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Summer – it’s warm outside, but web businesses often struggle during these months. People simply like to spend more time in the sun then surf the web, or even take their full yearly holidays to spend time with their families.

And that’s when web traffic drops. And with the drop in web traffic come slow sales, smaller advertising revenues, and so on.

When you are running a web business, you are most likely running the business from your computer screen. And staring at a screen waiting for sales to “just happen” can be extremely frustrating – even without the usual drop during summer. Believe me; I’ve been there.

But, if you are wise, you can also turn this into an opportunity: Instead of staring at this blank screen, you can use the added free time to give your business a boost.

Here are some ways you can boost your web traffic, sales, and advertising revenues during the slow summer month.

1. Start Guest Blogging Like a Pro

You know who else suffers during the slow summer month? Other web businesses! I’m talking from experience here – if you’re suffering, your competitors suffer as well. So turn this into an advantage:

Pro bloggers are essentially nothing else than web businesses build around blogs. And most pro bloggers take guest posts. Pro bloggers normally love guest posts (when they meet their quality standards). They mean less work because these bloggers usually have a content calendar that tells them to publish at least a certain amount of posts every week. The more guest posts they publish on their site, the fewer posts they have to write themselves.

Here is the thing: Because other people are lazy as well, bloggers usually get fewer guest posts during the summer as well. I know we do! And since the weather outside is warm and sunny, they would love to be able to publish at least as many guest posts as during colder times and spend more time outside.

So you’re chance to get your posts published on bigger blogs from your niche are a lot bigger during the summer.

So take a look around: Which blogs that are focused around similar topics as yourself regularly publish guest posts? Make a list of these and prioritize: Which blogs would you like to get published on. Send them a few topics you could write about and wait for their reply. Even if you tried that before, you could easily expect a higher acceptance rate during the summer.

Here are the results of a case study on Ahrefs blog:

Guest Blogging Case Study by Ahrefs.

2. Diversify Your Business: Create A(nother) Product

Many web businesses are based around one product or service. That creates a dependency: If one product doesn’t sell or stops to generate a lot of revenues for whatever reason, you are basically …

During the slow summer is the perfect time to do something about this: Less traffic and fewer sales/revenue/projects/clients also mean you have more time at your disposal. Use that time: Create a new product and try to start marketing and selling it!

When you are running a web consulting business, for instance, you can create a second product based on your knowledge: Create information products. Write an ebook, create an e-course. These don’t need to be extra fancy (like our Social Media Traffic Generation Masterclass 🙂 ). They just need to provide some information that you can sell.

3. Give Your Email List the Attention it Deserves!

Most web businesses are collecting email addresses one way or another. If you have not started yet, start now – an email list is the biggest asset a web business can create for itself. Products go away (i.e. become obsolete), email addresses stay.

But the strange thing is, I’ve yet to see a web business that gives it’s email list the attention it deserves (my own included). Because an email list doesn’t generate revenues when you don’t market to it – and by marketing, I don’t mean send boring sales emails every other day.

Email addresses aren’t just “leads” – behind every active email address is a real person. And a real person wants to be treated nicely. And that is where the problem starts to come up: Treating people nicely is hard. Making friends when all you have is an email address is hard. But that is exactly what you should do and what you should achieve.

Even when you are sending regular newsletters, there is usually a lot more that you can do. You can acquire information about the people on your list by asking them questions and collecting answers. You can then use that information to divide these people into interest groups. You can send targeted content to these interest groups. You can create content that exactly fits the needs of your specific segments.

Drip is a modern marketing automation email tool that allows you to create forked email automation sequences within easy to understand visual workflows.

What this does is it creates a relationship between you and the people on your list. And people prefer to buy from other people that they like and who have helped them before. If you treat your email list right, you will be warded with more (and easier) sales and more revenues.

All of this isn’t done in a day; it takes a lot of preparation. You will need to get accustomed to modern email marketing software like Convertkit or Drip. And to stop it from becoming a constant piece of work you will have to automate a lot of the processes in the end.

But it is worth it! Modern web sales funnels rely heavily on email marketing – yet email marketing is also the area with the highest potential for improvement. What better time to start than the slow summer months?

Do you have some “slow” time on your hands? Use it to learn some awesome social media marketing with “The Social Traffic Code!”

4. Counter Your Web Traffic Drop by Adding new Activities to your Marketing Mix

Your web traffic may drop a bit during the summer month – but that only means you should counter that by diversifying your marketing activities and especially your web traffic generation strategies.

Most web businesses have essentially one traffic generation strategy that is responsible for most of their web traffic. Some specialize in SEO, some on targeted web traffic through advertising, and others (like us) on social media traffic.

So when your traffic drops during summer, there is probably not a lot you can do about this within your primary activities – yet there could be a big chance that you can achieve a lot by adding another traffic source.

For instance: We specialize in social media traffic, and social networks will always be our primary traffic source. However: we’ve never done a lot of active SEO. So what we are going to do during the summer month is add a lot of link building to our activities. Here is what we will do:

– Guest blogging (See #1 as well): With our previous business, we managed to create a lot of SEO business for ourselves by guest posting a lot. With the Social Ms, we haven’t done this a lot. (We are not only doing this for SEO reasons, though!)
– Active link building: We are going to identify broken links on other peoples web pages and email them resources that we provide on our own site to update their links.

Granted: The SEO traffic won’t be rising at once – SEO takes time. But even without the SEO benefit, guest blogging does help a lot when you build your business: You widen your audience by creating visibility on other peoples websites.

For you, this might mean something else: If you are currently concentration on advertising and SEO traffic, maybe it’s time to start some social media activity? And so on…

5. Network Like a Pro – Go to Events!

Your business is slowing down during summer? Business events of any kind do happen around the year, but they are especially effective during the summer!

Why?

Because it’s summer! Networking is a lot more fun when you can sit outside with a cool beer, a glass of white wine, or even a cocktail in your hand while enjoying the evening sun after a hot day!

Business networking is a lot more relaxed on a warm summer evening than in cold (and wet) winter.

Business events are a lot more relaxed during the summer, and the actual networking aspect is enhanced.

This is obvious for the smaller type for business events that happen at any time in any city. But even conferences are a lot more relaxing in the summer.

The reason that business events of any kind are generally more effective during the summer is that people themselves are more relaxed. And relaxed people are better for business.

What you should do is research the events in your area that you could go to that look fun and probably have an audience that intersects with the type of people you need to talk to. And there are always events that fill the bill (when you are living in fact in a city and not alone on a mountain).

Create a calendar of those and got to several of these events per week. You usually get free drinks, so the evening won’t be wasted if it turns out to not be a successful night. But try to be relaxed and enjoy the evening – the more relaxed you are, the bigger the chances of success!

Final Words

When you notice the typical traffic drop in summer, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the end of all things – you can use the slower time in the middle of summer to give your business a boost in another way.

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