So, you finished building your website! Congratulations! Now people are going to start visiting it, right? Unfortunately, this is wrong.
More...
Just creating a website and waiting for other people to find it is a passive strategy that doesn’t work.
And it doesn’t work simply because nowadays there are millions of websites out there that you have to compete against.
And in order to compete against them you need to have a strategy in place to attract traffic to your website.
Luckily for you, in this article I’m going to share 5 free ways to drive traffic to your website.
Organic methods of advertising
All the methods described below are called organic methods of advertising. 'Organic advertising' means that you promote your business without having to spend money.
The only things you need are:
- Time/effort
- A device with access to the Internet
- A website
So, let’s get started!
1. Facebook Groups
The concept in this strategy (as well as in the next one) is that you go online and try to find out where your ideal potential clients hung out.
A great place where your potential clients are seeking help by asking questions is Facebook Groups.
What you should do is to go join some Facebook groups, read other members’ problems/questions and help them by replying to their questions and providing value to them.
Do that consistently every single day and after a couple of months some of those people will reach out to you and ask you if you offer paid services.
Besides that, you can also start promoting your business inside the group, but you should never do that from the moment you join the group.
You need again to wait a couple of months until people in the group trust you and value your opinion.
I know that's a long time, but again this is a free method.
And also think about how many people you will have helped before you find a client with this method!
If you would feel satisfaction with helping 99 people for free until you find 1 client, then this method is for you.
2. Quora
You can employ a similar to the Facebook Groups strategy in Quora. Quora is a website where people ask questions/concerns they have, and other people give them answers.
Imagine it like a huge forum organized in topics of interest.
So, what you can do is first create a profile on Quora and add all your info including your website link.
Then you select your topics of interest as the ones that your target audience may be interested in (e.g. Married Life or Depression).
After that you browse these topics and start looking at what people are asking about. Chances are that you will be able to reply to quite some people.
So, once again, if you help a lot of people by replying to their questions then some of them will visit your Quora profile and from there they can find your website link.
Another thing you can do in case you have a blog is to also link your blog posts inside your Quora answers.
But don’t just start spamming people with links. A clever way to do that is to type a short reply and then at the end of your reply to say something like: I’ve written more on this topic in this blog post, you can check it out, if you want.
Just like with the Facebook Groups strategy, you shouldn’t start sharing links from day 1. Give it a month or two until you start including links in your answers.
3. Email Marketing
Having a list of emails of (potential) clients is one of the most powerful and cheapest ways to promote your business.
And once you collect emails into a list you can start sending emails of useful and promotional content to your contacts.
This is a powerful method, because people will always look at their emails.
It's not like social media, where a post you make may or may not be seen by your followers.
You can create your email list manually into an excel sheet or you can even use software to automate the process of collecting and sending emails.
You can even create sub-lists so as your content looks more relevant to different people inside your main list.
So, you can have a list of all the people who have expressed interest in your services (Master list).
And you can have a smaller list that only contains your clients.
So, if for example you want to communicate something to all your clients, you write your email, you select the Clients list, you click a button and BOOM... email sent!
4. Blogging
An awesome way to get traffic to your website is by writing blog posts.
It’s the best way that people can find you on Google (and other search engines) without you having to spend money on ads.
Why? 2 Reasons:
- Google loves text! The way your website appears in Google results is that Google is crawling your website. This means that Google executes some scripts that go through your website’s code and scans it.
And if there is enough text then your ranking improves.If there is not enough text and your website has mostly images or videos, then you don’t rank well.
- Besides just text, Google also loves text that gets updated regularly. This means that if you have a static website that you once built, and you left it out there without updating it, then Google penalizes you for this by ranking you low in the search results.
If you, however, have a blog then your website gets updated (usually weekly) then Google notices that and they reward you with a higher score in the search results.
In addition, if you combine blogging with email marketing you can create a very loyal base of followers to whom you can send weekly email updates about your new blog posts.
5. SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website so as to rank high on Google search results.
The way to do that is to first do some research on what people are searching on Google. By doing that you will be able to find some keywords that people search related to your niche/business.
The ideal is to find keywords that are not very competitive (not too many people are looking them up).
When you find these keywords you job next is to include them in your website so as when people search on Google (and other search engines) your website appears in the results.
There are also other techniques to improve your SEO. For example, when you include images on your website you should always include the Alt tag, which is basically a code text description of images.
Without the Alt tag the Google algorithm doesn’t read anything from your image. Remember that it can only read text.
Consistency is key
They key to success for all 5 methods mentioned above is consistency. You don’t have to use all of them. Use the ones you like the most or the ones that you think are easier for you.
But with the ones you pick you should be consistent. Execute them everyday and don’t expect results from the 1st day.
Are you using any of the 5 free ways mentioned above? Do you use any other that I missed? Let me know in the comments below.
Until next time.
