Generating website traffic for free is not only possible, but it’s also sustainable, scalable, and wise at the same time.
There are numerous ways, strategies, and tactics to generate a healthy flow of regular traffic to your website if you plant the right seeds online, which eventually will grow into traffic sources. In this article, we’ll cover some of the most effective ways to generate website traffic for free.
- Participate In Social Discussion Forums
- Create Amazing Content
- Use Self-Publishing Platforms
- Use Social Media to Get More Free Traffic and Expand Your Target Audience
- Advertise Using Google Ads and Other Paid Ads
- Guest Blogging
- Focus on Reliable Websites to Get Guest Posts
- Ask Others to Write a Guest Blog on Your Website
- Interview Influencers to Increase Traffic (Influencer Marketing)
- Email Marketing
- Online Webinars
- Analyze Current Traffic Sources\
Participate In Social Discussion Forums
Just like going to offline events to meet new people and build a network, it’s almost necessary to be social online. By going to social discussion forums online, you can participate in several conversations by addressing subjects you know well.
You can participate by asking quality questions, giving insightful answers, and connecting with people online. Doing this will inspire curiosity in the folks you interact with, who will want to visit your profile and know more about what you do.
Make sure you have transparency in how you direct them to your website from your social profiles so they know where to find out more about you.
We recommend discussion forums like Quora, Reddit, and Whirlpool, to name just three. Apart from that, there are some discussion groups on social media you can request to join. Make sure you stick to their social etiquette to remain an active group member! This means abiding by their rules about mostly spam content.
Create Amazing Content
Everything starts here. Content is a great way to attract, engage, and convert website traffic. The recipe for success with content marketing is straightforward:
Create Great Content + Do Great SEO = Generate High-Quality Organic Website Traffic
Great content marketing is also a sustainable, cost-effective marketing strategy in the long run. This is because people will always search for things online, and if your content offers them value, Google will reward you by enhancing your search engine rankings. Value is added for various reasons – like how long people stay on your site or if they go through any of your other content. That’s the essence of search engine optimization and bringing organic traffic to your website.
That’s why it’s an absolute must that you create genuinely insightful, educational, and entertaining content for your audience. It’s possible to create high-quality content by involving your staff in the content creation process, so you’re constantly creating a steady stream of engaging content ready to publish anytime.
Another key to content marketing success is to write punchy headlines for your content that instantly grab your audience’s attention. When people search online for information, they’re naturally inclined to click on article topics that catch their eye with an energetic promise of giving them value. There’s a very fine line between this and clickbait titles, so you have to be sure that your article conveys facts and that your title doesn’t mislead visitors to your website.
Great headlines can boost your click-through rates and increase your website’s traffic.
Use Self-Publishing Platforms
You can build subject matter expertise in your domain by self-publishing books on online public platforms like Amazon or by publishing articles on Medium, LinkedIn, or WordPress. This will allow you to gain exposure to a large audience that reads these platforms regularly.
Books and articles aren’t the only content format. You can publish presentations or PDF slides on platforms like Slideshare, which can generate lots of website traction too. You can publish podcasts on iTunes and videos on social media platforms like YouTube.
So think about what type of content you want to create and where you’d like to publish it and get on the road to self-publishing success as soon as possible! If all your content has internal links to your website, your exposure is far more significant; this way, you can grab more organic search traffic from other websites. In fact, it’s your stepping stone to succeed online!
Use Social Media to Get More Free Traffic and Expand Your Target Audience
Social media is probably the most invaluable tool you have in your arsenal for free. Consider all popular social media platforms as free advertising tools that work wonders if used with the right strategy.
Social media is an easy way to attract large target audiences. With their added features like groups and communities, you can now attract even more potential readers and customers than a few years back.
Leveraging hashtags on social media posts and posting regularly are the two most significant bits of advice you can find. Hashtags, more precisely, will help you reach new potential customers and gain new followers, which can, in turn, help you increase your website traffic.
Of course, we also have a curated list of the best social media tips for small businesses for you to go through if you want to get the most out of these platforms.
By using all the popular social media platforms, you can expect a significant increase in the number of visitors to your social site or blog because, currently, they’re one of the most efficient ways of getting more traffic. Creating and implementing even the most straightforward social media strategy is a great way to increase traffic to your website.
Advertise Using Google Ads and Other Paid Ads
There are several opportunities to advertise at no cost online, but we must also mention some paid methods here. Advertising at no cost can be done via newsletters, media platforms (like Gumtree or Yellow Pages) or any other marketing channel that permits free ads.
You need to create a comprehensive ‘free listing’ on these channels to establish a presence. It’s a great way to get started on an advertising platform and then upgrade to the paid version if the free listing generates traffic for you.
So if you get a call from Yellow Pages asking you to create a free listing, don’t ignore them! It can prove to be quite beneficial.
Other ad services include Google Ads. Using their advertising platform, you can reach millions of internet users searching for the same thing you’re offering. It’s another great way of getting more traffic to your website.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging can generate significant website traffic if you partner with the right blogs. You need to identify the right blogs with an audience that might be interested in your value proposition and then reach out to their editors to do a guest post on their blog.
Approach editors of blogs that have an established audience and make them an offer to create a piece of content that adds massive value to their readers. In exchange, you can ask them to put your name as the article’s author and request a link leading back to your website.
Start creating a winning content strategy and relationships with hosting blogs that allow you to do free guest posts and value your contribution. This is a sure-shot way of generating a ton of traffic to your website, so don’t miss it!
Focus on Reliable Websites to Get Guest Posts
Backlinks can be used to connect to other websites relevant to or not your competitors. They’re a key indicator that your content is valuable to Google and that many users have seen it. Getting free website traffic from backlinking can be extremely useful as it increases your website value in search engines.
It also helps create strong domain authority. Backlinks are merely for attracting traffic, but if search engines see that a high-traffic website points to yours, it can be a massive helping hand in bringing you up on the search engine results page (SERP). So it makes more sense to approach a higher-traffic website and go down the order.
Ask Others to Write a Guest Blog on Your Website
Just as you’d reach out to editors of other blogs, you can invite people to guest write for your website’s blog. If you can attract great people, writers, or influencers to create content for your blog, you could be on a winning streak!
People follow influencers and want to hear from great publishers. By collaborating with content creators with a social following, or anyone who can create high-quality content for your blog, you will build ‘content goodwill.’ This intangible value your content creates keeps people coming back to your website to consume more content!
Give people a solid reason to visit your website, and soon you will have lots of free traffic. It’s as simple as that.
Interview Influencers to Increase Traffic (Influencer Marketing)
Another top tip that can generate a ton of free traffic to your website is interviewing influencers and publishing the interviews on your website.
Influencers are folks with a large social following. By interviewing them and sharing the interviews, you attract more website visitors. The main point here is to request the influencer to share the interview on their social channels after it’s done. This provides a big traffic boost to your website since you’re leveraging the influencer’s audience size.
By interviewing influencers, you’re also building a robust social network and creating a ‘virality’ around the content you publish.
A piece of content shared by an influencer is like a content asset on marketing steroids! You’ll notice how it will keep getting shared by people in the influencers’ network, which can stimulate lots of free traffic toward your site.
The challenge with this technique is to persuade the influencer to do an interview with you. This can be time-consuming, and it can often take months before they agree. Never give up because even a single influencer interview can give you the much-needed website traffic boost you need.
Email Marketing
As you publish content on your blog, do guest blogging, and interview influencers, you’ll attract lots of traffic to your website. A vital step to action is to have an email capture popup or a form that requests website visitors to leave their email addresses.Doing this will collect many email addresses of website visitors who want to hear from you. These are your fans, the people who want to be part of your journey, your brand advocates and, quite possibly, your future customers. So maintaining a positive relationship that nurtures them over time is the key to your marketing success.
Online Webinars
If you’re looking to interact with your audience live, webinars can offer the benefit of connecting with your customers and enable you to create informational value for your audience.
Choose a webinar topic that would be of interest to your audience. Organizing a webinar on making great cappuccino is an excellent idea if you’re in the coffee business. Make sure you choose a webinar topic your audience is actually excited about to boost registrations.
The tricky part with webinars is to market them and then get people to attend. For this reason, you need to start spreading the word about your webinar a few days or even months before it’s held. Allow the time to send two to three reminders before the webinar via email so your registrants don’t miss it.
We recommend creating solid value in your webinars. A lot of them offer generic information, leaving people disappointed. Be different and authentic in the way you conduct your webinars by using them as a medium to understand your customers and allow them to interact with you.
At the end of the webinar, give your participants clear and specific calls to action so they know exactly what to do next.
Analyze Current Traffic Sources
To generate high-quality traffic to your website, you need to analyze what’s working for you – and most importantly, what’s not. One way to do this is via Google Analytics. It is an excellent way to see all of your current traffic sources and know more about the traffic’s composition, where it’s coming from, and why.
Image credit: Google
The platform will show you the channels that send traffic to your website, traffic sources like search engines and referral sources. You’ll also learn where your users are, the time of the day they visit your website, and what devices they use to access it. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg!
Image credit: Google
This information can be excellent for making significant marketing decisions to boost traffic to your website. You can double down on what’s working and eliminate what’s not working to save time. Only devote your attention to the most productive channels that offer the highest returns.
Google Analytics isn’t the only tool to help you understand your website traffic. You can use a tool like Hotjar heatmaps to understand which parts of your website users spend the most time on. It records user behaviour while they’re browsing your website using graphical representations that are called heatmaps!
This can be fantastic as you get a deeper understanding of what website visitors like and dislike about your website so that you can optimize accordingly.
Adopting this agile marketing mindset by testing your efforts, you’ll become smarter about generating free website traffic.
Wrapping It Up
A systematic plan to implement the above tips will put you in a very advantageous position over your competitors. Whether you’re a blog site owner or a small business that keeps a blog running, applying tips like backlinks, internal link building, search engine optimization, keeping blog posts up to date and exploring all the exciting aspects of social media is the perfect start.
Optimizing your search results pages using free analytics tools is another way to get a significant headstart for your own site. You’ll be able to attract more free traffic to your website by knowing exactly where your visitors come from.
And remember, building free traffic is a marathon, not a sprint race – so you’ll have to be patient before seeing positive results come at you.
Every website dreams of having more traffic, and rightfully so! The more visitors you have to your site, the better chance you have of achieving success if you remain committed to attracting your target audience.
