Have you got any ideas to increase my traffic?

[healthstatus]

Every year my traffic at Health Status Health Risk Assessments and Health Calculators increases by about 30%, which doesn't suck, but this is the FastLane and I am looking for more. Other than buying traffic, what specifically would you do to increase the number of visitors my site gets?

I will seriously consider implementing any serious suggestions, and if your idea creates some measurable results, I will make sure you get kudos and if I can swing it, more than that.

What is it? Throw it out there! Me and my team have been looking at the site for a long time and need input from some fresh, critical eyeballs.

When I ask my team members for an idea, I have them present the idea AND the reason they think it will attract more people. So if they say, "add a store", they have to justify why they think that will create more visitors.

Don't be vague, "better SEO" doesn't cut it, add H1 tags to these 10 pages is focused and can be acted on. Any takers?

 

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[AllenCrawley]

What are you doing in terms of social media to drive traffic? Anything?

 

[wade1mil]

Healthstatus, I have seen your website and I think what you have done is impressive. Probably more visits than I might ever get to my websites. My suggestion comes with a couple caveats. One, I haven't done it before. Two, I don't think it's easy to plan something like this.

Viral marketing. Snowbank has both challenged President Obama to a poker game and offered Michael Vick a $250k contract to work for his poker company. That sort of thing generates buzz. Is there something you can do to create buzz like that with your business? It seems like you are maximizing your web knowledge more than most people, and that might be an opportunity to push it more. Just a thought provoking idea.

 

[healthstatus]

What are you doing in terms of social media to drive traffic? Anything?

We have a facebook page, which mainly we post snippets from our 2 articles a day that we publish on health related topics, I think it feeds twitter also. We have the like and share buttons, we have done a couple of stumbleupon campaigns.

 

[Amail]

Do what PatrickP did and get really active on health forums. Become a regular, trusted member. These are your target - engage them one on one.

 

[healthstatus]

Viral marketing. Snowbank has both challenged President Obama to a poker game and offered Michael Vick a $250k contract to work for his poker company. That sort of thing generates buzz. Is there something you can do to create buzz like that with your business? It seems like you are maximizing your web knowledge more than most people, and that might be an opportunity to push it more. Just a thought provoking idea.

We have been trying to find someone that wants to be the next "Dr Oz" to be the face of the website and use that to launch themselves. Most of them want to be paid, and don't see any value of having their face in front of my 750,000+ visitors a month I already have, which tells me they are not the right people to be working with. But I continue to look.

It would create a lot of buzz, especially around my house when my wife wanted to know what the hell I was thinking offering somebody $250k.... Let's keep this one on the table and maybe we can get there without a big check....

 

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[healthstatus]

Do what PatrickP did and get really active on health forums. Become a regular, trusted member. These are your target - engage them one on one.

Have a full time VA doing that both on forums and on the popular Q&A sites like answers.yahoo.com and we do generate 20,000+ visitors a month from referrals from those sites, so that is something everyone should look into.

 

[JasonR]

You have 750,000 members on your site and you need more?

I'm not sure what your revenue model is, but that is an ASSLOAD of traffic. I know several multi-million dollar businesses (including the company I work for) that make millions off of 75,000-100,000 visitors per month.

Can you monetize the traffic and a better/higher rate? I don't think traffic is your problem, in my opinion.

Edit: I think you should be the one telling us how to drive traffic to our own sites as you seem to be the expert at 750k visits. Seriously!

 

[wade1mil]

So you have 750,000 visitors per month, and it increases about 30% per year. It's not really traffic you want to increase as much as it is revenue. Rather than focusing on getting more visitors, what are some ways you can increase the revenue per visitor? If you increased your revenue/visitor by 1 cent, that would be $7.5k a month. What ways can you increase revenue/visitor rather than visitors/month?

 

[AllenCrawley]

Great site.

Would you share your facebook and twitter account here so I can take a look at it. I will approach traffic generation from the social media angle. Also, I noticed that you don't have any social share buttons on any of the articles or pages. You should definitely add those to every page, post and article.

 

[AllenCrawley]

Good Lord! 750,000 per month?! Teach me what you did to get that!

 

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[PatrickP]

I agree with some of the posts above.

You have PLENTY of traffic. But the traffic is there to use a free online tool. What do you want your traffic to do when they get there?

I have been on your site many times. In fact probably 20 times and never could understand how it made money. I didn't realize until last week that you sold things there but am not sure if you do or not.

Maybe a clean easy way for people to see what you want them to do when they first get to the site.

More targeted traffic I think is what you need as well as more conversions. I replied to your email but didn't hear anything back. Let me know if I can help with that.

Or are you looking to get more traffic so you can sell advertising to businesses?

 

[healthstatus]

You have 750,000 members on your site and you need more?

Yes, I want someone to give me a billion dollars for a site with a lot of traffic and little revenue....

 

[healthstatus]

Good Lord! 750,000 per month?! Teach me what you did to get that!

Go back to 1998, create a website with interactivity (very unique at the time). Get thousands and thousands of back links from edu, gov and hospital websites just because of great content, add more content regularly, and add new features regularly. Get highly ranked in all the search engines for common health questions. It's fairly easy.

 

[JasonR]

It's fairly easy 12 years ago - lol. The first thing I noticed on your site was content, it looks great.

Why don't you start selling healthy products (supplements, etc.)? It would be an EASY test with all the traffic you have.

Or

Integrate affiliate links to natural products throughout your content pages. Revenue would be much less this way, but still may be very significant with the type of traffic you're pulling down.

 

[AllenCrawley]

According to http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/health-websites:

WebMD.com = 19,000,000 unique visitors per month
Mayoclinic.com = 7,000,000 unique visitors per month

So there is definitely some room to grow.

Would you share your facebook and twitter account here so I can take a look at it.

^ Yes/No?

 

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[healthstatus]

For all of you that are bringing up the revenue side....

I make good money from this site, I admit I am still leaving a ton on the table and have started producing my own products and doing JVs with other people with good products to put in front of my stream of traffic and generate more money. That is going well, but those are not the kind of things my team, in its current form, can pull off without a lot of my time. So instead of me being really busy and them not so much, I am looking for a collection of projects to put them on, while I go and do my thing. If I can generate more traffic AND increase my revenue per visitor it is a home run, one or the other is a double or a triple.

Currently, my site is in a bit of a no mans land, a lot of advertising networks can't provide me with enough volume of ads, and I am not quite big enough to get to the grown up table where the networks play with ad inventory in the billions. So I have to cobble together networks and that ends up slowing my site down, especially after you get to the 4th or 5th page view. If I can get into that 2-3 million visitors a month range, then I also become an acquisition target for a media or pharma company then full blown retirement becomes an option and I will be flying down to play golf with JackEdwards on a monthly basis.

On the revenue generation side, my traffic is fairly targeted in the health and fitness arena, but it is not buyer traffic seeking to solve a problem, it is researcher traffic looking to answer a question. I am currently training a VA to take over my email newsletter which goes out semi-occasionally to a minimum of twice a week and probably 4 times a week which will have revenue generation in mind as I convert the researchers to buyers. If you have the perfect "thing" to put in front of this traffic I will do a revenue split deal with you.

It also appears to me that currently, large websites with POTENTIAL are valued higher than websites that are efficient at making money with their traffic where only a revenue multiplier is applied. This may be changing as I type this as Facebook stock continues to sink in value.

All that said, my goal by end of 1st quarter 2013 is to be at 1.5 million visitors a month looking with 6 million page views.

 

[healthstatus]

It's fairly easy 12 years ago - lol. The first thing I noticed on your site was content, it looks great.

Why don't you start selling healthy products (supplements, etc.)? It would be an EASY test with all the traffic you have.

Or

Integrate affiliate links to natural products throughout your content pages. Revenue would be much less this way, but still may be very significant with the type of traffic you're pulling down.

Yes, we have had stores in a number of configurations selling either supplements, natural products, exercise equipment, amazon storefronts and so on. They do have an impact on revenue, but have had no impact on traffic. We do test a lot of different things. I can tell you, when we put diet pills and testosterone boosters and such prominently on the site, I get a LOT of complaints from the natural health people (who have very colorful language) even though we do get a lot of traffic from bodybuilder.com it never really converted to much revenue to offset the bitching.

I don't want to be a naysayer to all ideas, this is really just another devious thread to educate a lot of people.... but I do want to share what we have tried and things to think about and consider that hopefully some people can apply to their own sites.

 

[healthstatus]

Would you share your facebook and twitter account here so I can take a look at it.

facebook.com/healthstatuscom

@glwHealthStatus

 

[The-J]

You said in a previous thread that you make a good chunk from licensing your health calculators for use on other people's web sites (correct me if I'm wrong). Can't you just replicate that model using other tools?

 

[andviv]

Contact the office of the First Lady.

Send them a questionnaire as an interview.

Ask them specific questions.

Link to their site and join that movement.

Kobe Bryant's 5 Healthy Habits | Let's Move!

Create a tool to help somehow this program (use one of your calculators, re-brand it and re-purpose it specifically for this, offer it to their users for free ).

Why does it bring traffic? you are using a famous face and joining a great program.

Not sure if it will work, but probably would take you only 5 hours of work to rebrand a calculator and create the questionnaire and send it to them.Looks like a a low-effort, high-potential type of activity.

 

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[healthstatus]

According to http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/health-websites:

WebMD.com = 19,000,000 unique visitors per month
Mayoclinic.com = 7,000,000 unique visitors per month

So there is definitely some room to grow.

I'm not greedy, I will be happy being in the top 7 of the health site rankings.

 

[healthstatus]

You said in a previous thread that you make a good chunk from licensing your health calculators for use on other people's web sites (correct me if I'm wrong). Can't you just replicate that model using other tools?

Yes, we do that. Just trying to see if anyone has a tremendous traffic generating idea or social magnet that we can apply to the site. Looking for traffic ideas.

 

[healthstatus]

Contact the office of the First Lady.

Send them a questionnaire as an interview.

Ask them specific questions.

Link to their site and join that movement.

Kobe Bryant's 5 Healthy Habits | Let's Move!

Create a tool to help somehow this program (use one of your calculators, re-brand it and re-purpose it specifically for this, offer it to their users for free ).

Why does it bring traffic? you are using a famous face and joining a great program.

Not sure if it will work, but probably would take you only 5 hours of work to rebrand a calculator and create the questionnaire and send it to them.Looks like a a low-effort, high-potential type of activity.

Good idea!

 

[andviv]

Liked on FB; Following on Twitter.

You could do more in twitter, you need to follow more people in your area, and post more than just links to your site.

 

[miked_d]

What are your analytics like? Bounce rate? Total time on site? What countries are visitors from?

The main page doesn't render correctly in Firefox. I think that should be fixed ASAP. The search button is not integrated. The center column is lower than the sidebars.

Who are you using for ads? You may need to approve more ads. I clicked on an inner page and the saw the same ad in all three positions. Also, the ad in the right sidebar would look better if wider.

What are your keywords? I put your page into an SEO tool and the meta keywords did not match up with the keyword density. I beleive use of mets keywords is depreciated so the Google calculates the keywords from the density.

Add H1 & H2 headings to to front page.

Have you considered cacheing to speed up page load?

 

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[AllenCrawley]

I don't want to be a naysayer to all ideas, this is really just another devious thread to educate a lot of people

Silly me, but since you asked I'll start with this...

There is huge potential with twitter.

WebMD has nearly 480,000 followers WebMD (WebMD) on Twitter
MayoClinic has nearly 389,000 follower Mayo Clinic (MayoClinic) on Twitter
You have 16

You should have something like what WebMD has for their bio, "WebMD and our medical team tweet the most trustworthy and timely health news and information to you." This is more interesting and will entice more followers than, "I am the President of HealthStatus.com, Inc.".

Here's a suggestion. I posted something similar on another thread. It's what I do and have done for my clients. It works. It would be perfect for your staff to implement and maintain.

• Purchase TweetAdder and set up your twitter profile
• Set it up to automatically follow all of the followers of WebMD and MayoClinic. A certain percentage of those you follow will follow you back because you're providing information they are already interested in. Be sure to unfollow those that don't follow back within 6 days or so. This type of software will also allow you to search twitter for specific keywords in user profiles and that users are tweeting. You can also add them to your list to follow.
• Provide value in your tweets like you are currently doing. Provide content your followers will like. You should tweet out tips, articles, news stories, blog posts, pics, videos, etc (from other sites and a few of your own) that they'll love. Look at the tweets by WebMD, high value content. Emulate that.
• Be sure to engage your followers. Ask questions, answer questions, retweet tweets that your followers may like.
• Identify and use hashtags to help others find your content. Doing this may help increase your followers, retweets, lead captures, sales, etc.

You do have to be careful when using automation software like tweetadder. Only follow maybe 150-200 people per day when starting out. People who follow 2000 people right off the bat throws up a red flag and twitter may suspend or ban the account. This type of software can also automate the posting of tweets and rss feeds. It will take some time but it is worth it.

Also, add facebook, twitter, google+ social share buttons to every page, post and article on your site. People will be more apt to sharing your content if you make it easy for them to do so.

I'll be back with more suggestions later.

 

[healthstatus]

There is huge potential with twitter.

I'll be back with more suggestions later.

50 year olds like me, think twitter is ridiculous.... I need to catch up.

I will get someone on this one. Anxiously waiting for more....

 

[andviv]

Have a full time VA

Have him take care of twitter as well...

 

[healthstatus]

What are your analytics like? Bounce rate? Total time on site? What countries are visitors from?

Add H1 & H2 headings to to front page.

Have you considered cacheing to speed up page load?

Will check foxpro issue for you and the other 2 guys that use it....(LOL)

Bounce rate is just under 30%
Time on site is a little over 3 minutes
Mainly US with some other english speaking countries thrown in.

What do the h1 & h2 tags say? Google analytics shows my site found for over 8300 different keywords.
The majority of my traffic is from search engines there are about 15-20 keywords that I would really like to move up in, but

page load speed issue is a result of ad networks as mentioned previously.