After spending time and effort into building a blog, adding content, and promoting it everywhere, most people get stuck trying to get traffic to their website. In this article, you will learn how to get traffic to your website free of cost.
After spending years trying to experiment with various methods, we have built a list of techniques that have worked for us over the years to increase web traffic to our blog. Some of these strategies are so good that they start to drive instant traffic to our blog.
Understand that every blog/website is different with different niches and caters to a different type of audience. There is no silver bullet to get traffic to your website fast, but the following techniques can be modified according to your situation.
Table of Contents
15+ Proven Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website Free
Optimize On-Page SEO
Every other day, we would hear about a new trend in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The reason is that search engines such as Google keep learning new methods to serve the best content to their users.
Without a doubt, SEO is one of the best free ways to drive traffic to your website. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to optimize your website for SEO to drive organic traffic to your blog. If you aren’t optimizing your site and your content for SEO, you are doing yourself a disservice.
Among the numerous things that you can do to make your site SEO-Friendly, adding targeted keywords in your content is the most important factor. Only when your content has the right keywords, search engines would be able to dissect the meaning of the content and rank them accordingly.
To make use of keywords, add them to your content in headings, lists, or paragraphs. Also, make sure that you optimize your meta description and title tags that are visible in search results. These tags are super important to increase your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and entice the audience.
Once your website becomes SEO optimized, Google would promote your website and you would enjoy lots of free website traffic. Understand that SEO isn’t a one-time process, it’s an ongoing process and because of this, you would keep generating traffic even after months or years.
Recommended on-page SEO techniques for Higher Rankings
- Technical SEO (HTTPS, Website or Page loading speed, Mobile-friendliness)
- Improve User Experience
- Optimize Your Content for Voice Search
- Optimize page titles and meta descriptions of your Newly published articles
- E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
- URL optimization
- Internal links
- Image Optimization
- Add Schema
Don’t be content with content frequency
It is no secret – Blogs that post regularly know how to increase web traffic fast. The logic to drive traffic to your blog is simple – The more you post, the more audience you target, the more keywords your target, and the more organic traffic you generate.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of people posting about the same thing as you every single day. Do you think that posting just once every week would increase your likelihood of getting your content noticed? Absolutely not! To get traffic to your website free, you need to post good quality content consistently.
Posting content regularly doesn’t mean that one should focus on just posting content randomly that lacks depth and value. After all, visitors come to your website to get some value out of their time. So, make their time worth visiting by having content that adds value to the readers and you will be getting free website traffic for a long time.
Build your Content Chain
You should ALWAYS interlink all of the content on your website so that once someone visits your site, they get tons of knowledge and information from your website easily. This is an easy way to promote your blog posts to increase organic traffic.
Isn’t the point of getting traffic to your website to keep the visitor engaged and make them come back for more? Unless someone can find content to consume on your blog, why would someone want to visit again?
Understand that the longer someone spends on your blog/website, the higher are your chances of getting them to pay for your product(s)/service(s). Not only that, the longer someone stays on your site, the more likely it is that they would come back or even share your content.
Linking related content together isn’t just good for SEO, but is also helpful in providing a great user experience. Also, linking your content together helps establish your brand and domain authority. If you want to understand how to drive traffic to your website, you should focus on building your content chain to increase audience retention.
It’s all in the Head
Once you start a blog, one thing that you learn in the traffic generation journey is that having great headlines matters – A LOT! Think of the last link that you clicked or the last story that you read on social media or your phone. Weren’t you intrigued by the headline before you decided to read it?
Having catchy headings that draw the readers’ attention is crucial to drive traffic to your blog. If the headings of your articles aren’t eye-catching, users won’t even click on your link. So, no matter how good your content is, if your headings don’t engage your audience, you can forget about getting any organic traffic at all.
Skimmers vs Readers
As a content creator, you should try to create content not just for the readers, but for the skimmers. Most people that visit your site won’t even read the entire content. They would usually just read the heading, first few lines, and a few last lines. This is sufficient for them to get the gist of the content, so why is waste time reading things that don’t matter, isn’t it?
Creating your content for skimmers is one of the great blog promotion strategies because you can use it to control the flow of your content. Skimmers like reading:
- Small paragraphs
- Lists
- FAQs
- Summaries
So, always try to summarize your content and add lists wherever possible. This will make your content easy to share and consume not only for skimmers but also for your regular readers.
Stay Fresh
Posting good quality content regularly is a great way to increase web traffic fast. But it’s hard to come up with new content ideas and new content on a regular basis. So, you can make use of the content already available on your blog to get traffic to your website.
Some of the content that is present on your blog might have been outdated by now. Search engines would probably have de-indexed those pages as they no longer serve relevant content.
So, take out some time to update the content on your website to get search engines to crawl your site and help you attract a fresh audience.
Create Courses
Post-COVID lockdowns, everyone is turning towards the Internet to learn everything starting from school knowledge, to personality building, to mental health, to almost any skill.
The no. of courses available online has gone through the roof and is growing exponentially. During such times, having a course that explains a certain concept is an assured way to get a lot of attention from the audience. Leverage this opportunity to create a simple course that anyone can follow in an hour or so and start implementing it.
This will not only help you promote your blog posts, but will also hook your existing audience to keep visiting your website for more courses and new content. You don’t necessarily have to charge for your course as your audience might not want to pay you for simple courses, so you can offer it for free. Talking about free stuff …
Freeeeeeeebies
Don’t you love it when you get something for free? Who doesn’t love free stuff? We sure love free traffic on our website ;-)!
If you want to know a surefire way how to drive traffic to your website – It’s Free stuff! Holding giveaways/content/events on your website will be one of the best free ways to get more traffic to your website. You can incentivize people to share your content, or ask their friends/families to participate in the contest to increase their chances of winning.
Freebies can be anything from Free Ebooks to free subscriptions, to physical gifts. What matters is that your target audience should value the freebie that you offer.
Learn from your Analytics
Google Analytics or any other blogging tools that you use on your website are often the most overlooked tools when it comes to increasing web traffic on your website. Analytical tools or WordPress plugins for a blog tell a lot about the source of your traffic and hint at the type of content that your audience enjoys.
From your Analytics, you can understand the traffic sources that generate the most amount of free and organic traffic. You can then optimize your content and your campaigns to leverage those traffic channels to generate even more traffic.
Having a few websites that generate a lot of traffic is much better than having lots of sources generating small amounts of traffic. Remember that 80% of your traffic would come from 20% of sources and those are your most important traffic sources. So, pay attention to those.
Snipe your competitors
You aren’t the only one in the world that is creating a particular niche content and targeting a particular audience. There are tons of other bloggers/businesses that have been creating content for the same audience.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and learning the hard way to find all the traffic sources, you can learn from your competitors. In fact, they are your single greatest source of learning how to get traffic to your website. By the time that you would experiment and understand your audience on your own, you would have learned 10 times more from simply researching your competitors.
You can use various tools and techniques to understand your competitor’s traffic sources, content types, website design, audience type, and so much more. Use those strategies in your campaign so that you add new traffic sources to your website.
Become a Guest Blogger
One of the best ways to drive instant traffic to your blog is to take advantage of the audience that someone else has built. Other bloggers and influencers in your niche have been working hard to promote their blog posts and build organic traffic just like you. You can then take advantage of the audience that they have built to drive traffic to your blog.
Various overlapping domains intersect and share common threads with each other. For example, Digital Marketing and Lead Generation, or Graphic Designing and Fashion design have lots of overlapping topics. You can make use of such topics to create interesting content and share them on someone else’s website or blog.
You can offer to create content for their website in exchange for a link to your website. It’s a win-win situation for all involved parties.
You get some free website traffic and they get free content from you.
This is known as Guest Blogging where you blog on someone else’s blog as a guest.
Use Google search queries to find blogs accepting Free guest Post contributors:
- your keyword + inurl:write-for-us
- your keyword + guest-posts
- your keyword + inurl:guest-post-guidelines
- your keyword + become a contributor
- your keyword + bloggers wanted
- your keyword + submit an article
- your keyword + want to write for
- your keyword + contribute
- your keyword + become an author
- your keyword + guest post by
- your keyword + now accepting guest posts
Email Marketing
Email Marketing may seem dead, but that cannot be further away from the truth. In fact, Email is one of the most efficient ways to communicate with your audience. The reason is that your content easily gets buried among all the noise on search engines and on social media.
Emails on the other hand remain in a user’s inbox for a very long time and need to be deleted manually. This ensures that the receiver would at least have seen the title of your email and if they found it interesting, would even click on the link to your website.
After understanding this, you should start thinking about how to get traffic to your website using Email Marketing. Start building your email list from your visitors by offering them freebies, or your newsletter subscription. Then, you can use various blogging tools combined with Email Marketing tools to drive traffic to your blog whenever you wish.
Quora Answers
Quora is one of those platforms that specialize in Question and answer format type content. It is a website where users ask specific questions and get answers from experts in a specific niche. This is why people trust the answers on Quora and usually go to Quora to find solutions to problems that they want to be solved.
Any time you create a post, try to answer questions on Quora that solve the specific problem/question that someone has.
Just give a brief answer that is sufficient enough to answer their query and then link to your post. This will help you to drive traffic to your blog over a long period of time.
Getting Social
When it comes to Virality, there is no platform better than social media channels. Social media websites enjoy a ton of instant website traffic on a daily basis and almost everyone you know is on some social media or the other.
Social media is a part of an everyday diet for people where they get a dose of everything that is happening around their world. People share content that they like with their friends and families almost every day. Hence, various social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are great sources of free website traffic.
You Can Join, Different Facebook Groups like “The Blogger’s Team or BloggingCosmos” Where they run weekly Blog Promotion threads, For Participation, Just comment on your recent blog posts and share other bloggers’ posts and they do the same for you.
If you are looking for such facebook groups, My Friend “Yasar Arafath” curated a great one on this. Check out this post,
Depending on the type of content that you post and the social media platform where your audience is found the most, you should build a community on those platforms.
Create content that is crisp and shareable (Preferable Images and Videos). Some day or the other, if your content is exceptional, you will find yourself becoming famous overnight and enjoying hordes of traffic on your blog.
You can also use Blog Aggregator i.e BLOGORAMA, BLogengage, indiblogger, BlogAdda, Feedly, and Content Curation Websites i.e Pocket, Flipboard, Paper. li, GrowthHacker Community and Tribber to promote Your new blog posts and get traffic to your Website.
Build Backlinks
Having links to your website from other authorities and relevant websites is a strong indicator of a good website. Getting quality backlinks from industry influencers and complementary businesses would expose your website/blog to a huge audience.
Not only will you get tons of traffic, but the traffic would be highly qualified and interested in the content that you share on your website.
Having good links is great for SEO as well because quality backlinks are a ranking factor for Search Engine Optimization.
So, you promote your website by building backlinks and improving your website SEO as well. That’s what I call killing two birds with one stone!
Here are the Best Ways to Build Backlinks to Your Blog for Free
- Get interviewed
- Broken-link building
- Backlinks through infographics, Pins
- Write testimonials
- Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
- Blog Comments
- Forum and Profile links
Interview Industry leaders
It might seem that the top experts in the industry would only want to talk to other important people. But, you would be surprised to know that experts love talking to anyone and everyone that would ask them questions on the topic of their expertise.
In fact, the more interviews that the experts do, the better it is for their image. You can make use of this knowledge to get an interview with an expert in your industry to boost your website traffic.
Just draft an email talking about an interview, adding the questions that you would want their input on, and the audience that you cater to.
You will most likely get a positive response from them.
After you have the interview with the expert, share it on all the platforms that you have including your website, social media, YouTube, and others. The influencer/expert would also share this interview with their audience thus increasing your credibility as well.
Of course, this would require lots of effort for finding the right influencer, creating an interview pattern, editing videos, creating cover images, etc. However, it is worth the effort if you want to increase web traffic fast.
Start Engaging
Just like a relationship involves interaction between two people and not just one, engagement on your blog requires two parties – Your audience and YOU. People would only like or comment on your content either when they really love your content, or when you interact with them. It’s the famous phenomenon of “You scratch my back, I scratch yours”.
Start engaging with blogs and social media handles of other people. Start taking interest in other people’s content so that they start taking interest in your content. If you never comment or like some else’s posts, how can you expect someone else to do the same for you?
So, when you go to other websites and forums, be sure to add a comment so that people notice you. This exercise will also help you build backlinks as you can share relevant content links in the comments as well. Also, start interacting with people on social media so that they share your content and engage with you too.
Summary
These are some blog promotion strategies to get traffic to your website free of cost. You can use these strategies in your daily routine to keep attracting more free traffic to your website and build your website authority.
If you have any strategy that worked for you and want to share it with others, feel free to drop a comment!
How can I get traffic to my website in 2023?
There are tons of ways to get traffic to your website in 2023 and 15+ proven ways to get traffic to your website free of cost are listed in this article as:
Optimize On-Page SEO, Post Content Regularly, Interlink all your content, Copywrite your headings, Write content for skimmers, not readers, Update your content regularly, Create useful courses, Create Freebies/giveaways, Gather information from Analytics, Spy on your competitor, Guest Blog, Use Email Marketing, Give answers on Quor, Leverage Social Media, Build Quality Backlinks, Interview experts from the industry, Engage with other people
How can I get 1000 visitors to my website?
Getting as many as 1,000 visitors on your website is not an easy task. But thankfully, there are many ways to get lots of visitors to your website.
Firstly, focus on your content as content is king! Post regularly, experiment with various content types and share your content in as many places as possible without losing quality.
How do I drive traffic to my affiliate website?
You can drive traffic to your affiliate website by adding links to Quora answers, Guest Blogs, Emails, social media, and other sources of traffic generation.