When you start a new website or a blog, you would not aim to invest a lot of money in marketing and advertisement. Instead, you would look to drive free or organic traffic onto your platform. Is it possible to sustain an online business without paying any money for a stellar marketing campaign? Yes, it is.
Most of the websites aim to grow through their organic reach itself. They implement a variety of methods to optimize the amount of free traffic that their websites get. But what are these methods? In this blog, we’ll find out exactly that.
Things to Remember:
Before we get into the details of the best ways to generate free traffic, we need you to acquaint yourself with a few ground rules.
- There are many free traffic sources. But that doesn’t mean that you should implement all of them to generate traffic for your website.
- Despite that, you should know all the possible methods to get free traffic. This will help you improvise according to different situations.
- Some traffic-generating sources will work for your competitor, but not for you. Generating free traffic will also involve a lot of test runs before you find the best method for you.
- You will have to use an analytics tool to measure the free traffic that you are generating via different sources. A stellar idea is to use Google Analytics. Use the data that you obtain to figure out your website’s strong and weak points.
Best Free Traffic Sources in 2021:
Now that we are past the basic rules of generating free traffic, we can go on to discuss the most productive sources to generate it.
1.) Search Engines (SEO):
If you are in the marketing business, you must be knowing all about Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Generating traffic from Search Engines is the primary feeder source for most online businesses. SEO is what helps people get the best out of these search engine searches.
Knowing how to work around SEO is a great advantage for any business as it is the largest source of organic traffic. With its help, you can send your website to the top of search rankings. This, in turn, would mean that your website gets more free visitors, carries out more business, and generates more traffic without paying anything.
But to enjoy these benefits, you will have to put in a considerable amount of effort. Building a solid SEO strategy is something that you will have to do to get optimum results. But the end product is worth it. The biggest advantage of getting free traffic from SEO is that it sends interested customers to your business. Unlike in paid advertisements, the traffic that comes through Search Engines will already be interested in your product.
2.) Local Connections:
This is a side of online marketing that a lot of business owners ignore. Their free traffic suffers because of this. Making use of connections (family, friends, clients, etc.) is a good way to market your product without spending any money. Here’s how you can do it:
- Tell your connections about your business through WhatsApp, E-Mails, etc.
- Ask your connections if they can link your business on their blogs and websites.
- Connect with different communities on your specific niche. You can do so by participating in questions and answers, engaging in forums, and so on.
3.) E-Mail Marketing:
If you check your inbox right now, you will see tons of E-Mails from different websites advertising their products. While you might ignore most of them, there would be a couple that can catch your eye. This is what makes E-Mail marketing such a great option.
You can talk about your business to a list of targeted customers without putting in much of an effort. And your message can reach a large forum of people. There are several online tools and platforms available to shortlist your targeted audience for E-mail marketing. You should check them out and get advertising for free!
4.) Social Media:
This one is an obvious candidate for this blog. How can you talk about generating free traffic without including social media as a feasible source?
Nowadays, there are tons of social media platforms where you can promote your business without spending anything.
It won’t take a lot out of your work time. All you need to do is interact on your social media pages regularly. Linking your websites to these pages can have a positive impact if your social media presence is attractive.
These are the social media platforms where you must create a page to get free audiences:
- Quora
- Tumblr
While most of the businesses are online on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, they forget about other giants like Quora, Reddit, and Tumblr. Make sure you don’t make the same mistakes as these websites have ginormous communities of their own!
5.) Guest Blogging:
Have you ever considered going into guest blogging? It is one of the more effective methods of driving free traffic to your website. Many platforms invite people to post guest blogs for free. You can post attractive blogs there and link your website on the guest blog to generate healthy organic traffic.
This sort of ‘backlink’ on popular websites will mean that some visitors from that website will also visit your business. Guest blogging, therefore, is one of the most accessible and productive sources for generating free audiences.
6.) Video Sites:
Like social media, websites that feature video content have a large amount of audience as well. About 1.3 billion people, for instance, stream content on YouTube, the biggest video platform in the world.
Promoting your business on platforms such as YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vine is a great way to get better organic reach on your website. You can do this by creating your video content, collaborating with other content creators, or by promoting your products through the comment section and other interactive spaces.
7.) Referral Marketing:
This method works well when it comes to generating free traffic, especially for E-Commerce platforms. But to be successful at implantation, you’ll need to put in quite an effort. The only way people will refer others to your website is if they find your content productive and interesting.
There is another way of referral marketing, which is through networking. Establishing good communication with other websites and forming a partnership is a good way to boost your referral marketing campaign. Both you and your partner’s website can refer customers to each other’s businesses.
8.) Free Classified Ads:
There are multiple websites on the internet (like Craigslist, for example) that allow users to post free advertisements to list their products and services.
Many people might see this method as an unconventional source of generating free traffic. But people have been posting classified ads since 2009 and proved to be successful in generating a healthy amount of organic traffic.
There are no risks involved and thus there is no reason for you to not try it.
Conclusion
Without generating free traffic, most of the businesses online would not have been able to survive. You should only treat paid advertisements as the cream of the crop to an already healthy marketing campaign. The primary sources of traffic should be free.
We’ve talked about some of the most effective and accessible sources for generating free audiences. You don’t need to implement all of them for your marketing campaign. Choose the method that works best for the kind of services that you provide. Keep testing and experimenting with different tools and ultimately you’ll find the best plan.
This might seem like a bit of hard work but once you get into it and start seeing positive developments, you won’t look back.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to gain a competitive edge. Contact our team for expert assistance.