Paid traffic can be expensive so here are 10 ways to get more free website traffic! There’s many ways to skin a cat as the saying goes and likewise there’s more than 1 way to get free traffic to your website, too. Organic traffic is a great prize because it means any sales you make means 100% profit. When you’re paying for advertising to get traffic, you must deduct your advertising costs from your sales revenue. Often this can leave you with nothing, or even less than nothing!
Of course paid traffic offers the fastest way to build a scalable business. You can’t scale free traffic as easily as when using paid traffic. But if you’re out of ad budget, organic traffic is a good option, if you have the time. So here’s 10 ways you can get more traffic to your website completely for free!
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #1 – Create Content
Of course free traffic comes to your website because you’re offering something of value – your content. Without content don’t expect any free traffic! To build content takes time and a little dedication. A few posts simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to traffic generation.
The more content you create, the more opportunity you create to attract an audience to your website. However, before you rush off in high hopes of thousands of website hits, it’s worth asking yourself why you want traffic. If you want to sell something from your website, keep in mind that not all traffic will be “buyer traffic”.
Buyers are more valuable than any old traffic. So create content with this in mind. You could create thousands of posts on your website but without understanding your target audience (or customer avatar), your blog might simply attract the wrong kind of visitor – those who don’t care about your products. So write lots of content but keep in mind the purpose of your content – to attract buyer traffic.
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #2 – Keyword Research & SEO
Let’s get more specific here even creating content can be a total waste of time if that content doesn’t get found. So you need to either promote that content, or make it so good that the search engines must rank it.
For a new website, this can be super tough since there’s so much content out there on the internet. Google will naturally rank content which has been around for a while, over a brand new website which has just been put up. They may even sandbox you for a while until you prove your worth!
To get ranked on Google, or any of the other search engines, you can create content which is targeted towards specific keywords. Certain keywords have much less competition than others. With a new website, it’s worth targeting these because you’re more likely to get free traffic from the search engines for long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Ideally, find these keywords which also align with your affiliate products, if you’re promoting some affiliate product. That way, when someone finds your content, they are also interested in whatever it is you’re selling.
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #3 – Post On Social Media
Once you have created your content, don’t sit back waiting for Google, Bing, or Duckduckgo to rank your content. It may not happen, particularly if you have a brand new website. You also need to do some self promotion too. Posting your content on social media is one way of doing this.
Posting your content on social media has a couple of benefits – it gives you a backlink from a highly ranked site, and it shows your posts to your friends/followers on those platforms. Backlinks are a major ranking factor so getting your backlinks on social media sites can help with your SEO – pushing your ranking potential further up the algorithm.
The number of people you add to your social media platforms, and how you interact with them also has a play in how many will see your posts. Get into a habit of posting your content regularly and you should see an uptick in your website traffic over time from this strategy alone.
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #4 – Automate Social Media Posting
You can even automate posting to social media with post syndication software such as revive old posts or postplanner.com. See also the best free blog plugins for WordPress for some other useful plugins.
An automated social media tool lets you focus on creating content. Once you have set up your tool, you can simply post as normal and the tool will automatically post to your social media accounts. There’s many free plugins which help you with this and a variety of options with an “upgrade” which gives more functionality.
Some social platforms won’t allow you to post to your main page through automation, such as Facebook. However, you can automate posting to your facebook business pages which will allow you to get more views without a lot of effort.
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #5 – Use A Social Media Share Plugin
Social media share plugins allow your visitors to easily share your content via their social media profiles. If you don’t have them, they aren’t going to share, or at least you’re making it much more tricky for them to do so. A plugin can give you this functionality and it only takes a few minutes to plug it into a WordPress site.
There’s several such plugins simply head to your plugin dashboard and search for “social media share”. You’ll see a range of plugins which fit the bill.
This is one of the simplest ways to get more free traffic so it make no sense not to do it! If you don’t want the icons getting in the way of your posts, you can even place them more subtly if you prefer!
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #6 – Quora
Quora.com is a question and answer website which you can use for free traffic to your content. Create content first which you can use on the site (see top of this article). Quora has some rules which you need to be aware of before you do this. If you repeatedly post the same content on its site, they will likely collapse/delete your answers. But if you answer questions relating to your topic fully, you can also post links to content which help answer questions more fully.
Quora is a great source for free traffic if you make a habit out of this practice. You’ll need a lot of content to do this and you’ll need to answer a lot of questions just to get a little bit of traffic. However, you can get a lot of traction with this method over time. Make sure you answer questions in as much detail as possible, and provide value in your answers on the site itself. Don’t just spam your links because you’ll get banned!
As your content grows, people will share your answers too, if you are providing good information. See also traffic generation with Quora.
10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #7 – Blog Commenting
Blog commenting is another way you can get direct traffic from other websites in your niche. You can also build your SEO (search engine optimisation) with this strategy so it has a double benefit. Start with a simple search on Google for: “your niche + dofollow blogs,”, “your keyword + dofollow blogs,” or “your niche + commentluv blogs”.
Commentluv is a plugin which is used in conjunction with blog commenting. It’s a good signal that a blog allows others to comment on their blogs and leave a link to a page or their website, or both.
Not all bloggers and websites allow blog commenting and it does tend to require some upkeep to filter out the spammy ones. But it’s worth finding those which allow you to leave comments because you can attract some direct traffic and increase your SEO score using this tactic if you do enough of it.
#8 Guest Posting
Guest posting has long been cited as one of the top ways of generating more traffic directly from websites in your niche as well as increasing your SEO score by getting legitimate links from high domain websites.
To find websites in your niche who accept guest posting, do a Google search for “guest post” + “your topic” or “guest post submission” + “your topic”.
Not all websites accept guest posts so you might have to do a little digging. Even then, you might have to produce some examples of your writing, or provide a high quality post in order to be accepted.
Once you find a suitable website in your niche, contact the owner and enquire about guest posting for them. As with blog commenting, this can take a bit of work to get going with. Many guest post opportunities also require a high standard of content for submissions.
#9 – Email Marketing
Yes email marketing is a fantastic way to increase your website traffic without paying a thing. You can even get an email autoresponder here for free which gives you up to 500 subscribers before you have to pay!
From a website, you can collect email subscribers by placing a form and offering some kind of giveaway. Even if you don’t have a giveaway, simply offer to join your list to get notified of your updates. Then, send new content to your subscribers.
With paid marketing, you have to pay. With organic traffic, you have to work hard at getting it. But with email marketing you collect subscribers from your website and that puts you in greater control over your traffic. Send subscribers to your new content as you publish it!
An email list also allows you to build longer term relationships with your subscribers. This can be harder to do with other methods where website visitors only see your content for a few minutes/seconds and then leave, usually never to return!
#10 – Push Engage
Pushengage.com is a push notification alert plugin which allows your website visitors to opt in using one click. When they do, they will be alerted to your new content as you publish it.
Push engage can give you a dramatic increase in traffic quite quickly, especially if you already have some traffic. There’s a free option with Push Engage with gives you up to 200 subscribers before you have to pay.
It’s a little like using an email list although it’s easier to subscribe to which means more people will opt in. Check it out here.
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