If you’re wondering how to get website traffic without spending any money, this post is for you! There’s a few reasons why you wouldn’t want to run paid adverts to bring in traffic. There’s the expense for one and the unknown return you may or may not receive. You can spend a fortune and simply just lose money with paid advertising. So it’s a risk and if you do use paid advertising you should start with a small budget you’re happy to lose while you learn.
On the plus side of paid advertising you can scale up a paid campaign once you’re profitable. That’s much more difficult when using free strategies such as blogging. But there’s upsides to blogging too – such as it’s free! Free traffic means whatever you earn from your blog is yours – it’s 100% profit, (minus your time of course).
But if you have the time, blogging is a fun way to turn it into readies! It’s cheap and if you have a well targeted affiliate product on your blog to sell, it’s a great way to turn your spare time into cash!
How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – Blogging
Yes blogging is a simple and cheap way to generate website traffic. Once you have decided on the topic of your blog, you can easily find keywords which are suitable for your niche and which can also bring in targeted traffic. To find these, head to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main keyword. Look for long tail derivatives. These are the keywords which you have the best chance of ranking on Google for.
While you still may not rank on the top of Google for them, having them on your website will increase your overall authority with Google too. They are also a good place to start to attract the kind of person you want as a website visitor. Attracting the wrong audience isn’t going to help you make those sales, so it’s key to determining your audience first before you start out. Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet to get clear on this topic.
Once you know who you are writing for, things get a lot easier as a blogger. You can write to attract the people who are most likely to be interested in your product – your target audience.
How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – Plugins
You can also get an SEO plugin which helps you write SEO friendly content. I use one called Yoast SEO. It allows you to balance the correct number of keywords throughout your blog posts to give you the best chance of ranking your content. See also my post on best free WordPress plugins for bloggers.
There’s a few other plugins you can get which will help you as a blogger:
- Social media share plugin – lets visitors easily share your content on their social media
- Push engage software – allows people to get notified when you re-post
- Content syndication software – automatically syndicates older content on your social media
- Pop up plugins – allows more visitors to subscriber to your email list
Plugins can make your life much, much easier as a blogger. They help you share your content more easily and even automatically. Since it’s traffic you need, the more people who can find your blog the better. Not everyone who finds your content will buy from you, but you can stack the cards in your favour with an email list.
How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – The Email List
The email list is an important factor in turning your traffic into affiliate sales. Without one, you’re relying on people who visit your content buying from you. Since most visitors only stick around for a few minutes the chances of that happening are pretty low. Especially since statistics show most online consumers need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website before they buy something.
With an email list you have multiple opportunities to re-engage your visitors via email messages. So make sure you start building an email list from the get-go. It will save you a heap of time and effort. You can access a free autoresponder here, which you need to build an email list.
Patience
Sadly with blogging you need to be super patient because it’s a long, slow process. But if you stick with it, over time you should see exponential increase in your traffic.
There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s plenty of competition in pretty much every topic you can think of. So standing out and getting known is going to take some time. However, as your volume of content grows, you should pick up some backlinks from other websites and from people sharing your content on social media. Plus, if you install the various plugins you can automate a posting campaign throughout your social media which is running in the background.
Little by little your efforts will add up and compound. See also the magical compounding effect of blogging.
Ideally pick a topic you know about of have some kind of passion for. That way, you’ll be able to keep going far longer than the rest in your niche!
Summary
To get traffic without paying takes time and a bit of dedication. There’s a lot of content out there, and AI is taking a lot of the organic space now with Google’s own AI dominating the top of the search results pages. In a competitive niche, you can expect to see paid advertising at the top of the Google results pages too.
Take a look at the image below which was a search I did for “affiliate marketing” – a super competitive niche. It had multiple paid adverts and then Google’s AI machine is at the top (where organic search results used to be!)
So if you want to make a go of blogging today, you’ll definitely need the tools I suggested in this article:
- SEO plugin
- Social media share plugins
- Automatic social media syndication tool
- Email list
- Push engage plugin software
