7 FREE Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you’ve caught yourself pulling your hair out at the ends trying to drive more website traffic – you’re probably doing it wrong.

As every marketer understands by now, relevant website traffic is the ‘lifeblood’ of online businesses. The presence of strong tools (or lack thereof) that drives traffic to your site can make or break your brand!

So how exactly is your website suffering?

The simple answer is – you’re focusing on the wrong areas.

You want to focus on the Pareto principle, where 80% of results are driven from 20% of your efforts put in. I know it’s easy to get sidetracked, especially if you’re not intimately familiar with the intrinsic world of digital marketing and content curation. Not monitoring analytics, using outdated tools and failing to keep up trends are one of the major reasons why brands get left behind!

Here’s what you need: – a rock-solid marketing layout that works for your niche and business. Once that’s established, you’re already on your way to answering – how to make money online fast by monetizing your website?

It’s the same system and ideas that have worked for tens of thousands of marketers to grow their following. Although there are various paid tools out there, this post focuses on 7 ways that have been tried to drive FREE traffic to your website.

Whether or not you’re a professional interested in switching things up or just starting an online business; it wouldn’t hurt to keep these tools in mind.

1. Creating a Better Content Marketing Strategy

Is content king?

Even though it has been said time and time again, the answer is: absolutely!

Professional bloggers understand that content isn’t just a hopeful shot in the dark. Successful copy translates to more conversions, clicks, and results that you can see.

Many businesses fall through for the sole reason that they don’t have a concise and solid content marketing plan. Only 7% of businesses without a documented content plan survive; in comparison with the 60% that thrive with one.

So how do you come up with the best? Good content is regularly divided between these pillars:

• Blogs

Establish dominance through frequent blogging. This can be divided into long-form contents (articles and listicles) or done through shorter contents (reviews, tutorials, and guides).

If you don’t have the resources or time to invest in writing blogs yourself, outsource the help to quality professional freelancers through sites like Fiverr!  

• eBooks

eBooks are a fantastic way of delivering real-time value for your consumers. Having a decent follower base might be necessary here, as people need to know you’re legit at what you do. It’s also great if you’re just figuring out how to build customer trust.

If you’re ready to come up with an eBook of your own, here’s one of the best examples to follow.

• Videos and Infographics

Catering to your consumers visual and audible sides will stand to improve your content strategies by a mile. Companies like Viddyoze, Piktochart, and Venngage are slaying the visual industry at this point, so you’re going to want to hop on the bandwagon sometime soon too.  

2. Guest Posting

It might be a little traditional, but guest posting certainly isn’t dead. Publishing a guest post on already established sites can immediately drive website traffic for you and put your brand on the map. It also helps you drive high-quality backlinks for your website. 

You can delve into the world of guest posting almost immediately. Identify influential websites in your niche and reach out, but keep your content relevant and updated!

No platform is going to entertain the thought of shameless self-promotion. Always offer extreme value to readers – and that will translate back to traffic for your website.

3. Using SEO Tools and Backlinks

If you’ve been keeping up with our post here to effortlessly generate large amounts of traffic, you’d recognize that SEO is a crucial part of growing your website. Optimizing your content for search engines isn’t just an option anymore; it’s necessary!

Improving your SEO tactics doesn’t just revolve around writing more content, but rather investing time and energy into making your text a power-packed promotion in itself.

Start by conducting keyword researches into your niche. What is your target audience searching for the most? What keywords are the easiest to rank for? What keyword densities should you incorporate to boost those ranking?

A great way for all these aspects and more to be measured is through LongTailPro – an essential SEO tool for keyword research.

Once that’s done, you want to create compelling headlines to grab your readers attention. Here’s a free tool that helps with this – Co-schedule’s Headline Analyzer.

The quality of your backlinks is also something you need to think about. If you’re not familiar with backlinks yet, these are links that link back from another website to yours. It has major potential to drive organic traffic to your website. Google picks up on these backlinks and is one of the key factors to establish your authority, which would increase trust in your website –ranking you further up on the search engine!

You can study and dive deep into the power of SEO and a whole lot more through this affordable eBook which we use as well.

4. Investing in Digital PR

Digital PR is one of the efforts carried out by brands to increase the visibility of their online presence by building partnerships with professionals, and other companies in the industry. It provides huge benefits to your company as it helps with boosting traffic, improving your SEO, as well as establishing authority and trust among other brands and your customers.

There are many ways you can implement digital PR into your company. Partner up with experts in companies that cover digital marketing, SEO, content marketing, and others that suit your current needs. This makes “co-opetition” a thing where business can become more competitive by cooperating and achieve an overall better result for both parties.

Another powerful way to conduct an ongoing PR campaign is to sign up for a service like HARO (Help A Reporter Out). It’s also a very powerful way to develop and build editorial backlinks that strongly helps with the authority of your website.

With the current rise of digital influencers, companies are seen to be moving from A Class celebrities to smaller or lesser-known figures that can generate good and authentic engagement, while having to spend way less. Using digital influencers also helps you to scale your reach depending on your budget and suited for companies of any size.

5. Social Media Automation

We all understand why social media marketing is important.

While it’s a great way how to measure customer loyalty, how much time do you really have to screen through each of our posts to try and measure engagement? Not to mention comparing each one to the other and cracking your head over the what, why, when and how.

Online tools like Iconosquare (Analytics), Buffer (Social Scheduling), Social Warfare (Social Sharing) take it upon themselves to automate the entire process for you.

Not only will you have access to first hand and comprehensive analytics, but you’ll also be allowed to schedule posts, monitor your competitors and tons of other things.

6. Joining Community-based Marketing

Besides the obvious necessity of Facebook and Instagram, these are two social media sites you need to get on ASAP:

• Pinterest

This visual-based platform has become an essential part of niche marketing and driving traffic to your website.

Pinterest marketing has evolved way further than just DIY craft tutorials and wedding inspiration. It is used by millions of marketers and is an integral part of many businesses.

Put your focus on pinning and repinning pins that are related to your market. Having large, vibrantly colored pins will help you with gaining more attention as well as repins. Sites such as Canva comes with ready-made Pinterest templates to help you create quality pins without the need for Photoshop or other software.

Similar to other SEO methods, using the right keywords for your board and pins helps with getting the right traffic and to rank in Pinterest search.

If you need a head start, have a look at this A-Z guide eBook on Pinterest for business.

• LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become much more than just a platform to help you find your next job. This is, in fact, the world’s largest professional networking platform.

If you’re not seeing much traffic to your website – you need to start posting content on LinkedIn right this instant.

To put it simply, LinkedIn is for business, and Facebook is for everything else. While both platforms presents opportunities to reach your audience, LinkedIn is a more business-focused social channel, and as a result of that, you’re more likely to gain more traction for business or industry related content. If your content is purposeful and packs value, you can definitely stand out on much easier on LinkedIn.

Its higher engagement rate and maturity of the users make LinkedIn one of the best platforms to be on as a business.

7. Podcasting

Podcasting is a great way to invite guest speakers, conduct how-tos, review case studies and so much more. Podcasts strengthen the grasp of your niche –and is pretty easy to record + edit through a podcast hosting platform like Anchor. Podcasting is a fantastic way to connect with industry leaders as well – so it also can be viewed as a networking tool.

If you’re looking at new ways to bring traffic to your site, podcasts are something that you should consider. The best free podcast hosting sites include companies like Buzzsprout and Transistor –with hundreds more that are ready to serve all your audible needs. Alternatively, you can also think about turning your already existing blogs into an audio form to be uploaded as podcasts!

---

Wrapping Up

That about wraps it up! Although there definitely should be hard work from your end, gaining website traffic shouldn’t be something that garners stress and confusion.

To recap this post, here are the best ways to improve, and gain free traffic for your website:

• Creating a solid content marketing layout that covers all aspects of your niche
• Participating as a guest blogger and reaching out to industry professionals
• Investing in SEO by writing blogs, building backlinks, etc.
• A good digital PR relationship with affiliates and partners alike
• Automating social media management with various marketing and analytics tools
• Joining community-based platforms to grow your network and connect with similar professionals/bloggers
• Podcasting + turning your blog pieces into audio forms that lead back to your website

Following all of these methods to a tee will significantly boost your chances of getting exposure for your website. So if you haven’t already, now is the time to get started!