4 Sources of Free Traffic For My Website

Intro

Without website traffic, I’m here to tell you that your only visitors will be your mother, best mate and a few dodgy people hell bent on finding the domain name you happen to have chosen.

We all know that the only way to run a successful online business is by gaining visitors that take action. Not everyone takes action when visiting your site, which means you need to attract loads of traffic get a small portion of them to make a purchase or sign up to your subscriber list.

Of course this can be done via paid traffic methods, but I’m all for freebies! I can always do with more free traffic for my website to thrive.

So, how do we go about this and which are the best free traffic alternatives?

#1 Organic Content Will Always Win

It’s the most sustainable way of getting free traffic, and always will be. Keep Mr.Google happy, and your targeted audience will continue to be filtered to your blog posts.

Because there are so many website owners attempting to achieve the same results, it takes more than just writing an article and placing a common keyword into the post. This used to be the case, before everyone decided they wanted to try their hand at making money online.

The first step is to use an SEO plugin that will fill all the needs required. In my opinion, the best free WordPress SEO plugin is called All in One SEO. Get your sitemap setup along with various settings, and this will help your rankings in unison with SEO friendly posts.

Placing metadata, keywords and alt tags to your images will also play their part in your free traffic. These will help Google, and other search engines determine where your post will rank. Obviously, if your posts make it to page 1 in the search results, you’ll benefit greatly with more traffic than your competitors.

Organic content will always gain you more free traffic than any other source.

#2 Social Sources to Gain a Following

Just think about it. The amount of social channels that are promoting various services and products has become large to say the least. To get an idea of just how big your reach can get on social media, just look around on public transport.

95% of people have their head in a smartphone, and 60% of those spend most of their time on social media. Without trying to be a sticky-beak, I try to get a glimpse of what people have on their screens. I find it astounding that all these people are not only reading what their friends are doing, but they click on all types of promotions.

I have a totally different mentality to most of these people. I enjoy watching people search for products on social media and various websites, it makes me think that what I’m doing as an affiliate marketer is justified. I look at the potential to make money, whilst they are happy to spend money.

So, which social media platforms are best for free traffic?

Pinterest

Currently in 1018, Pinterest is the most widely used social platform for creating internet sales. This is not surprising, and if you’ve ever used Pinterest you’ll understand why.

Most of us are visual creatures, and therefore we are attracted to images over written text. That’s exactly what Pinterest is all about, capturing a browsers attention with creative imagery. This is where you’re going to get loads of free traffic.

Creating a Pinterest account costs absolutely nothing. It’s the advertising promoter’s that are the ones that keep the funds rolling into the Pinterest coffers. There’s also the option to create a free business account which will show you insight information as to how your Pins are tracking and which Pins perform the best.

If you use Pinterest correctly, your free traffic can snowball into endless amounts of visitors to your blog. As with all social media platforms, constant engagement is critical to gain a following, but you don’t actually require a following for people to see your Pins.

This is what makes Pinterest so great, Pins can go viral just by using the right hashtags.

What also makes this social platform so diversified, is the use of Boards. You can create endless amounts of Boards, individualised for each topic or category. If you’re a marketer that has multiple small niche websites, this is an ideal solution for promoting within the one platform.

Oh, and don’t forget the obvious benefit that inbound links can offer your blog. Some good old Google juice!

Facebook

Although not my favourite social channel for marketing, Facebook does have its place for free traffic. Again, a free account is easy to set up and get a following amongst friends and family. You’ll want to keep your online business affairs separate from your personal relationships, so creating a Facebook Fanpage is the way to go.

This also won’t cost you a thing to get started. Although you may have a hard time gaining followers, it is possible to target your audience geographically in the Fanpage Settings.

Unfortunately, the promotional activities that Facebook have allowed, have also made people sceptical. Scroll through your personal Facebook feed and you’ll notice adverts with ‘sponsored’ attached to it. These are paid adverts which are targeted towards you, as a user.

As far as free traffic goes, you’ll want to get followers so that your promotions appear in their feeds. The great thing about your promotional material once you do have a sizeable following, is that these users have already approved your Fanpage to follow, so they’re interested in what you have to promote.

If you’d prefer to get the ball rolling in terms followers, you could run a Facebook advert to gain ‘Likes’. Spend $30 and get a following of 200 people or more, this could be of huge benefit should those followers share your content. This paid traffic could then pay for itself.

Instagram

Whilst I’m still not totally over Instagram, it’s become the most popular social media channel for sharing photographs and videos from smartphones.

Buffer claims there are over 800 million Instragramers worldwide, with over 500 million of those being active every single day. That just goes to show you the exposure you would expect with this social platform.

What you’ll find as a small business owner, is that you are a brand. If you don’t think this is the case, you need to start thinking differently. This is because brands are searched and followed more on Instagram than any other social platform. So learn these key elements of a brand to make your trademark stand out above all others.

The main thing I find different with Instagram, is that instead of placing your page links into your posting (because this is disallowed), you’ll have to direct your audience back to your profile, where you website link will be available. You can only have the one link though, unless you use a program called linktree. This is a super little program that will allow you to show multiple links, with titles, on your profile splash screen.

#3 Forums For Offering Advice

The next alternative to gaining free traffic, is to be active and engaging on community forums. If you can give answers to peoples problems and issues on a regular basis, they will check your profile to see more about you.

For this reason, you’ll want to place your website URL into your profile. The majority of forum moderators will accept this, and encourage it. This is because they don’t want you sharing your homepage URL in any forum threads. This is known as spamming which is frowned upon.

The same goes for affiliate links. Many years ago, people would plaster their affiliate links within forum threads to gain commissions. Today, this has been cleaned up, and all forums will not accept affiliate links on any thread. The majority will also not accept website links as this is a form of promoting your own interests.

However, by placing your link in the profile part of your account, anyone that is interested in what you have to say can contact you by checking out who you are. This is all free traffic, which can be harnessed via helping communities with your knowledge.

#4 Write Guest Blogs for Others

If you’ve never heard of guest blogging, you may want to consider reading up on it to gain more exposure to your website. Guest blogging has become a very popular way to create a backlink to your website, whilst getting your post in front of a whole new audience.

It basically consists of contacting a blog owner in a similar niche to yourself, and asking if they’d like to incorporate a post of yours, on their website. The chances are that they will say yes, if your blog has been around for a while. You will require a blog that has started to rank in search engines to keep your colaborator content.

If you get accepted, write a quality article and send it to the website owner to upload onto their website. Make sure they link the article back to your blog, as this will create the backlink.

This article will now go live in front of a whole new audience, and they’ll see who wrote the article, with a link to your blog should they like to read more of your work.

You then get the opportunity to share this guest blog on your social media channels.

Guest blogging is another great way to gain free traffic in today’s competitive blogging market. Backlino have a brilliant guide on how guest blogging works, and where you can find sites willing to accept you as a guest blogger.

Wrapping Up

I was going to mention how great is would be if free traffic was so simple to achieve. However, when you think about it, because it takes a bit of hard work to achieve these results, you know you’ve earned it.

This is especially true of organic traffic. Because there are so many people trying to achieve the same result, that being high rankings in Google, we need to work harder at our SEO blogging. And to be honest, we don’t want everyone knowing that this online career is possible! It’ll just get even harder to rank.

The results of this, for those willing to put in the initial hard work, is an endless stream of free traffic, that we can even build on. The more posts you have out there, the more internal and external links in your posts and the more tags inserted, the better chance you’ll have of gaining this free traffic.

If you know of any other free sources of free traffic, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.