FREE Website Traffic Ideas

If you have a website, you are probably looking for free website traffic ideas. Here are some ways to explore as you look to increase traffic to your website if you have no money to spend on advertising at this time.

Social Media Sites

website social mediaThere are a ton of platforms that offer free accounts. Everyone knows about sites like facebook, youtube, twitter, linkedin and instagram. All of these sites give you the ability to post links to websites. They are free to join. You may not see a lot of traffic from these sites if you haven’t grown your network of followers. If you are popular, you may find that having thousands of followers is a great way to drive traffic to your website with a few simple posts on your profile. Make sure your url is is shown on your main profile page if the platform allows website links.

Very Important. Be careful using your personal profile to promote business on some of the social media sites. Facebook frowns on being “commercial” with personal profiles. They encourage you to build a facebook page for business promotions. Facebook pages are free to create and can be a great way to drive traffic.   Facebook also provides the ability to create groups that can support your business page or simply bring like-minded people together around a specific topic. If you have been on facebook for any period of time, you are probably a member of several groups on facebook.

Search Engine Traffic

Of course, the best FREE way to get traffic is the search engines. Being near the top of page one on google for your key search terms will drive quality traffic. Yahoo and Bing can drive some nice visits to your site too. Getting near the top for quality keywords is not easy. There could be a lot of competition.  Watch out for individuals and companies that spam your email box offering to put you on page 1 of Google. There are some legitimate companies that can do that, but most are just tring to get your money. With time and research, anyone can get on the first page of search results for specific keyword phrases. Being on page one in the top three or four for searches that generate traffic is something that may take a lot of time and research.

It is good to go after popular phrases, but at the beginning try going after low hanging fruit. Get indexed for longtail keyword phrases and work up to the shorter high searched terms. For more information about longtail keywords,  see this page on Low Hanging Fruit.

Start an Email List for your Website

There are a lot of free services to start an email list of followers.  Follow.IT is one of those if you are trying to stay FREE. If your website is built on the wordpress platform, you may find several plugins that will also help you build an email list. Having an email list to notifiy subscribers when you post something new on your website will help bring visitors back to the site. Look for services that feature RSS feed driven emails.

Traffic Exchanges

I have never been a fan of website traffic exchanges. I think the traffic from these sites is very low quality and ultimately may hurt your efforts to drive quality traffic in the future. If you are considering one of these services, know that you may get penalized from some of the bigger search engines. I think people that use these traffic exchanges could be compared to the people out there using the “Fake It til You Make It” Philosophy of selling. I suggest skipping this idea and look for other resources.

Link Building from other websites

Having quality sites that share similar topics are a great way to drive free website traffic. Offering to write a guest post that has a link to your site may be approved by some website owners. In some cases, websites may allow you to link to your site through the comment section on a post. Quality comments may reward you with a link back to your website. These links could drive traffic, but they could also help your effforts in keyword ranking on the search engines. Being discovered naturally helps sites like google and bing determine the quality of your website. Don’t comment spam. Those spammy comments don’t help you or the person that owns the website where you are trying to leave a comment. If you are getting a bunch of comment spam on your website, look for ways to filter it out.

Do you have Free Website Traffic Ideas?

free website traffic ideaThanks for reading my tips on getting more traffic without paying for it. I would love to read some of your ideas on how to increase traffic to websites for FREE.  Use the comment form below.

 

 

20 thoughts on “FREE Website Traffic Ideas”

  1. I hadn’t considered a traffic exchange before, now I know I won’t bother. Thanks. I quite enjoy the low hanging fruit take myself. I can’t say I’ve managed page 1 of google yet but I did get page 1 on yahoo and that brought me quite a bit of traffic. It’s good to see hard work pay off in this free way. 

    I also get an awful lot of traffic (say 80%) through Pinterest. This I did not expect, but it appears Pin It can generate quite a bit of traffic within some niches so I always urge people not to underestimate the power of this great platform. However, if you are using pin it for traffic make sure your site is mobile phone ready as it would appear most of my pin it traffic is coming through a phone or a tablet.

    Reply
    • I haven’t spent any time on pinterest in last few years. I may need to reconsider. There was a time when I was trying everything. I am growing less and less interested in facebook. Unfortunately for a few of my topics, I can’t let it go.  Thanks for the tip about Mobile Friendly Posts on Pinterest.

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  2. I have accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Linked In. I have a large enough following, I post a few times a week on facebook and now and then on Instagram. Recently I became aware that I do have a lot of contacts but I need to have their email addresses so I can build a list and create some traffic to my website. I recently started collecting. I wished a number of people happy new year via messenger, sent them one of my compositions linked to YouTube, and asked for their addresses. I was surprised how my list grew. The next effort will be to create an ebook and offer it for free on instagram. Thank you for this listing and discussion about finding traffic. In this digital world we need it.

    Reply
    • That sounds like a Great Plan, JJ.  I am working on a list for Internet Marketing Ideas. I have several lists in another NICHE. It hasn’t worked out trying to market to these people about creating websites and driving traffic. They just like to read and interact with facebook memes.. They signed up for other interests. Best of Luck to you!

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  3. My site is relatively new and definitely needs traffic. I already started with social media and just made a page on Facebook recently because I just read that it’s a no-no promoting on a personal account which I was doing in the past. The good thing and I was not banned because I was not promoting heavily. I haven’t started an email list yet, I feel like I need to have more posts before starting an email list.

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    • Having more content on the website before asking strangers to sign up on a list is a good plan. I have sites that do a lot of traffic and have hundreds of pages of content. I personally know the majority of people on that list, because I have been selling to them for nearly 20 years.  This is a new project for me. They wanted to see an example of a completely free wordpress website.. Voila! Only thing is spent is “Time”

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  4. Great Article Free Website Traffic Ideas. From the experience of bloggers and website owners, social media is really great for attracting free and quality website traffic, so it pays to invest time and build profiles on at least a few of these social networks. This is my priority now because I am still very weak in this area.
    I also tried one page with a traffic exchange, but I quickly gave up because this traffic exchange is not of good quality, and at the same time it reduces the time of visiting and viewing the page, so it seemed to me that it harms my site.
    I wish you a lot of joy and success in creating a website and a lot of quality visits!
    Nina

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  5. These are all wonderful strategies to use! I recently started using Instagram as one of my traffic strategies to get more people on my website. I have actually been quite successful with it. The traffic is not amazingly high, but it is definitely moving up pretty quick. That is, of course, aside from SEO

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    • Instagram can be a really good source of free traffic. It all depends on your topic. Sometimes it is hard to get the right pictures that draw the visitors to click over and discover your website.

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  6. Hi –

    Thanks so much for publishing such an informative blog. I just launched my new blog a couple of weeks ago and I can’t wait to start driving traffic. I liked your idea of starting an email list. What are your thoughts about MailChimp? And do you have any suggestions on how to encourage people to sign up for a newsletter? Thanks in advance!

    Reply
    • I used mailchimp for years and just recently abandoned my account. I don’t like the way they count subscribers. It is not good if you are trying to promote a lot of affiliate products. Mailchimp frowns on affiliate marketers for some reason and can drop you pretty quickly. 

      The best way to get people to sign up on an email list  is to offer something; free tips, proven advice or even a free gift if you can afford to give something away. A lot of people give away ebooks which are not hard to produce and copies are free to the person that owns the rights to the ebook.

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  7. Hi there and thanks for writing about “Free Website Traffic Ideas”.  I’m familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase traffic and Social Media, but not with Traffic Exchanges.  I heard many people talk about building email lists, but wasn’t sure about how to get started.  Thanks for the tip about Googe Feedburner, it looks like a good place to start.

    Cheers,

    David

    Reply
    • You are welcome. Thanks for dropping by my post. Google Feedburner is free and a great way to get started with email lists. There are some other benefits to using it. You may decide to promote a bigger service in the future, but having it set-up and sending out an email every time you post is pretty cool.

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  8. Great post!  I never knew about web traffic exchanges, now I know not to use them.  I have been taking advantage of site comments to drive traffic.  I also use Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram,  I have business accounts for all except Twitter, not sure if they have one,  I am always looking for more traffic and interested in email lists but not sure how to make them. I’m always looking to drive more traffic to my website

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    • I don’t think twitter distinguishes between personal and business.  I may be wrong. All the tutorials I have found on feedburner are pretty old. It has not changed much. I just set-up feedburner on this website and added a form to the bottom widget area. 

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  9. Hi Rich,

    Indeed, traffic to a blog, especially if it was created with the idea of ​​monetization, is vital. You have highlighted in your article important aspects of attracting traffic, but each of them has two sides.

    In my website, I have a section for guest writers, which generated a bit of traffic at first. Also, I tried Facebook in both variants, personally but also business. What I noticed is that the internet world is saturated with ads, and the business account goes much weaker than the personal account. In my case, I post on my personal account a few words related to the topic of the website, with no link, and believe me I have more private messages, related to my profession and my website, than I receive on the business account.

    But of course each case is particular, and everyone has to try what works for their business.

    Reply
  10. This is a great article with some great views on website traffic. I agree that making a business page on FB is the best way to go in regard to social media posting.  That way you’re not “spamming” any friends who just want to see what your cat is up to today.  PLUS, the business page has many features that the personal page doesn’t such as analytics and post scheduling!

    Reply
    • I have been using fb for a long time. I have pages with over 29k likes. If the topic is good, people will find your page. I wonder how many pages fb has covering Cats. Thanks for the feedback.

      Reply

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