Do you have a blog but you don’t see the results you really want? You don’t have a lot of clicks and this lets you down?
Starting and growing a website is not an easy process, especially if your niche is really difficult or it doesn’t belong to the profitable blog niches 2020.
However, the good news is, we will cover literally everything you will ever need to know about free blog traffic and how to increase your website’s traffic volume that you will definitely see the results you want.
There are many ways to drive more traffic to your blog for free and you should use all of them or plenty of them if you want to do it fast and you do not want to put all your eggs in one basket, right?
Let’s get started step by step!
Contents
SEO Strategy Template
SEO stands for search engine optimization which, in simple terms, means that you should optimize your content so it ranks better in the search engines, for example, Google( which is the world’s most important search engine).
So, what can we do to boost SEO?
SEO Tactics
- Long Blog Posts rank better on Google. So, Google has changed its algorithm many times in the past few years. They want to just bring up on the first page the most complete and the most suitable post for the reader. So if your post is let’s say 500 words long they assume it hasn’t covered the topic on every aspect and they do not rank it high. So, make longer posts over 2000 words at least.
- Publish Quality Content. The fact that I told you to write longer posts does not mean that you should write stuff that people aren’t interested in and they don’t like just to make a longer post. People will leave your site(bounce) fast and this is a very bad signal for Google.
- Keyword Research. As you probably have already heard, keyword research is very crucial for driving traffic to your website. Use software like Ubersuggest, Answer the public, Semrush. All these tools have paid options but stay to the free part of them especially if you are starting. It is fine. You can also use Google’s autosuggestions to take keywords ideas straight from Google, so you assume everything Google suggests has some sort of search volume.
- Use longtail keywords to rank. Longtail keywords(over 4 words each keyword) can help you rank easier. If you try to rank for the word ”Yoga” as a brand new website, good luck! You won’t! However, if you try to rank for ” The 5 Best Yoga Secrets For A Healthier Mind And Body” for example it is much easier to rank. Search volume won’t be as high but we prefer lower volume with low competition rather than high search volume with a high competition where we will be unable to ever rank. You prefer 5 clicks rather than 0 clicks right? (Don’t fear, in one article we use hundreds of keywords so these little numbers stack up)
- Internal/External Links. When you write a blog post, it is very important to link to 1 or more articles of yours, so firstly you create a backlink for the other article and secondly you connect all things on your website together so it is better organized. Furthermore, you should also link readers out of your website. This shows Google you are a good authority site that wants to provide the best possible user experience, which is the #1 ranking factor on Google.
- Website’s Speed. Another factor that Google takes into consideration is your website’s speed which also affects the user experience. Cut all your unnecessary plugins, widgets, etc which slow your website. Do not use ads when you starting. Wait to gain some authority and then start with ads if you like. Another trick is to decrease the size of the images you use in your posts. Go to tinypng , upload the image and compress it.
- Use SSL certificate. If your website does not have SSL enabled which provides security to your website, Google won’t rank your website. Plain and simple.
- Optimize Title, Meta Description, Images. On-page SEO is also important. You should always optimize your title for certain keywords and also your meta description. You can use a plugin that I use, called Rank Math which is completely free and optimize your content according to that. Also when you have an image to your post, click to your image and go to edit. Then change the alternative text with your focus main keyword you want to rank for. This is how we optimize images.
That’s it for SEO. You may feel that this is a bit too much information but I guarantee you, this is the bare minimum to succeed. I try to do my best to keep it short without skipping anything which will lead you to success.
I have also articles in SEO if you want to learn even more because SEO is very important and I am an expert at it, as you can see.
We move on to the next chapter of your journey to success.
Social Media: How to drive more traffic to your blog?
The use of social media in 2020 is obviously an excellent way to let people know about your website and generate more free traffic.
In general, what we do is letting our ”friends” on Facebook, our followers on Instagram or Twitter or whatever platform we use to know about our content as soon as it is released.
For example, you should make a post on Facebook and on Instagram. Also, we use our stories to reach even more people with these 2 platforms.
Another tactic is to use Facebook Groups around your niche. You can find some groups and ask permission to join.
There, after you read the rules that you should comply with, you can comment and help people with their problems (and they may follow you or visit your Facebook profile and then visit your website) or post there content of your website as a backlink to your site.
Be careful, not to overdo it and they kick you out. Google has also similar groups, you can join them too.
A very nice alternative or addition to those is Pinterest. Pinterest has become very famous and successful due to the fact that it is a search engine but instead of text, they use images.
You can grow your Pinterest account, publish pins everyday which become backlinks for your website. Be sure to post useful and nice content so you have the chance to go viral and drive huge amount of traffic to your website. It is not difficult at all to do that if you want to spend 1-2 hours a day. It works. Especially, for some niches, it works great!
Quora and Blog Comments for Free Traffic and Backlinks
Another great tactic, you can use is to use a platform called Quora. It is, in short, a platform where people ask questions on every single topic and other people answer.
What you should do here, is in the same direction. You search for questions around our niche from the search bar and you provide engaging and comprehensive answers that show you know your stuff and you are an expert.
Once again, your answers should be long comments, with bullets, with images, nice and pleasing for your readers, providing value to people.
Affiliate Marketing and generally when you start a business or try to get the traffic you must provide tons of value for free and then people will start to trust you and then you make money. That’s how it works.
Also, Quora, may promote your stuff to other people if you start to post regularly and some of your posts may become viral and drive lots of traffic to your website or to your opt-in pages or ads, literally for free.
In my opinion, you should answer around 10 or more questions a day and this will create a lot of backlinks in the long run. Write an answer and somewhere place a link back to your content.
Sometimes, because they don’t like affiliate websites they erase some answers. Try to link quora answers to articles that do not have affiliate links but these articles can contain links to other articles of yours that do have affiliate links if that’s is your purpose.
This is a little trick, I learned the hard way as you suppose. I tell you things from my own experience to prevent you from failing.
In the same concept, you can also write blog comments to other websites on your niche.
Type some keywords around your niche on Google and visit the first let’s say 10 websites. Then scroll down in the comment section of the article and write a comment.
Your comment must be relevant and helpful for people and for the admin of the website. So be careful of that.
It can contain backlink to your website, however, most blogs ask your name and your website’s URL so even if you just comment, people can find you by clicking your name which will send them to your website.
An excellent way to get free and targeted traffic.
Also, you can write comments and answers on forums. It may sound a bit outdated but it works. People still try to find specific stuff on forums and sometimes some posts on forums are found even in the search results of Google on the first page!
If you think about it, you will find an example of that. Forums are not dead. You can still get some free traffic from them. I don’t say it’s the best option you have but if it matches your style or your preferences you can use it. It will help you.
Don’s spam your links everywhere. Provide value to people, help them with their needs and questions and in the long run, they will start following you, visiting your site and even purchase things you recommend.
Email Marketing: The Safest Source Of Traffic
The ultimate way to get website traffic and keep it for a long time is Email Marketing. Every successful business if you ask them what your most important asset is, will tell you: My email list. ”Money is the list”
As you may already know, on your website, you can run things like pop-ups, ribbons, etc that help you collect emails. Even if you don’t use it yet, you probably have seen this surfing through the internet. People collect emails.
However, why they do that?
Emails are a great way to stay in contact with a reader on your website or a potential buyer. Someone may visit your website once but then he will probably forget to visit your website again or he may forget the name of the website etc.
However, if you have his email address, you can email him every time you post a new blog post or a new youtube video or you just want to keep in touch and create a relationship(providing more free value).
So, if you have let’s say a list of 1000 subscribers and you email them for your new blogpost, some of them let’s say 100 will open their email and visit your website. Well done. You have 100 clicks for your website for free already on day 1!
Of course, you can scale this up to more and more subscribers and improve the conversions(people that open the emails and visit your website) but this is more advanced to be discussed now.
It needs split testing, some sort of software and may need a lit bit of money to improve your email conversions. I will make a separate article on that in the near future. Wait for it!
To sum things up, Email Marketing is one of the most powerful tactics to use for growing your website and business in 2020. In my opinion, it is a must for every website that wants to create an audience, even if it takes some time to grow.
Remember. ”Rome wasn’t built in a day”
Now, we move on to more ways of free traffic. As I promised I will give every single way of getting free traffic and scaling your website so you do not need to read or learn anything else.
My recommendation is the most famous tool with over 350,000 users Getresponse, the cheapest and the easiest on the market. I have been using it for 5+ years.
Youtube Traffic
Everyone knows Youtube, right? Except for my grandma, maybe!
YouTube is a video sharing service where users can watch, like, share, comment and upload their own videos.
Guess what? Youtube is free. Totally free and the interesting part is that it is the second-best search engine on the planet after Google. But Google owns Youtube so if you think about it, Youtube is an extension of the best search engine on the planet.
Youtube, as of now, has 1 billion visits per day. 1 Billion.
Why do i tell you these things though?
I just try to remind you how important Youtube is when it comes to ” Traffic” and ”Free”.
Growing a Youtube channel needs time and effort but worths it because you not only can send people to your website but also do a lot more stuff.
You can use affiliate links in the description to make money, you can run youtube ads to make money. Also, if you have many subscribers and visits you can also make money.
You can build the relationship that written text cant build. You upload a video. The power of videos and images is incredible in our era.
Now the most common question I am getting asked. Tasos, I want to start a Youtube channel but I fear to show myself on camera. What do I do?
Well, I ‘ll tell you the truth, as always. It is nice for other people to see your face on camera because the relationship and trust are much easier to be built.
However, there are lots of people that have a huge Youtube success without showing their faces online. You can record your voice and play some Powerpoint slides for example.
You can also use software to help this process, for example, Doodly or anything else but it will cost some money, for Doodly I think it’s 20$ per month but this is obviously optional.
Of course, for the description and the title you should use the keyword research and the SEO tactics we have discussed before, in order to rank the video higher.
Remember, Youtube is a search engine with similar algorithms as Google, so everything should be optimized for keywords and to provide the best possible user experience.
Youtube also has a section on the right side with recommended videos so it promotes videos by itself to help people have more views.
Youtube is a powerful search engine that will definitely help you to scale your website or business to the next level. It needs effort, it needs dedication, it needs motivation but it is able to lead you to success all by itself.
That’s I highly recommend it as an excellent source of free traffic that connects everything together.
People may find you on Youtube, like your content and then visit your website. Then, if they like your content again they may subscribe to your channel and to your email list.
Then, you email them and keep in contact with them to promote your next video and your next post. When relationships and trust are built, they may use your affiliate links to buy anything and you get paid. That’s how marketing works.
This is the only way. Everything else, every shortcut every secret is fake. Marketing is trust. When you are able to build trust and relationships with people, you make money online. That’s it.
Medium Platform To Get More Readers
Last but not least, another way to get traffic to your blog is by using a platform called Medium.
Medium has grown a lot over the last few years from 25M users in 2012 to over 200M users in 2020.
As you can easily understand there is a huge audience here that you need to take benefit of.
Medium is built to reward writers for the quality of their content. Medium allows people to post anything however, they try their best to allow only the nice stuff to be published.
How to use Medium
In order to make a post and publish your content on Medium, you need to make an account or sign up with Facebook.
To create a new post click on your icon on the top right and then click on “New Story” in the sidebar.
It is very easy to create a new story and publish it on Medium. However, you need to follow their guidelines and their way of thinking to succeed.
When people search for something, there is not the latest post that show up but the post they think is the best and most relevant. So, you need to use some very crucial tags for people to be able to find it and you should as always make great content.
Your strategy should be to earn money, get additional reach, and even grow your blog in the process as your Medium followers trickle over to your original blog. This is very important to understand.
I personally think Medium is a very nice way to drive extra traffic to your website. I will try to make a specific tutorial on how to use Medium, even if it is not difficult at all, because I think it will help you.
Conclusion – Drive More Traffic To Your Blog
I wrote this article trying to make it the best and most complete guide you will ever find on how to get free traffic to your blog.
It could be way more detailed but this would be very tiring so I tried to write everything that I think is important with no unnecessary fluff.
There are a lot of free traffic sources to get more traffic to your website. In my opinion, you should use as many of them as you like depending on your preferences and on your daily schedule.
Search Engine Optimization is necessary to succeed. Every article you write should follow all SEO tactics.
Social Media also give you an edge over your competitors and it is relatively easy to do.
Quora and Blog comments are excellent ways to gain more traffic and to create backlinks, necessary for your website’s authority and success.
Email Marketing is huge nowadays. If everything is lost as far as your business is concerned, the email list stays. You can literally start it all again if you have built a great email list.
Youtube is the 2nd best search engine on the planet. If you like it, use it. It’s great.
Medium is a platform that can help you, especially in the beginning to reach a large audience and start it all.
Every way of those is important for success. If you don’t have time for all of them choose what you like and stay focused on it until you succeed.
This is a winner’s mindset. This is our mindset.
This is not a get rich quick scheme. It needs time and effort as anything big in life. Building a website is an asset that can lead you to financial freedom so you have to work for it. You have to work harder than your competitors. The results will come.
