You’ve invested so much of your time, energy and resources to create a user-friendly, mobile responsive, content-rich website. But, why even after so much hard work your site isn’t generating any organic traffic.

Why?

Well, the short answer is because you aren’t promoting it (Don’t hate me, read on). According to a report, 380 new websites are created every minute. That’s equivalent to 3,28,32,000 websites per day. How can you expect individuals to find your site unless you find ways to put it in front of them?

Now there are two ways to generate traffic to any website.

  1. Paid
  2. Free

Well, if you aren’t investing in advertisements for your site’s promotion, then you will have to work hard to promote it manually and trust me that requires a lot of time.

How to Generate Free Traffic to Your Website?

In today’s guide, I’ll walk you through 4 simple but extremely effective strategies that will help you drive targeted traffic to your site without spending a single penny. Remember, what I’m sharing here are the strategies, they are not cheat codes, and so you’ll have to work hard to implement them. If you use the channels discussed in this guide, rest assured, you will see an improvement in your website’s page views. So, let’s dig in!

1. Search Engine Optimisation

Consistency, hard work, quality content, and above all, patience is the key to success in search engine optimisation or in short, SEO.

It’ s by far the most effective strategy to drive unlimited as well as targeted visitors to your website from search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. for free.

The only issue is that SEO requires time and effort to show its effects and benefits. You cannot expect your site to be instantly on the first page because you were mentioned on Forbes or Entrepreneur. It takes Google bots a while to find the link mention, and they need even more time to consider it as a positive factor for your site. It may take 3 to 6 weeks for a backlink to show its true impact on your site’s overall ranking.

Moreover, backlinks are not the only factor considered by Google when ranking a site on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). There are over 200 different factors and many different algorithms that determine your site’s position on search results pages.

Besides building backlinks, you also have to focus on things such as meta titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, content silo and so on.
Remember that in SEO, quality is always more important than quantity.

2. Promote Your Site on Reddit

Reddit, with over 542 million monthly visitors (March 2019) has enormous potential to generate targeted traffic to your site. As for those who are not familiar with Reddit, it is a social site with more than 340 million active monthly users and 1.2 million Sub-Reddit. SubReddit are mostly small groups or forums that are focused on a specific topic such as a celebrity, operating system, game, movie, and even a book.

Although registration, browsing, and commenting on Reddit is free, they have stringent guidelines for people who attempt to spam on this platform by promoting their products or others.

Therefore, if you want to harness the power of Reddit and its community, you need to be a little more creative. Instead of directly displaying links to your site, blog posts, products, etc. you can try to answer other members’ questions, and with that, you can recommend that they visit “your link” for more detailed information.

Another great advantage of promoting your site on this platform is that you get backlinks tracking to your site if your comment gets 5 to 7 upvotes.

3. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging serves three different purposes; first, it lets you establish yourself as an authority in a specific niche by publishing on other authority websites. Second, it helps you build high-quality, niche related backlinks directly to your site (in some cases you don’t have control over the anchor text). Third, it helps you drive targeted traffic back to your site.

When you publish quality content on a “prominent” or a “well-known” site in your niche, you should expect like-minded people commenting, expressing their thoughts and looking for a link to your site to learn more about the topic.

Take a look at the strategy below which you can implement to take your guest blogging campaign to the next level:

  • Look for only niche, relevant websites. So, if you are in fashion next, you should try looking for blogs which share tips and collections on fashion related products. In this case, you can harness the power of tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz.
  • If your target website is an authority in your niche, you’ll have to craft and outstandingly unique pitch because you are not the only marketer who wants to build traffic and backlinks from it.
  • Create the best content possible. You want your content to show that you are knowledgeable in your field, and you share your expert advice on your website.
  • Interact with every individual who shares their thoughts or comments on your posts.

4. Promoting Your Articles on Quora

It is a dominant online community forum with more than 300 million monthly users, 40 million of whom come from the United States and 15 million from India.

Every day, thousands of people from all over the world ask their questions, and thousands of individuals, including experts, scientists, authors, engineers, businessmen, politicians (verified) answer their questions.

In short, you can consider this to be a question-and-answer forum driven entirely by user-generated content.

So, the question is, why should you promote your content on this platform?

Because regardless of your niche, Quora already has a topic of discussion with hundreds of questions and thousands of answers from thousands of users around the world.

You will always find hundreds of like-minded people in this community looking for answers to various questions.

But, remember that Quora has very stringent policies on promotional content just like Reddit. And like Reddit, moderators can either shadowban you, or your content, or completely ban your account and your website on this platform.

So, while trying to promote your site’s URL to generate targeted traffic, try to present yourself as an authority while answering other questions.

Overview

The Internet is overloaded with methods and strategies to generate both free and paid traffic to your site, but it all comes down to the target audience. Just because you have visitors on your website doesn’t mean you’re going to generate revenue or build mailing lists. All you need are visitors who are interested in your niche because they are the ones who can buy products from your affiliate link. They are the ones you would like to have in your mailing list.

So, your ultimate goal should be to generate targeted traffic to your site, and in my opinion, the best way to do this is through search engine optimisation. With SEO, you don’t need to have a budget, and when it is implemented in the right way, you can generate unlimited passive traffic to your site.