10 Best Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website for Free
There are various sources from where you can generate traffic to your website. Paid mediums like Google Adwords, Facebook advertising, banner ads on websites, etc. can help you get instant traffic but they have one major downside – you will continue to get traffic only till the point you keep pumping in money; as soon as you stop the campaign, your traffic will come to a grinding halt. So, for a spontaneous flow of regular traffic, relying on free sources would be your best bet in the long run. In order to help you achieve just that, we are listing below some time-tested, popular sources that would help you drive traffic to your website.
1. SEO
Search engine optimization does not need much explanation; it is the evergreen process that makes websites leverage on search engines and harvest the traffic. SEO is not just about link building but it covers everything from onpage optimization with right keywords and proper meta tags to offpage strategies for your site. Since SERP rankings are not available for purchase, you need to make your way to the top by winning trust of search engines and adding value to the web. Search engine optimization services are easily available to help you get the most from search engines or you can even do it yourself if it is not on a larger scale.
2. Social Media
Social media is a great place to drive traffic to your website and it only needs the right marketing tactics. Unlike search engines, here we are dealing with real people and you need to actually seem worth it to gain traffic and conversions from social media. You have to embed your website with social media subscription and social bookmarking links to squeeze the most out of it. You can also make use of groups within social media websites to promote your website easily. Having a brand page on Facebook and Twitter is a must if you are targeting real people from social media. You can also host events and competitions on social media sites to give your business a boost.
3. Email Subscription
Email subscription is one of the oldest methods of promoting your website and gaining traffic. You can let people subscribe for email updates on your website and mail them with the latest updates which they would be interested in. However, you should make sure that you don’t bug your subscribers with emails very often which can ultimately lead to them in unsubscribing from your mailing list. When used right, email marketing can drive potential traffic to your website and the chances of conversions are higher too. If your website doesn’t have an email subscription form, implement one right now to make use of this potential traffic source.
4. Blog Commenting and Guest Posting
Commenting on popular blogs is a good way to get noticed and generate some traffic. You should follow blogs in your niche and be a regular visitor to be able to leave quality comments that get approved. Do not sound desperate for a link but rather add some value to the post you are commenting on. Guest posting too is a great way to get traffic as well as quality backlinks to your website without much efforts. Again, choose blogs in your niche and that will ensure you get the maximum benefits of guest posting.
5. Infographics and Link Baiting
Link bait is a viral content that people love to share and post on their websites with a link back to you being the creator of it. Creating link bait needs creativity and expertise but once you make it, you can expect traffic and links from other websites flooding. Links are also a factor in SEO and they will help you rank higher in search engines too. The best way of link baiting is to create awesome infographics that people love to use on their blogs. Make sure you make it look attractive enough for the best results.
6. Forum Posting and Participation
Being a member in online forums has a lot of benefits and getting traffic to your website is one among them. All you have to do is join some leading forums related to your website niche and be an active participant there. You can post informative content on the forum to help others out while linking to your website in the signature. If people like your post, they are likely to pay you a visit and thus you get traffic. However, like most of the methods, it is important to make sure you do it in moderation.
7. Video Marketing
People are easily attracted to anything that is visually stimulating and hence, video marketing is one future-proof way of driving traffic to your site. People now want to understand things in the fastest manner possible and videos just do that. Create an awesome video tutorial on a related topic and post it on video sites like YouTube. Video marketing traffic is easy to convert as they trust your website more from the video that they just watched. Make sure you add links to your website and social media handles to convert the viewer into a subscriber. It is better to keep your videos short as people tend to lose interest after 2-3 minutes of watching.
8. PPT Slide Share
There are websites where you can share your PowerPoint presentations and turn them into traffic generating tools for your website. This is a hugely ignored method with lot of potential and you can use it to get some extra traffic without much effort. For the content, you can simply copy paste an article that you have already written into a PowerPoint presentation and it’s ready to be uploaded to a PPT sharing site like slideshare, and start sending traffic your way. You can register with your keyword as username on these sites for better results.
9. Question Answer Sites
Question and answer websites are a goldmine for traffic seekers considering the relevancy of the links you can make there. You can simply find questions related to your website niche on question answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Wiki Answers, etc. and try to answer them. If your website has the answer to the question, you can simply put the link or otherwise answer the question on your own while mentioning your site as the source. This way, your website will be found by people who are actually interested in the niche and moreover, the chances of them becoming your customers are really high. The Pagerank of these question answer sites will be really high and you get the SEO benefit from it too.
10. Article Marketing and PR Releases
Article marketing is a good way to get traffic by writing articles about your business and submitting them to article directories like Ezine Articles and Articles Base. The best part is, you can include as many links in these articles and even sound a bit promotional. That’s a great thing but keep your standards good anyway. Press releases are an easy way to turn the latest news, openings or innovations into high quality links and traffic. When you go by the press release way, make sure it has a newsworthy tone to improve the chances of approval. Embed links to your website with desired keyword in the press release to get a boost in search engines which is ultimately going to improve your traffic. Make sure you submit your press release to more than one site for improved visibility in search engines. Press releases are now read by a wider audience because of the search engines and RSS feeds.
Though all of these are excellent sources of traffic, overplaying on just one can be risky for your site. Instead, diversify your sources as much as possible and that should give you good results. Patience too is equally important since these are for your long term strategy and hence would not yield immediate results like paid advertisements.
