1. Advertise.
I know, it's super obvious, yet there's this built-in resistance to doing it. Probably because so much of the advertising for sale is a complete waste of money. That being said you can reduce waste be tracking your advertisements.
We've had a lot of success advertising with PPC search engines like Google Adwords. When you advertise on a search engine you get more value than just showing up amongst search results. The impressions of you ad frequently are seen but not clicked. Later, a person see's another of your ads online and remember's that first impression and decides to visit your site. That type of result can be tricky to track.
Another thing that happens is you end up getting other people in online communities to notice your product. This will frequently lead to blogs, reviews, forum posts, and comments. All those things play a role in helping getting your site organic search engine ranking, which is the grail of free advertising.
One thing I can say for sure concerning advertising is that you can have the greatest product or service in the world, but as long as nobody knows about it, it's as if it doesn't exist. Advertising is critical for making yourself known and getting the ball rolling.
2. Follow up.
Getting people to stop by your website one time is not enough. You need a mechanism to get them to come back. The best way to do this is by capturing their email address. That way you can send them an email reminding them of your product or service later.
The best way to get people to give you their email address is by providing something of high perceived value in exchange for that little piece of contact information. Be careful not to ask for too much info. Typically the more information you ask for the higher the perceived value of the products you're looking to giveaway and the less likely someone is to provide you with it.
Once you have the email you can't be afraid to follow up. You need to send your visitors regular emails giving them even more value and asking them to come back to your website and checkout your product. I've read a lot of articles that recommend you stay away from selling your products in your email, but I found the best way to create interest is by talking about your products and services.
3. Keep things fresh.
There are so many abandoned websites on the internet. You need to let the people coming to your website know there's something going on behind the scenes. You can do that with something as simple as posting a blurb of text saying you the time and date you last updated the site, or by mentioning holidays. Something we've always done is acknowledged major holidays to show people we're still here and going strong.
4. Create shareable content.
By now you've probably read a blog post or two recommending you create high-quality content to get more traffic to your site. The idea being that great content gets shared and mentioned, and ultimately ranks well on Google. All of that is true but it can be tough to get your content going, in the same way it can be tough to find the first few users of your product or service.
To create shareable content try doing either a roundup style blog post where you ask five or six experts for their opinion. People love to share their opinions and so they'll most likely want to share your article with their network once it's published.
The other way is to mention a product, service, or person in your blog posts and then notify them of the mention. These people too will be likely to share the article.
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