Once you have a website, driving traffic and visitors would be your next primary concern. Not only because you can’t live without it, but good traffic also allows you to reach your goals — to share ideas with more like-minded people or to increase profits from your online business.
The problem is getting free traffic for your website might not be that easy. It requires you to have good strategies, continuously support the effort, and invest.
Ranking high on the search engines could be the best way to drive traffic, but it is time-consuming. That’s why a few people prefer to invest money to drive traffic faster. Using ads for promotion or working with social media influencers lets you get instant results, but you need to have a reasonable budget to do that.
Now, if you want to flood your site with many visitors yet keep expenses to a minimum, you have to come up with a good strategy. This article will show you the best free traffic sources you can use for your website.
How Important Is Traffic for Your Website?
Traffic is the heartbeat of your website, meaning that if there are no visitors, it might be considered as dead.
If you are a business owner, the more traffic you have, the higher chance there is to turn visitors into customers. But, keep in mind that traffic should be high-quality.
That being said, your website’s visitors should be the ones who need your product. For example, if you sell Apple mobile phones on your online store, you should not expect anyone who wants to buy fruit. Otherwise, you will get a higher bounce rate that will rank you lower on the search engine result pages (SERP).
The same thing applies if you’re running a personal blog. Unless your website is dedicated only for personal use, the traffic is important. As a blogger, you can have great opportunities to monetize your blog if you have good traffic.
Best 4 Free Traffic Sources
Basically, there are two types of traffic, paid and unpaid.
Paid traffic is traffic that comes to your website if you spend money to get it. This includes ads and PPC (Pay per Click). In fact, PPC, Facebook ads, and other premium ads are powerful ways to bring in visitors to your website.
The negatives of using paid traffic include the costs required usually for short term gain as most ads are thematic.
On the other hand, unpaid traffic would cost you a minimum investment — as you still need to fund campaigns — but they will serve you for a longer period.
Before moving on to the list, please note that consistency is the key to all of the free traffic sources.
1. Blog and SEO
A blog is a type of website that focuses on articles that are presented in reverse chronological order.
While a blog might serve a different function from a common website and often stand on their own, you can integrate it to your existing website for it to help your website get noticed by search engines.
Search engines have certain ways of ranking websites known as algorithms, like Google Hummingbird. By it, websites are encouraged to have regularly updated content releases.
As a website tends to provide static information like an About us or a pricing page, a blog can accommodate the mentioned requirement as it is commonly updated on a regular basis.
However, updating blog posts can’t automatically rank you high in the search engine result pages. You need to make the content SEO optimized. With SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you can apply effective methods to achieve that goal.
Here are the keys to optimize your blog:
- The right keywords. It is important to know what topics people are interested in when dealing with your niche.
- Good structure. You should pay attention to the use of headings on your content.
- Optimized images. Not only do you have to use appealing images, but you also need to add Alt texts and properly format file names.
- Subscribers. Make sure you provide a subscription button for better engagement with your visitors in the future, as engagement statistics impact SEO.
- Plugins or Extensions. If you use WordPress, there are plugins to help you optimize your blog like Yoast. As for Joomla, you can use EFSEO.
With these key points in mind, you can help your blog perform better and attract visitors to your website. Also, providing good content using your blog will give value to your customers and build stronger engagement and branding.
2. Social Media
Social media accounts are a great way of driving free traffic to your site since it’s not mandatory to invest in ad campaigns. Communities tend to form around good and engaging content.
As you might know there are more than 2.7 million people using social media for more than 2 hours a day, the potential of using these platforms for promotion are massive. In fact, 71% of consumers will recommend the brand to their friends if they think the brand is good.
Here are three social media platforms that you can use for such efforts:
This is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. In the western market 68% of Americans use it daily. As an all-in-one platform, Facebook is suitable for an individual or a business (via Facebook Business Page). With huge demographics, using Facebook to increase brand awareness and generate leads is definitely worth your attention.
Once known only as a social photo sharing platform, Instagram turns out to be an effective tool for marketing. In fact, 72% of Instagram users buy products after seeing it on the app. Also, Instagram business claims to have more than 25 million business profiles.
That means you should not miss the boat by skipping this platform for your marketing campaign and see how Beats uses it to promote their products.
Unlike the two previous platforms, Twitter is more lightweight and perfect for simple syndication. On Twitter, you may have direct access to high profile people like company CEOs or official brand account. With this uniqueness, not only people can reach you easily, but you can be closer to your audience to maintain trust and build brand awareness.
One of the companies that uses Twitter well is Microsoft with many official accounts like Xbox, or Microsoft Office which is ideal for a syndication strategy.
3. Quora
Quora is a popular website for sharing knowledge. Even Barrack Obama was once an active Quora user.
While anyone may give their answers, this platform is great for those who want to show their expertise. Using Quora, you can gain trust by providing high-quality answers, lead people to visit your website.
To do that, you just need to optimize your profile, find the questions related to your niche, provide your best answers and that’s it.
4. Email Marketing
If you think that email marketing is no longer effective, think again. It is a great way to reach prospects on the deeper level of the marketing funnel.
Everyone on your email list should be a person that has shown interest in your products before. So, you can build engagement with them using newsletters, product pitches or surveys once in a while.
Basically, email marketing would require you to set the goals, build the email lists, determine the type of campaign you want to run, perform the campaign and monitor the result. As this might occur repeatedly, it would be cumbersome to do it manually. So, you can use tools like G-Suite, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign to make the process much easier.
To make it work effectively, you should ensure that you do the right things throughout the process. Here are the tips:
- Mind your customers’ journey — awareness, evaluation, or conversion.
- Always share high-quality content.
- Personalize each email.
- Do not send letters blindly – avoid spamming.
- Think mobile first.
Conclusion
Having good traffic for your website is important so you need to make efforts to realize it.
While you can allocate a great sum of money to drive traffic from ads, free traffic is more preferable. In this article, I covered the four best free traffic sources you can use:
- Blog and SEO
- Social Media
- Quora
- Email Marketing
If you implement the proper strategy, it won’t be long until your website is flooded with tons of traffic!
Leave a Reply