As a blogger or Internet entrepreneur, you need traffic. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it simply means people going to your website or blog. Just like all of the people you encounter in their vehicles when you are driving to work constitute real world vehicular traffic, everyone surfing the web at any given time is a part of Internet traffic.
There are two ways to get traffic to your site.
- You pay for traffic.
- You get traffic for free.
If your advertising budget is limited (as mine is at the moment) or you have no idea yet how to do paid traffic methods, the “Free” traffic is what you need to work at until such time as you can use paid traffic effectively.
As you no doubt know, this type of traffic is not truly free – it takes your time and effort. However, depending on the method(s) you use, these can continue to drive traffic to your site or offer with little or no upkeep.
Here is a list of some no-cost ways to get traffic to your website.
- Use viral blogging to get people to share your content driving traffic directly back to your website by using the most common types of shared content such as top 10 list, celebrity news and controversial topics.
- Use YouTube to get people on that site to what your videos and then drive traffic from YouTube back to your own website.
- Put a link to your website in your forum signature on every related forum that you visit, and then post whenever you can, making sure to reply to other people’s posts, answering questions and giving advice.
- Look for other sites that are selling related products and find the ones that will have a thank you page after the person buys the product that might trade links with you on that thank you page. You put their link on your thank you page and they put your link on theirs.
- Use podcasting, with a professional sound, to build your expertise in the industry and drive traffic back to your website.
- Find other websites that allow guest posting and then email them for a chance to post on their blog. You can build your expertise that way and include a link to your own website, and then their visitors will become your visitors.
- Hold a free webinar on some type of specific topic within your industry and then invite every single person that you can, even letting people who are influential in the industry know that you’re having a free webinar so they can tell all their followers as well.
- Join social networking groups so that people will want to follow you on social media and then post expert content within these groups so that people will want to look you up and follow any links that you can post back to your own website.
- Use the name dropping method to get people to link to your site simply because you have mentioned them in an article that you have written.
- Use the viral report method. Create a report that solves a problem within your industry and name your website as one of the solutions, and then distribute that report as widely as you can allowing people to share it freely.
I will expand on these methods in subsequent blog posts but hopefully this will get you thinking about what you can do right now to get traffic without spending a dime.
