Free traffic sources
In addition to advertisements, there are free sources that can generate more traffic to your business. Free traffic sources are beneficial to everybody, and particularly to marketers and businesses that do not have a big budget for web advertisements.
However, you will have to invest more of your time and effort in order to be able to drive free traffic to your Website. Most of the free traffic sources are tied to quality content, so learning to write interesting articles is essential. Ideally, there should be at least one editor in your staff. Also, you can hire writers. There’s just one catch: it is important to manage content marketing professionally. So, experienced content marketer can help you to create a plan to achieve business purposes in the cost effective way.
Own blog
A blog is a key to other free traffic sources that we’ll talk about. It will help to attract and retain your target audience on the site, acquire regular visitors and collect a database of email addresses. But for the blog, you will have to write articles that will attract the interest of your target audience on a regular basis. There are several rules to help achieve this:
Explore Target Audience
To understand which article the readers are interested in, analyze your target audience: create a portrait of the clients and write down their interests in great details.
Analyze your competitors’ blogs. Highlight the content that had the most views, comments, positive ratings in social networks, and compare it to your content. Look for common features and highlight the criteria that you will apply to your own texts.
Pro-tip. Avoid to use “tools” to search competitors or analyze their keywords. These “tools” gather data in a wrong way, so it can’t be accurate and useful. Don’t waste your money.
If you have second thoghts about your expertise, you can get professional digital marketing services. In fact, you can do it by yourself.
Decide on purpose
All articles of the blog should unite the general idea, they should be useful. Ask yourself the question: “What is the reader’s main problem that my content can solve?”
For example, you have an online store with elite alcoholic beverages. A simple description of the drinks will bring little benefit to the reader. But if you devote your articles to what is beneficial to the buyers, for example giving them tips, advice and suggestions, then attention to your blog and website will grow with time.
Optimize texts for the reader
The make your articles catchy and easy to digest, please work on the following points:
- The headlines. Headlines should demonstrate a benefit to the reader, generate interest. It is important not just to reveal the content of the text, but to say what problem it will help to solve. If the article is really beneficial, then it will be easy to make such a headline.
- The structure. Subtitles, bulleted lists and text, divided into paragraphs, are important not only to search engines but also to the visitor. This makes it easier to search for information while making the text not so cumbersome. Reading an article divided into blocks of meaningful contents is much more pleasant and convenient.
- Lightweight text. It is better to avoid florid formulations and convoluted sentences: very few people will appreciate this eloquence. If you can say it shorter and formulate your idea in a simple way, do it.
These tips suitable for SEO purposes too.
Posting in your social networks
Social networks are good examples of free traffic sources. You can post links to your website in your social networks. Just make a reasonable number of posts to avoid being branded as a spammer. Your post should contain a brief message regarding the questions you are answering in your article plus the link to it.
Often you can see that business social media pages fail. So our social media specialists identified reasons and wrote article that will help you to understand how social media work for ordinary business (ie. construction contractors).
Traffic exchange
Like you, many sites in your niche want to receive an influx of unique visitors. Therefore, almost everyone is interested in a traffic exchange. Find several related resources that you visit and offer to share content with the author and a link to the source.
In this way, you can get not only transitions, but also a qualitative increase in the external reference profile, and thus increase your ranking in Google search.
You can also exchange advertising banners. The preparation of a banner takes much less time, and it gets visitors interested in your services. The main thing is not to overdo it with someone else’s advertising on your own site, it will annoy your users.
Guest posting
Guest posting is also a free traffic source. Many informative websites and blogs will publish your articles for free. The main thing is that they are of high quality and do not duplicate other topics posted earlier. The Website where you will post your articles does not necessarily have to be devoted solely to your topic. It will be enough to have an audience that is interested in your services.
A small list of tips that will help you to Publish your articles:
- It is better to write guest articles for the blog audience, where they will be posted, otherwise, the editors may simply not accept them;
- The higher the site traffic, the more difficult it is to post an article in it. Look for resources with a high percentage of your target audience, and not the highest coverage;
- Do not try to cover everything in the article, select a narrow topic and expand it completely.
A guest post is a great bonus to brand awareness and customer loyalty, not to mention SEO. If you can publish them regularly, you will have regular readers not only on your own site but also other informative websites.
Using guest blogging for SEO is a very bad practice. Google ignore these links. So, don’t waste your money.
Contact SEO professionals to get SEO services. and to build the solid reputation of your site for search engines.
Media publications
If you know a lot of interesting things about your own sphere, then there are good chances to get into the media. Journalists are constantly looking for experts who could share their own opinions in their articles. Many people rely on media. Also media have high positions in the Google SERP. So, it increases the chance to get thousands of visits on your website.
On the other hand large media sites may have problems with content indexation. That is why it is a good practice to check URL of article with operator “site:” to sure this page was indexed. If page isn’t indexed you need to make further efforts to promote this page via social media, blogs, emails, etc.
Email distribution
Add a subscription form to your blog to gather and work with your email database. The newsletter will not bring unique visitors but will allow more efficient work with subscribers. Send announcements of the most interesting materials, report on current news. This way you can increase traffic by converting regular readers.
YouTube
YouTube is the second most popular Internet platform in the world (after Google) and an excellent source of free traffic to the site. Create your own YouTube channel to communicate with your audience and share useful information. Create helpful tips, educational videos or interviews, etc.
The video content is characterized by maximum user engagement, which means your subscribers will interact with you more actively. Try not to overlook the most interesting comments and mention active subscribers to earn loyalty.
YouTube use own algorithms which based on interests of the user. That’s the theory. In practice YouTube use complex algorithms to keep users on the site with weird suggestions (known as a dark side ogf TouTube algorithms). Nobody knows how it works exactly but you should bear in mind this problem.
Also, making video is expensive. You need professional equipment, software to create video.
Conclusion
As you can see there are no free traffic sources to increase site traffic. All of them require your time, efforts, creativity, ideas.
But it’s worth it. Additionally you will get a great digital marketing experience.
Of course, there are many nuances and pitfalls, that you can hardly guess at. So, F5 Studio experts will help you, if you contact us.
