Getting Traffic to Your Website with Urgency

Few ways of getting traffic to your website can beat providing a sense of urgency.  If you don’t give people on and off your list a reason to visit NOW, they probably never will.  Short attention spans are the norm on the Internet, so you have to grab them by the eyeballs now and get them to your site.

Making Limited Time Offers Speeds Things Along

Few things can instill a sense of urgency more quickly than providing a countdown on limited time offers.  When you launch your new promotion, you should provide a cut-off date.  About a month before the launch, release your first notice of the impending launch date.  Every week or so after that, provide another until the last two days before launch.  Then you should send out notices daily.

You don’t want to start right off by giving daily notices.  This will annoy the people on your list and make them want to leave.  However, they tend to stay on your list if you increase the frequency of notices within the first few days of launching.  The technique should give a sense of “putting a bug in their ear” at first, leading up to a virtual sense of crisis if they don’t join by the last call.

Having Limited Spots Is Powerful Leverage

Perhaps more potent than advertising that you have a limited time to sign up is advertising that you have limited spots.  You follow pretty much the same procedure as the limited time frame, only the focus is on how many “seats” you have available for a product.  Being informed that there is a diminishing availability of your product, but no indication beyond “spots are filling fast,” can really make people move on subscribing.

Now, whether you’re honest in how many seats are actually available depends on how well you could sleep at night if you aren’t honest about it.  I’ve known many marketers that do this and seem to have maintained a positive reputation.  I mean, how long can you visit a page and see “only 200 (struck through) 97 (struck through) 2 spots left!” every time before you begin to wonder?  Wouldn’t there eventually be a point where it says that 0 spots are left?  As for myself, I wouldn’t risk it.

Limited Bonuses Can Draw Serious Traffic to Your Website

Perhaps you’re not comfortable with the idea of dishonestly portraying the availability of your spots.  You can instead offer limited bonuses for people to sign up.  With this technique, you can apply either of the two urgency techniques I mentioned without losing sleep or reputation.

All you have to do is mention in your mailings and social media postings that you will give a free bonus “for a limited time” or “for the first X subscribers.”  This helps along the more indefinitely available products and leaves you without a moral dilemma, although, I suppose you could fib about this if you wanted to take that risk.