How to Increase Website Traffic for Free in 2024 – Part 1
Traffic is the lifeblood of every business.
And the question of “How to increase website traffic for free?” is one that I often see.
So today, I’ll share with you some of my free traffic generation strategies and secrets.
You can have the greatest content in the world, you can be the greatest…but if no one is seeing your content, nobody’s reading your content, nobody’s paying attention to your content, then what does it all mean?
It means nothing.
Table of Contents
- Content Is King
- Forum Marketing
- Blog Commenting
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
#1. How to Increase Website Traffic for Free: Content
Content Is King! It all starts with some useful content. If you don’t have this, then you need to go back to the drawing board. This is the foundational step for how to increase website traffic for free. You’ve got to have something worthwhile to offer your market to offer your target visitor in order to get them interested in your content into your ecosystem.
And I can’t stress this enough, because I see so much mediocre, and flat-out terrible content on the net. And that’s just not gonna cut it. Not in this day & age.
The web doesn’t need another mediocre piece of content, another garbage piece of content. It’s all about quality these days. So really take some time to work on a content marketing strategy so that you’re really intentional about the type of content you create for your market.
It needs to be laser-focused, it needs to be niche-focused, don’t just pump out general content. really speak to your audience, speak to that ideal persona in your niche and talk directly to them. So they know when they find your content, they know that it was created especially for them.
And don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through. That’s your unique fingerprint on the web. Let it shine through, be loose, be unique. That’s your unique stamp, embrace it.
So how do you come up with different topics in your niche?
I hear so many people today talk about writer’s block and creator’s block.
Look, the universe is infinitely filled with ideas. And that goes for your needs too. You just have to broaden your mind on how you source and attract those ideas to you. They’re everywhere.
Some ways that you can find some great ideas and topics to write about in your niche is to just visit search engines like Google and type in a search term related to your niche. Then Google will suggest other popular search terms that people are actually using to try to connect with you and your market. So use that resource.
Another thing you can do. You could join forums, communities, and groups in your niche and just integrate into the community. Start conversations, ask questions, or just sit back for a while and listen to what they have to say. They’re gonna let you know the concerns and questions they need answers to as it relates to their needs.
And finally, another thing that you can do is just talk to your audience that people ask them:
“Hey, what type of content would you like for me?”
…or
“What type of content can I create that can serve you better?”
So just communicate with them just like you would in real life. Just be yourself and let your personality shine through.
Start leveling up your content and your traffic will follow. This primary step in creating high-quality content is the most crucial step if you really want to learn how to increase website traffic for free. I cannot stress this enough.
#2. How to Increase Website Traffic for Free: Forums
And the second method on how to increase website traffic for free is through forum marketing (or through online groups and communities).
And this is what is called “attraction marketing” – meaning that you’re integrating yourself into a community and becoming a helpful resource. In essence, you’re positioning yourself as a thought leader in your niche.
And by doing so, you’ll attract people your way and make them want to find out more about you. They’ll become motivated to click through to your links and visit your website to see what more you have to offer. So the key is to make sure you really get involved in any community that you join and really become a helpful resource.
Don’t go in there spamming and promoting your links. People don’t want that. They can smell that a mile away, and they will kick you out as fast as you got in there and you’ll lose all credibility. So don’t do it!
Just be smooth, relax, and go in there and network and talk to people and get to know them. Then hey, eventually, you start telling people what you do and find out what they do. Just be natural, be human…something that a lot of people forget to do on the web. Just be yourself and treat others like you want to be treated.
Would you want somebody to come and say, hey, hey, buy my stuff, hey, hey, hey, I got this for sale, hey, hey, hey, BUY MY STUFF!!!
No, you wouldn’t want that, so slow down, and help people by being a thought leader and exchanging useful information and ideas. This way, people will be attracted to you, they’re gonna want to naturally learn what you have to offer. And they will come your way.
Now, when you go into these forums and communities, oftentimes they will allow you to have what is called a signature aka “sig” – which is a link that goes along with every post.
In social networking groups, usually, even if they don’t allow you to have a signature, you always have your profile. So you want to make sure you have your profile filled out to the tee. Don’t skimp on it. This is an area that a lot of people skip on. And that is a big mistake.
So make sure you fill out your profile, that’s your area to shine. Your profile is the area where you can really showcase what you’re all about. So don’t ignore it.
And also, if you’re allowed to have a signature, don’t just make it promotional, make it informative. Write something that will highlight what you do and highlight your expertise. And that will attract people towards you. This is a very effective strategy for how to increase website traffic for free. It’s magnetic marketing at its best!
So, how do you find forums and online communities to join related to your niche?
Well, there are plenty of ways to go about this. One way you can do this is by just going to Google and search: forums + your niche
And as far as groups, you can search groups on practically any social network that has groups (and that’s most of them). So just join groups related to your niche and do basically the same thing, just search for groups in your niche. And once you find these communities, just follow the tips that I gave you and you’ll start to see how to increase traffic to your website absolutely free.
#3. How to Increase Website Traffic for Free: Comments
Okay, now the third method for how to increase website traffic for free is by blog commenting. Yes, blog, commenting. This is a strategy that a lot of people ignore. Because the thing is, blog commenting, it’s just really not as popular as it used to be years ago.
People just don’t leave comments on blogs like they used to – largely due to the rise of social media. You know, everybody’s flocking to Facebook or other social media sites commenting and chatting and gathering that they kind of just forgot about blogs.
But you gotta understand something. Make no mistake about it, blogs are still powerful. There are a lot of nice blogs still ranking very well on Google and other search engine and still getting good traffic. And you know what… there’s a lot of content out there to where when you scroll down to the bottom, you will see no comments at all (or very few comments).
And that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing for you! Because when you leave an engaging and relevant comment, it gives you a chance to stand out, because there’s just not that many people doing it. The competition is low for this. Heck, you might be the only comment on the page, and that’ll give you the spotlight! Because we all know that everybody reads the comments. 😉
So find blogs in your niche (or related to your niche) and leave a comment. The blog owner will LOVE you for it. They live for things like this, because there’s people and bots of all types just trying to spam the comment section all day, with links and trying to get backlinks and stuff like that. So rarely do a lot of these sites get relevant comments on their blog.
So when they receive one, you have a high chance of getting yours published. So add value you don’t spam. I repeat, DO NOT spam! Just leave a relevant comment i.e. comment related to the content of the blog. Be sensible be helpful and add value.
And the great thing about it is that on these blog comments, there’s usually always a space where you can include your website link along with your comment. Then when the blog owner and other visitors come along and read your interesting comment, they’ll say themselves “Who wrote this engaging comment? I want to find out more about them!”
And then they’ll click the link to your site, and bounce over to your blog or website to find out more about you.
BAM! Now you got ’em! 🙂
Blog commenting is one of the most ignored yet one of the most powerful ways to draw free traffic to any website. It’s how some of the most popular sites today originally discovered how to increase website traffic for free.
One thing you want to remember also is on a lot of blogs, you’re able to use what is called a gravatar, along with your comment. And that’s just basically a picture of you, or of your brand, but ideally of you, that you can attach along with every comment that you leave across the web.
Many commenting systems such as Disqus now offer this Gravatar feature. So make sure you set up and fill out your gravatar profile because this will make it easy for people to understand and know who you are. And it will draw traffic back your way.
Okay, now ways to find blogs relevant to your niche…
Again, use your friend Google or your favorite search engine. Look at the suggested search for blogs in your niche: blogs + your niche. Most websites these days have a blog. Some may not be as active as others, but most websites have a blog. So you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding blobs in your niche.
And remember…
These blogs do not have to be directly related to your niche to be useful. They can be somehow related to your niche. So use the power of blog commenting to attract relevant visitors back to your blog. If you want to truly master the skill of how to increase traffic of website for free, then this is a strategy that you must take FULL advantage of.
#4. How to Increase Website Traffic for Free: Social
We’re in the age of social media, it just can’t be ignored. Social media can be a traffic goldmine for your website, or blog. But the thing is, I see a lot of people are not taking full advantage of the power of social media – at least when it comes to how to increase traffic to website or blogs.
So how to increase website traffic for free from social media is to make sure you have a page (and even your own group) set up in any social media that you’re in. That way, when you’re posting your website content, you’ll automatically have a place to share it. This is a great and easy way to expand your reach, but sadly a lot of site owners neglect to do this.
And I know things like Facebook pages and others just have not been getting the organic traffic that they used to. But make no mistake about it, they still can draw relevant traffic back to your blog or website. So you don’t want to ignore any type of free relevant traffic that you can get.
Also, there are tons of niche-based groups in these social networks (especially Facebook), so interact in these groups and that will draw traffic back to your website or blog.
And hey, I know you can’t be everywhere on the web. There’s no way that we can be everywhere on the web with all these social networks because they are time-consuming. I do understand that. But the way that you can leverage your time is to pick one or two social networks that you can be personally involved in, and then just syndicate your content to the rest!
There are tools out there like Buffer, Zapier, IFTTT and HootSuite that will help you do just that.
These tools will let you syndicate your blog posts out to social networks that you really can’t be involved in. That way you’re taking full advantage of your reach. And that’s exactly what you want to do. Because the more people that you can reach with your content, the more targeted visitors, you’ll attract to your site.
And another thing is that a lot of people just take advantage of the largest social networks…the most obvious ones, you know like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blah, blah, blah.
And that’s all fine and dandy. But the thing is, you may be ignoring some powerful, yet smaller or mid-sized social networks that may not be as popular as a Facebook, but may work better for you and your niche than Facebook.
So the thing is, I challenge you to explore and think outside the box. Explore and find other social media networks and smaller communities on the web that may be able to draw traffic back to your blog or website. You gotta think outside the box because everybody’s flocking to the same places and it’s becoming saturated.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS A NOISY PLACE.
So find other communities on the web, that you can resonate with and can add value to. And that may be your biggest traffic driver ever, something that you may have never even known about. Social media marketing is a great and powerful way to drive traffic to your blog or website – if done strategically.
Don’t just waste your time on social media, chit-chatting away your time and looking at cute cat pictures. Use social media like it’s using you. Use it to draw more traffic back to your website: your home on the web that YOU own and control.
#5. How to Increase Website Traffic for Free: SEO
And the fifth method for how to increase website traffic for free is through search engine optimization. Yes, SEO is a great way to increase organic traffic to your blog or website. So if you’re not using SEO, you definitely need to take advantage of this traffic generation strategy.
Now there are various facets to SEO, but just understand that SEO in its basic form is optimizing for those search terms, those keywords that your users are typing into search engines like Google and Bing, to try to connect with people who can help them.
These people have questions. They have problems, they have concerns, and they’re just out there typing in the search terms, just trying to connect with people that can help answer their questions and solve their problems
And how do you prove that issue? Well one way that you do is to optimize your content with these targeted keywords. For best results, it’s best to optimize every post around a targeted keyword (you can include related keywords as well “LSI keywords”, but always keep each content piece focused and weighted on that one specific keyword).
By doing so, it will help search engine spiders to easily be able to examine your content and determine what it’s all about. They’ll understand your content and know without a shadow of a doubt that this is something that they need to feed to that visitor who is desperately seeking help in your niche.
So be sure to include your targeted keyword in your headline and subtitles. Include it in your post tags, your image alt tags, and sprinkled throughout your blog content so that the Google bots and search engine spiders will definitely know that you have the answer that a particular visitor is searching for.
So how do you discover targeted keywords to optimize your content for?
There are great keyword tools on the market, some paid some free that you can use. And they will present you with these lists of keywords and volumes that your visitors are searching for every month. These visitors in your market are having questions that they need answers to. And they’re searching, searching, searching…
One great free keyword tool that I use is the Google Ads keyword planner. You do need a Google Ads account to use the tool. But the good thing is that you don’t have to run any Google ads to use the tool.
All you have to do is set up a free account, and you’ll gain access to this great free Google Ads Keyword Planner. And then you start using it and you’ll start discovering relevant keywords that your users are actually using to search in order to connect with you and your market.
Once you uncover these juicy keywords, you can then optimize your content around them.
Another great free keyword tool is Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. This is a great free keyword tool to help you uncover targeted keywords that you can optimize your content around and connect with the people that you want to serve.
So if you’re not taking advantage of SEO, you’re definitely missing out on a long-term, powerful and proven content marketing strategy. And I definitely recommend that you get started today.
Well this concludes Part 1 on How to Increase Website Traffic for Free. Test some of these methods out and then return for Part 2 (to be posted in the next few days).
Question of the day:
Which traffic method did you like the most (or which traffic method are you currently using)?
Let me know in the comments!