A mini guide on
How to Improve Your Website Traffic Without Paying a Dime!
Paid advertising may increase your brand awareness but it is not the only way by which you can get eyeballs on your site.
There are a few ways which done right you don’t even need to pay for ads to promote your sites, we will discuss that here!
But, why do we need to promote our site, won’t google’s free tools do it?
Tools provided by Google and any other sites are good but not one-stop to every solution.
I would have mentioned SEO, and making your site mobile friendly, and other technical things but considering how some site owners hand those things to developers and freelancers… I have focused on ways you can do without major expertise and complications!
Here are a few things you can try to be discovered:
1) Creating Content On Social Media:
Without a doubt, this has to come first given that it is the face of personal media online with a billion users.
With that big of attention, you cannot miss this!
Now like I said you don’t have to pay for a social media team to advertise your business or create content, sites like Canva, Adobe spark, Kapwing offers a wide variety of content creation for free!
Remember not to get sidetracked while using social media as it happens very often!
Now, you don’t have to create social media accounts on every social media site you can find,
You, just need to select and create accounts on 1 or 2 social media platforms where you have your target audience aka people who like your stuff and are willing to know more about it.
Then create content around it on a regular basis, the quantity matters as platforms like IG, Facebook, Twitter have a wide crowd so creating and posting 1–2 times a day will result in more awareness than posting 3 times a week!
The quality of your content may be subjective to your readers but you will only know what works and what doesn’t when your readers see it and respond to it.
This is something that needs to be done regularly for it to work.
Also, it’s best to have a consistent tone of your content to make it more unique and familiar!
2) Working With Other Blogs:
One of the major ways for blogs to establish good relationships and credibility is by helping other blogs.
Like guest posting is best known as writing for other blogs in your niche for free in exchange for getting exposure or getting more audience.
While some people might resist working for free, but this one is certainly worth it.
Blogs require content creations and creating content requires time, effort, and sometimes even money!
So by writing for them you would be doing them a favor and increase your brand awareness with their audience.
All you need to do is find blogs with great authority who produce great content and make a list and start asking!
It is a great win-win for new blogs to ensure great relationships while exchanging values.
3) The $1.80 Strategy:
Ok, I assure you it doesn’t require a buck it is just a representation!
The infamous $1.80 strategy for social media is all about creating “micro-connections” every day that leads to creating a more engaging community for a long time.
“The number of Instagram followers you have means nothing if you can’t build a community of like-minded people who care and engage.” — Gary vee
Building true fans may sound like a lot of work but it is better to have 1000 true fans who buy things from you rather than having a million who don’t!
Here is how you do it:
- Search for a relevant hashtag for example #diving, #shoes, #technology, click on it.
- Then go to the top 9 posts that are shown and after that see which posts have the highest engagement(number of comments, not followers) and then drop your most relevant and genuine comments related to those posts, these are your 0.2 cents.
- Now do the same thing 90 times a day, 0.2 cents * 90= $1.80…get it!
You can apply the same thing on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
You might not get 100 followers a day, but each day having 10–20 followers will help you build a fanbase and therefore getting some exposure to your profile where you have the link to your site.
4) Engaging online:
Content creation is not the only way you can dominate online, there are a couple of simple things that with strategy can reap a lot of benefits for you!
List down the blogs in your niche, the ones with a solid fan base and good engagement,
if you are having trouble finding them, just google: “Top blogs in “your niche” in 2020” hit enter, consume and read their content then scroll through the comments section and either write a relevant comment or answer something their readers have asked.
Make sure that they can find you by leaving your profile link etc.
Do this for 10–20 blogs a week and their readers, as well as blog owners, will start to notice you and see what you have to offer.
Tip: It is better to make this a habit because every once in a while you need to learn things from other blogs so might as well engage with their audience!
5) Using Quora:
Hands down, Quora has a big and different base for over 300 million users who are asking or answering questions related to their niche.
Another thing to know is that you can find your target audience in Quora.
Now Quora is all about engagement as content creation is a bit different unlike other social sites like IG, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
How is Quora useful?
Well, you need to find and genuinely answer questions about things you know regularly.
Answering with the intent of helping others will help build your loyalty among your followers.
Also, avoid the copy/paste of your blog post to Quora answers as Quora will spam you or ban your account forever!
Instead, answer with the intention of helping and have your blog’s link on your profile so if the readers are curious they can see your site for themselves.
One another advantage you might have by using this is that you can directly answer questions from your prospective clients.
Which in turn gives you the opportunity to turn leads into customers and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Also by honestly answering questions regularly and gaining trust from your fans, you can be featured in Quora Digest or emails sent by Quora to people who have subscribed to their newsletter which may feature your answers.
6) Publishing On Medium:
Medium is an online publishing platform for articles also called “Stories”, It has gained a lot of popularity over the years and now it has over 100 million users.
And the best thing is you can re-publish your website articles here!
Which is totally ethical and SEO-friendly i.e. it won’t hurt your SEO score of the original website, you just need to re-publish after a time, you can refer to medium guidelines for more.
A lot of people including major blogs like “Hubspot” use this to gain more awareness of their original site.
And if you are worried about technical stuff… don’t,
because Medium makes it easy for writers to post their stories with ease for example they already take care of a few things about SEO and H1 and H2 tags that play a role in ranking your stories, so it’s easy!
Tip: Don’t just publish only your original website’s content, try to write exclusive medium stories, and try to apply for medium publications that have a high volume of readers, which will increase your readers and followers over time.
7) Share It On Social Media:
One of the best uses of social media is sharing your blog posts or content updates in a strategic way, making a plan to share your website content on social media while contextualizing it.
What does context mean here?
Simple, if you have a blog post create multiple pieces of that content and distribute it across multiple platforms while being aware of which platform has which type of tone.
Here’s how:
- Publish your blog posts, create a sub-article, and post it on LinkedIn.
- Publish the whole article after a week on Medium.
- Post multiple tweets about the quotes or stats you used in your blog posts.
- Take a screenshot of a particular section of your blog post and post it on IG with captioning your thoughts.
There are a lot of ways in which you can chop your post in pieces and distribute it across social media, just start with these.
8) Creating Or Joining Facebook Groups:
What better way to talk about your stuff than having like-minded people around it.
Now Facebook ads are not the only way to promote your site, but if you already have a loyal group of fans and community, it might be a great idea to create a Facebook group and invite them.
It’s great to have a Facebook group to grow your followers talk about your blog post, things that you want to talk about, and spread the word along, but if you want a little control over things that can happen in your group be sure to mention some ground rules or group guidelines.
Note that I have mentioned Facebook group not Facebook page because groups have limited no. of members to join and as you are starting this would be fine.
Also, if you don’t have much of a fan base or any at all,
You can join FB groups that talk about things your site is all about like e-commerce, farming, cars, etc.
And bring value to their conversations and when convenient mention your blog posts.
Some of the FB groups do have self-promotion guidelines that you can use.
9) Using LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a great place to connect with your audience and grow with over 722 million users.
It has become a great place for professionals to become a thought leader over time by “posting content” or “publishing articles” and connecting with people.
Now like Medium this is one more place where you can re-publish your articles and create links for your site, but make sure to contextualize the platform and don’t become spam.
You can use the $1.80 strategy here too and grow your connections which in turn brings a lot of opportunities for you to build awareness about you.
“LinkedIn 2020 is like Facebook 2012” — Gary vee
What does this mean?
It means that the organic reach of LinkedIn is still here and can be used to create a massive long-term audience, period.
You can also create content for LinkedIn about things in your niche and engage with the audience over time to build loyalty.
Also, LinkedIn groups are a great way to share your content and build a community.
Do remember which type of content to post where
LinkedIn is a place for professionals so posting memes won’t do any good and Facebook has a more casual audience so you don’t want to talk business every time.
Mixing entertainment with business to create content is very useful here!
10) Having A Clear Goal:
There is nothing more annoying than getting sidetracked and spending the entire day on social media and other things when you have a site to take care of!
A lot of times people can get lost in doing the other things which have absolutely zero impact on improving their goals.
Therefore it is important to set goals and time you will spend before doing these things.
In the end content and your service of the site do matter so you need to constantly improve that otherwise, people would not be regular visitors or would advise other people the same!
I really hope this gives you some new ways to explore word-of-mouth on the internet.
Thank you for reading!
