Driving traffic to your website for free is the goal of many bloggers and affiliates. If you can get free traffic, you can make sales without spending any money on advertising. That means any sales you make from affiliate marketing is 100% profit. Since most paid adverts don’t work and you’ll end up spending a lot of money (at least initially) just to break even, it makes sense to have an organic strategy.
Top marketers attest to spending thousands on their marketing budgets, only to double their spend. And that’s after they’ve found a profitable advert – which takes a lot of testing and measuring of their budget. So figuring out a profitable ad can be costly. So if you don’t have the funds (or the temperament) for this, organic traffic gives you an alternative and free option to build an affiliate business with.
The downside of organic traffic is that it takes time and there’s no guarantees. So if spending months on end blogging or creating videos isn’t your “bag”, it’s probably not for you. Plus, you can’t easily scale organic traffic as with paid advertising. Long term returns can be good though if you’re willing to put the effort in upfront with little or no short term gains.
Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free – Finding Your Niche
In a competitive niche you’re going to have to work for much longer too and despite a niche being highly sought after (and profitable), that also makes it very competitive. Consider that fact that you’ll need to work at your blog for several weeks, months or even years before it brings in a nice monthly income for you. In a top niche it’s likely to take longer than a relatively uncompetitive one. So it’s worth considering your niche before you start out. I spent a long time in the wrong niche, thinking since it was untapped and uncompetitive then it would be “easier”.
However, what I didn’t consider is blogging for 6 straight months about a topic I had no clue (or interest) about. This makes it considerably more difficult. The topic I found was garlic harvesting! Since I knew nothing about it, I had to research every article I would write. After 6 months that became incredibly tiring. I lost interest and my blog fell from the search engines. It was also difficult to monetise, which is another consideration.
So ideally choose a topic which you’re passionate about, find a high quality product which aligns with that passion and start your blog. Expect to create content for several months to establish yourself.
Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free – SEO
A good place to start is with some keyword research using Google’s free keyword planner tool. Strart by looking for long tail keywords with low SEO competition. You can find these by typing your main keyword into the planner tool. Scroll through the keyword suggestions until the monthly search volume drops to the lowest number (10 or lower). Here you should find some longer tail keywords which although offer less traffic, offer the new blogger a better opportunity at a ranking for their content. Going after the main keywords in your niche is unlikely to result in any of your content ranking on Google. There’s simply too much competition for a new site to rank for competitive keywords.
Google will usually “sandbox” new websites anyway until they have proved themselves with high quality content and regular new, fresh content. Some bloggers even recommend going after zero search volume keywords. The thinking here is that many new keywords are being searched for which haven’t yet shown up in the keyword planner. By going after these keywords you’ll benefit your SEO (Search engine optimisation) score with Google and give yourself more chance of ranking for relatively uncompetitive keywords in your niche.
SEO Tools
Once you have found a suitable keyword to target with your article, make sure you use an SEO tool such as Yoast SEO. This free WordPress plugin lets you optimise your articles for the search engines. It will let you know the optimisation score and keyword density for each post you write. This will involve getting your keyword in your titles, image alt tags and meta descriptions and so on.
There’s various other tools you can use too. I use social share icons to encourage my visitors to share my work on social media sites. You can also syndicate the publishing of your older posts automatically using a plugin called Revive Old Posts.
It’s a good idea to automate as much as possible because it will take up quite a lot of mental space just creating, publishing and sharing your content manually each time. So having some automation helping you is no bad thing! See also my post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Driving Traffic To Your Website For Free – Write Long, High Quality Posts
I would also suggest to write as long and as detailed and high quality posts as you can. Over time, there’s more and more bloggers added to the online mix. As your older posts gather dust, they get overtaken by other bloggers content, especially if they are of low quality. So make them stand out from the rest by writing long posts (ideally over 1000 words) and make them high quality so they stand the test of time.
Write to help your reader, not to “rank” or impress the search engines. Your plugin Yoast SEO will help you optimise for the “bots” so that’s taken care of. Google’s search engine algorithms constantly change and evolve. So over time SEO tools will change too. The Google “bots” can easily see how people interact with your content and they know whether it’s good or not by virtue of the way people interact with it. If you content isn’t worth reading, people will click away and the “bots” will see this. So write high quality posts for your audience’s benefit.
Will Google Rank You?
The internet houses a staggering 1.9 billion websites, including over 600 million blogs. So the chance of your content ranking top place on a Google search are pretty low; especially with a brand new blog with not much on it. You’re often competing with bloggers who have been around for decades. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of back links and decades worth of content. So don’t hold out for your 10 page website to suddenly bring in a tonne of traffic overnight! It just ain’t going to happen!
However, if you stick with it and continue to post regularly for several months, your authority will grow and you should see some changes. There are other search engines who will pick up your content and rank it too – Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, for example. But just don’t rely on Google (or any search engine) to do your bidding for you as you’ll be disappointed. Instead, take charge of your own blog promotion by:
- Actively and aggressively promoting your content throughout your social media presence
- Building an email list of subscribers and sending them your new posts as you write them
- Placing share buttons on your blog to make it easy for readers to share your posts
- Using social media planners and plugins to syndicate your content throughout social media platforms automatically
- Building back links through guest posting and blog commenting on other websites/blogs in your niche
- Using Q and A websites to link back to your posts (E.g. Quora.com) – See using Quora to drive traffic.
Aligning Your Content With Your Offer
Before rushing out in high hopes that your blogging is going to make you millions, it’s worth understanding how you’re monetising your blog first. Unless your blog posts are aligned with your products in some way, you’re not going to make any money from all this work!
I’ll say that again: unless your blog posts are aligned with your products in some way, you’re not going to make any money from all this work. So before starting out on this journey it’s worth getting this very clear: you must align your audience with your product. Failing to do this will result in a lot of work for nothing.
Now if you love your niche and it’s just a side hustle, perhaps you’re not too bothered. It is much more interesting and satisfying writing about something you’re dearly interested and enthusiastic about. In fact, it’s much more difficult sustaining the necessary effort involved if that’s not the case.
However, if you want your blogging to bear fruit at some point in a monetary sense, make sure your affiliate product is linked with all your content. So when you’re doing your keyword research, ask yourself this question:
“Does this search query bring a targeted visitor to my website who might want the product I promote”
If the answer is no, you might be wasting your valuable time on that particular piece of content. It’s worth checking out this post on the customer avatar to get clear on who you want to attract to your website.
Summary
Driving traffic to your website for free can be very rewarding if you stick with it. Plus, all your sales are 100% profit, unlike when you’re using paid advertising.
Before setting out with your article or content creation, do some research. Does your keyword have a good chance of getting found on the search engines? Is it aligned with your target audience? Don’t rely on the search engines in any case and make sure you aggressively market and promote your content personally, using manual posting and/or automated plugins or post planners. You might even want to test out some paid advertising too to give your traffic a boost.
Make sure you get a few plugins to help you both write and promote your content. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Progress though blogging can be painstakingly slow. So create a routine which helps you overcome procrastination and get moving, however slowly it might be at first. Define your niche – choose one you’ll love writing about for several months at the least if you want to make it work. Choose a high value product which is going to last and stand out among the others.
Keep going and never quit!
Good luck!