One of the most common bugbears that marketers often moan about is that they can’t get traffic to their web properties. Building a website alone does not ensure that you’ll get visitors. The hard truth is that you’ll need to go out and drive traffic to your sites.
The good news is that the internet is full of traffic. You just need to know how to tap into it and syphon as much of it as you can to your sites, etc.
There are mainly 2 types of traffic – paid and free. Paid traffic is advertisements such as banner ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, solo ads and so on.
Free traffic methods are what we’ll be looking at in this article. You’ll not need to pay a cent to get free traffic… but do note that while you’ll not need to spend money, you’ll need to spend time.
Since time equals money, in a way, no traffic is free. There is ALWAYS an opportunity cost. Now, let’s look at 7 effective ways of driving free traffic.
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Video marketing
This mainly involves you posting videos on YouTube. While there are many other video-sharing sites, you want to focus MOST of your efforts on YouTube. That’s where the traffic is.
Getting your videos ranked well on YouTube will send hundreds and even thousands of visitors to your sites. You’ll need to add a link to your blog in the video description.
Always offer a ton of value in your videos and keep them engaging. People will want to learn more, and they’ll come looking for you and your sites.
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Blog commenting
Commenting on other people’s blogs can be tricky. You want to appear helpful, but at the same time, you don’t want to look like a spammer. The remedy to this conundrum is to deliver a ton of value in your comments.
When writing a comment, you’ll often be given an option to link to your website. Always link to a page on your site that is relevant to the comment.
This will not only get you visits from curious readers on the other sites, but when your comment is approved, you’ll also get a backlink to your site and this is good for your site’s SEO.
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Social media
Facebook fan pages, Facebook groups, Twitter, Pinterest boards, etc. are all places that allow you to drop links to your web properties. All you need to do is build a following there by posting good content and link back to your sites.
The more content you have on the different platforms, the more visitors you’ll get. It’s the world wide web (WWW)… and you want as wide a web as possible to trap as much traffic as you can.
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Answering questions
There are many popular forums and ‘question and answer’ sites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers. Go ahead and help people out by answering their questions. Once again, the goal is to provide value without appearing spammy. Only target the popular sites.
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Email marketing
Your list is one of the best ways to drive traffic. If you’ve built a sizeable list and have a good relationship with them, you can always send an email with a link to your blog post and many of them will visit your site. Always strive to build as big a list as possible and keep them engaged.
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Guest blogging
Guest blogging requires you to contribute exclusive content to highly popular blogs in your niche. In return, you’ll get a link back to your blog and be able to syphon some of the traffic from the other site and get an SEO boosting backlink.
The catch here is that you’ll need to contact the website owner and ask if they’d be interested in your blog posts.
Always have 3 posts written and send them upon the first contact. This will reduce the back and forth exchange between you and the site owner. Many of them are busy.
If the owners like what they read and they have exclusivity over the content, they might use what you provide and post your content with a link to your blog. In some cases, if your content is impressive, they may use all 3 pieces of content.
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SEO
SEO refers to search engine optimization and it is without a doubt the BEST type of traffic out there. The only problem is that you have very little control over it. You’ll need to do your best to target your keywords correctly and make sure your blog posts are optimized.
This will ensure that the all-knowing eye of Google will look upon kindly on you and rank your site for the keywords that you’re targeting and so on. SEO is a slow and constantly evolving process… but it’s something you should always aim for.
Ranking on the first page of Google for popular keywords will send avalanches of traffic to your sites without you having to pay a cent. It blows all other traffic generation methods out of the water. So, give it the necessary attention it deserves.
That concludes the 7 free traffic generation methods. Give them a try and you’ll be amazed at how effective they are.
There are marketers who make six figures a year just being good at some of the methods. Choose one and go all out with it. Consistency will get you the traffic and the results.
[avatar user=”mike” size=”thumbnail” align=”” link=”file”]Mike Gaudreau is the owner of The Wealthy Boomers, a site devoted to helping seniors make money online. Mike resides in Montreal Canada.[/avatar]
