How Fast Does Traffic Grow With Inbound Marketing?

Website traffic is one of the biggest indicators that your marketing efforts are succeeding. But if you do not see the traffic numbers you like, you might be wondering how long it will take before your inbound efforts pay off.

So, how fast does traffic grow with inbound marketing? The speed at which your traffic grows with inbound marketing depends on several factors:

• Quality of content
• Amount of content
• Presence on inbound marketing channels
• Marketing budget

The success of any business nowadays is heavily dependent on their inbound marketing efforts. To help you gauge the rate at which traffic brought in by inbound marketing should grow, read on.

Inbound Marketing Content

In inbound marketing, content is king. It’s the lifeblood that drives your entire inbound machine.

Without a decent amount of high-quality content, you won’t have any useful or educational material to use for attracting prospects. And if you can’t attract prospects, you can’t grow your website traffic.

It’s not just about creating a bunch of content quickly, though.

Gone are the days where spammy blackhat SEO techniques can push a sub-par batch of articles to the top of the search results. If you want to rank now, you need to put out genuinely useful content that helps readers solve a problem.

Both the quality of content and the amount of content you have will impact your traffic growth rate.

Quality of inbound content

Taking the time to write genuinely helpful content will drive traffic to your website in several ways:

• It will rank higher in the search results.
• It will get more social shares.
• It will get higher clickthrough rates from your email list.
• It will help generate leads, which will increase repeat visitors and therefore increase overall traffic.

If you’re going to put effort into any single thing mentioned in this article, it should be content quality. Releasing one highly informative and well-researched blog post per month will likely drive more traffic than 30 half-baked pieces with little to no research.

What is high-quality content?

Great content is super important. But how do you differentiate it from sub-par content?

Here are few telltale signs a piece of content is exceptional:

• It’s well-researched. I said that content is the lifeblood of inbound marketing. Well, data is the lifeblood of content. Even the most compelling writer on the planet can’t write a good piece of content without research and statistics to back them up. A large number of outbound links to authoritative sources is always a good sign.
• It’s got a lot of social shares. If lots of people are sharing a piece of content on social media, it’s a sign that those people find the content exceptionally helpful. To check how many social shares a piece of content has, use a URL share tracker like SharedCount.
• It doesn’t have any fluff. One of the most common myths in the marketing world is that longer content = better content. While this is often true, as longer articles typically go into greater depth than shorter articles do, length does not always correlate with quality.
• It’s well-written. Data and research are undoubtedly important. However, the quality of the writing also contributes to the overall quality of the article. Read through the article and check that the sentences flow nicely and that they’re free of spelling or grammar errors.

How to write high-quality content

Knowing how to identify exceptional content is essential.

But how do you write it?

I could write a thousand articles on how to create great content. And if I did, I still wouldn’t have covered everything.

However, some advice is better than none. Here are some essential elements of a great piece of content:

• Write a captivating headline. According to Copyblogger, 80% of people will read your headline copy, but only 20% will read the rest of your body content. Your article might contain the most interesting and informative content on a particular topic. But if the headline doesn’t attract readers, it may as well not exist.
• Make it highly actionable. Good content provides useful information. Great content goes a step further and tells users how they can use the information to solve their problems.
• Answer the reader’s implicit questions. High-quality content doesn’t just answer the question posed in the headline. It also solves the follow-up questions the reader will have after they receive an answer to their initial query. Get in your reader’s head and answer their questions before they even ask them.

Amount of inbound content

Creating great content should be your top priority. But once you’ve figured out how to make it, you should figure out how to make a lot of it.

Making more content will increase your rate of traffic growth in the following ways:

• It will give you more opportunities to rank high in the search engine results.
• It will give your readers more content to share with their social networks.
• You’ll have more content to share with your email list.

This next section will discuss the channels on which you can place your content and drive traffic to your website.

By building and optimizing your presence on each of these channels, you can leverage the terrific content you’ve spent tons of time (or money) creating and exponentially increase your traffic growth rate.

Organic search results

The most direct and hands-off way to attract traffic with inbound marketing is through organic search results. By tailoring your content to specific queries on Google, you can rank in the top search result slots and get a consistent source of lucrative, free, and highly motivated traffic.

Pay-Per-Click search ads

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are the ads that show up in the search engine results. If you have a competitive and profitable keyword you’d like to target, you can write content geared toward that keyword and leapfrog all of the organic results with PPC search ads.

PPC ads used to be considered a form of outbound marketing, but the industry has changed its tune in recent years. As such, PPC ads are now an essential component of any comprehensive inbound marketing strategy.

Social media

Organic social media marketing consists of building and interacting with your followers. The more active and engaged social media followers you have clicking on the content you share, the more traffic you’ll be able to drive to your website.

Email list

Your email list is an excellent source of website traffic. By sharing new content with your email subscribers, you can significantly increase the reach of your content.

While your email list probably won’t bring in the highest numbers of raw traffic, it will bring in some of the most interested and motivated visitors.

And remember that new content doesn’t always mean you have to write something ‘new’… you can re-purpose some of your greatest blogs, podcasts, etc. by re-writing or re-positioning them in an email.

This is a useful and effective way to get more out of the great content you’ve already published.

Inbound Marketing Budget

The last factor impacting how quickly you can grow traffic with inbound marketing is your budget.

At the start of their marketing journey, many business owners begin with a marketing budget of $0. They don’t know if this inbound marketing stuff will work for them, and they’re understandably hesitant to invest any serious money. So they make their own content, bootstrap a website, and build up their channels through organic methods.

Making content and building organic traffic sources will always be useful. However, your time is limited.

You’re only one person, with two sets of hands and sixteen hours to use per day. Maybe a little more if you sacrifice sleep.

If you want to scale up your inbound marketing efforts and increase your traffic growth rate, you’ll need to spend some money.

Now, I’m not saying that throwing money at marketing will magically bring in truckloads of traffic. If you don’t carefully test what you’re doing, you could spend a lot on relatively little results.

But a smart application of funds will be more helpful than not using those funds at all.

Here are the ways a larger inbound marketing budget can grow your traffic:

• You can hire people to make content for you.
• You can buy more PPC ads.
• You can boost posts on social media
• You can buy lead gen ads on social media that grow your email list.
• You can hire a professional inbound marketing agency to grow your traffic for you.