having a subscriber list puts your SEO on steroids.

As your list becomes bigger and bigger, so will your repeat traffic and this will eventually start to reduce the time it takes for your content to rank higher on search engines like Google.

This method has one more significant advantage. Since your base is your email list, you aren’t vulnerable to search engine algorithm changes. The websites which only rely on organic traffic generated by search engines can often be one algorithm change away from complete disaster, like many found out in 2011 when Google released the famous Panda update to their algorithm which targeted websites which had followed fraudulent SEO practices to rank higher. Even some major websites were wiped out overnight.

Traffic has to be generated in a way that is sustainable for your business. Never use any black hat practices to generate traffic. First of all, they won’t sustain and more importantly, they can result in your website being penalized by search engines.

Always remember that quality of traffic is always more important than the quantity.

So there you have it – the brutal truth of generating traffic. You can see that it will involve work. All good things do. Never ever believe anyone who says they know some “secret” to generate large amounts of traffic quickly. Because there is no secret. It will involve work but once things start going, it becomes easier and easier.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.