You can generate website traffic free using a number of strategies. One of the best ways to generate free traffic is through content creation. By crafting content which targets specific keywords, you can even rank on the top of Google for your certain keyword phrases. If you manage this, it can give you free traffic not only from Google, but the other search engines (Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo etc.).
But you can’t rank for any term. You have to be selective because there’s a lot of competition for the most searched for keyword phrases. More on this later.
Another simple strategy to get free traffic is to build a niche website. Niche websites are built around specific keywords to give them an advantage in the SERPS (search engine results pages). This site, for example, has been built around the terms affiliate marketing mentors. So some of my traffic comes from this keyword search on Google.
There’s other tactics which bloggers use to get more traffic to their website too. You can build an email list, use push notifications and various plugins on your site to build a larger audience. You can build backlinks to your content and promote it yourself throughout your social media presence. All of these strategies can help your SEO too, which can give your site a boost in the eyes of Google to help it move up the rankings for various keywords.
Generate Website Traffic Free – The Niche Website
A niche website is built specifically around a keyword of your choice. By using a keyword planner, you can see which terms are used when looking for your particular niche. By finding and targeting longer tail keywords with less competition on the SERPS, you can rank a website on or near the top. I used Google’s keyword planner to identify the main keyword to build this site around (affiliate marketing mentors).
You can do this is any niche. Just type your main seed keyword into the planner and it will give you hundreds of keywords which are already being searched for on Google. Identify one which gives you some traffic which you think has low competition. You can see the competition on Google with a basic search. You’ll see a number at the top of the page like this:
This number should give you an idea of the relative competitiveness of your keyword. When you find a good keyword which gets traffic, but which isn’t very competitive, you have a good fit for a niche website. Build your site around your chosen domain name which has your keyword in it.
This tactic still works and can give you an advantage when it comes to ranking a website.
Generate Website Traffic Free – Finding Long Tail Keywords For Blog Posts
The next step is to create some awesome content for your website. If you already have a website, this tactic can work well. It’s basically the same idea as I just shared. You find longer tail keywords with low competition. Use your main keyword again in the keyword planner, and choose other (long tail) keyword ideas which come up. Write lengthy articles using your chosen keywords as article titles.
I use an SEO plugin when I write my articles to help me write search engine friendly content. This gives you more chance of your content doing well on the SERPS – search engine results pages. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of my favourite plugins.
By using this tactic for all your blog posts, you will be able to get some of them ranking on the search engines and this will give you some free traffic. This does take some time and dedication and those keywords which have the least competition typically have less traffic, so it’s a long term plan. But by creating a lot of content on your site, you’ll start to see your SEO score improve and your site should move up the rankings.
Generate Website Traffic Free – Content Promotion
After publishing a great piece of content it can be easy to rest on your laurels and sit back waiting for traffic. But you shouldn’t expect traffic to come from your posts because Google might not rank you for them. If it does, think of this as a bonus, but don’t expect it! So to get people to your blog posts, you’ll need to do some work in promoting it.
There’s a few free plugins which work wonders here and can save you heaps of time:
- Revive Old Posts – lets you automatically syndicate your blog posts throughout your social media presence
- Push Engage – is a push plugin which lets you notify subscribers of your new posts automatically
- Social media share plugins – let your visitors share your content on their social media feeds
- Postplanner.com – similar plugin to Revive Old Posts and lets you automate sharing of your content
You can also promote your blog posts manually using sites such as Quora.com. Quora.com lets you post answers to questions and you can leave links in your answers too. Link back to your relevant content on your blog. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Link Building & Blog Promotion
You can also write guest post articles on certain blogs which allow you to link back to your site. The more links you build back to your site the better for your SEO, providing they are from good quality and authority websites in your niche.
Quora links are no-follow which means they don’t count towards your Google SEO score. However the links themselves can bring you a certain amount of free traffic. You can also leave comments on other people’s blogs to link back to your site.
Links are a major signal to Google about the quality of your site. A good link profile should show that people are naturally linking to your content over time. But you can build links yourself using blog commenting, guest post writing and through using question and answer forums such as Quora.com.
Email Marketing
If you’re wanting free traffic you should definitely get an email autoresponder and start collecting emails from your site when people visit it. (You can get an email service provider here for free).
Email marketing puts you in control of your traffic. Since winning traffic through content creation takes a lot of work, and paying for traffic is expensive, it serves you well to get the most out of your traffic.
To do this, you can collect subscribers from your website by offering some kind of giveaway on your blog. I offer a free video series if you sign up to my email list, plus I also use some ebooks on this website as giveaways.
Ideally your giveaway should align with your product/service and be a good match for the interests of your visitors. Once you start building an email list, you can send your subscribers back to content on your website. By offering a useful service through email marketing, you can build up a base of loyal fans who are interested in your content.
Summary
I’ve always been passionate about generating website traffic for free! It can take some time and dedication to do but it’s incredibly rewarding when it starts trickling in. Once you hit upon a strategy which works for you, you can simply keep doing it again and again!
Free traffic can be tough, especially in a competitive niche, so don’t give up if you don’t get immediate results. In the niche of affiliate marketing it has been a long road to generate even a little stream of traffic through blogging. But once you have a few trickles of traffic from a certain strategy, you can rinse and repeat it. Soon enough you’ll have streams and then rivers!
Did I miss anything? Write in the comments if so.
I didn’t mention that YouTube and TikTok are great ways to generate traffic too. You can upload videos tag them with your keywords and send traffic back to your blog. It’s also a good idea to stick with a certain strategy for some time. I stuck at Quora for a while, posting answers and linking back to my websites. Even now years later I still get traffic from work I did ages ago on Quora.com Although many of my answers were collapsed (Quora can be strict), many of them still give me another trickle of traffic.
Social media can be a great source of traffic too. Checkout my post on unpaid social media marketing.