- Optimize your site for search engines for free traffic
- Frequently update the contents of your site
- Take advantage of social bookmarking sites for free traffic
- Use your Twitter and Facebook accounts
- Get links with other sites in your niche
- Use any chance to promote your site for free
- Create a free product or service
- Use viral content
- Use offline promotion
- Include your URL in your signature
Search engines are easiest and most efficient way to attract traffic for free. This makes it utmost important for you to optimize your site to get it on the first page for the targeted keywords. SEO is the most powerful tool to get traffic and with little time and effort, you can easily boost your traffic. You can check our SEO tutorials to familiarize yourself with SEO in a nutshell.
The only secret to keep visitors coming back again and again is to get great content and keep updating your website. Keep following the “Content is King” rule and you will not only have recurring visitors, who will keep coming back to check out the new content, but search engines will automatically love your site. There are no shocking secrets to get traffic, good content is and will always be the prerequisite to getting traffic.
The popular social bookmarking sites over the internet can help you to get traffic for free. You can check out our How to get Traffic from Social Bookmarking sites article, where you can learn to divert heavy traffic to your site from sites like Digg, Delicious, etc.
Using social networking to popularize your site is another very powerful method. You can advertise on networks such as Facebook or Twitter, or use your popularity to attract traffic in amounts that can even surpass traffic coming from Google or other search engines. It is tough to gain such popularity on Twitter and get such large amounts of fans and supporters on Facebook, but the results are generally worth all the time and effort.
You can attract a lot of free traffic to your site from other sites of the same niche and it even helps in SEO. Getting your link on other popular sites of the same niche, especially without the ‘nofollow’ attribute can get you large amounts of hits. The nofollow attribute renders the link useless for SEO but still can get you ample traffic if placed on a popular site. You can get list of sites within your same niche where you can place your link, you can check out the Backlink Builder tool. A link at a visible location on a popular website can alone get you thousands of visitors. On the contrary, linking to bad neighbors can harm your ranking and popularity. So choose wisely.
Free methods to promote your website can even help if used properly. Methods like free classified ads, submission in directories and listings etc. can help you promote your site for free. The free ways to promote don’t usually work that good but if they were used correctly and smartly, they can also pay up well. So don’t neglect them.
Your website is bound to attract free traffic is you provide useful content. Create quality content adhering to the niche of your site. You can provide tons of advice and tips but providing free service or product can attract a lot of people. Eventually, when the service or product becomes popular, the traffic will increase automatically and chances are people will visit other sections on your site too.
Free products and services can be used in the form of viral content to get free traffic to your website. Viral content spreads like a virus as users pass it on to their friends or post it on different sites and promote it for free if they really like it. Your only job is to create some really good content and submit it to a few popular sites and let users spread it for you. The most popular forms of viral content are hot videos or presentations and images. Sometimes a really good article can work too.
Offline promotion can be used to make your brand popular and can attract a lot of free traffic if you know how to use it. This method is scarcely used to promote websites and online services but some of the traditional ways to do so are by printing the URL on your business card, distribute pamphlets or advertisements, using souvenirs or sticking the URL on company vehicles. You can even sell your product merchandise such as T-shirts or mugs with your logo to popularize your brand.
A way that’s often missed out when getting free traffic:
If you are a popular member in a forum related to your niche, you can use your URL as your signature to get traffic for free. Popular forums get heavy traffic and whenever someone reads one of your posts and like it, they tend to click on the link in your signature to know more about to or even read more about the topics on the same niche.
Getting traffic is a vast and continuous process. It cannot happen overnight. However, the ways provided above, if implemented properly, can get lots of free traffic for your website.
