The first thing I would like to point out is that the word “FREE” does not exist in the internet marketing game. Either you give up your time or money … sometimes you give up both. You’ll get both back in spades when you’re successful, and you’ll be successful if you dedicate yourself and persevere through the tough times we all inevitably face along the way.
If others have made this work in the past and continue to do so in the future, it makes sense that you would too, unless you’re incredibly lazy or just plain silly. I’m not trying to offend, but the only reason people fail at something in life is because they give up too easily or don’t put in enough effort to get started.
Okay, let’s take a look at the best (in my opinion) free ways to increase your website traffic … the lifeblood of any business.
Guest Post:
If you are not guest posting to popular blogs within your niche right now, you are making a very costly mistake. Guest posting is a very rewarding strategy that can be used to drive traffic to your website. I’ve been writing for popular blogs for years, and while I pay for much of my traffic through other advertising methods, guest posting is still one of the most effective … and it’s free.
Imagine having 2-3 articles published each week on high traffic blogs within your niche? I would expect to receive between 500 and 1000 visitors. That’s a lot of traffic just for a free traffic generation method. Honestly, I can’t think of an easier way to make sales or build an email list than to post as a guest. Aside from paying for traffic, this is hands down the best free strategy in my opinion.
However, Gust posting isn’t just about posting articles to high-traffic websites. You also have the added benefit of being able to communicate with your potential prospects by participating and answering questions in the posts you write. This is a powerful thing. If you write a quality post that highlights your expertise4 in a particular area, you will inevitably have people willing to follow you to your blog, where they can learn more about you.
Guest post traffic can be the most targeted traffic (depending on which blog you’re posting to) and the relationships you can build can benefit you for months and years. I’ve had people keep reading my posts on different blogs and leaving great comments about my work. At one point, my girlfriend thought I had stalkers.
Regardless, this is a powerful strategy and now you have no excuse when it comes to attracting visitors to your website. However, the trick is to be consistent. Two guest posts each week will do wonders for your business. After a couple of weeks, you won’t have a problem posting a guest post in an hour.
Article marketing:
I have to admit that article marketing is not as popular as it used to be. If you are looking to get backlinks from this strategy, you would honestly miss it. What I like about article marketing is that you don’t have to write any additional content to post to directories if you don’t want to. Personally, I write often for my blog, so all I do is wait for my posts to be indexed by Google and then submit them to the top 5 directories with a link to my squeeze page and website.
I have found that to get consistent traffic from article directories, you have to submit a fair amount of content. Just throwing in a couple of items is not going to be enough. As a long-term strategy, this may be good, but in the short term it is not. I have about a hundred articles published in some of the major directories and I get quite a bit of traffic.
Another thing to keep in mind about article submissions is that if your articles are quality, other webmasters can pick them up and post them on their own website with all the links to your website intact. This is good for baclinks, but more importantly for more direct traffic.
Marginal note: After posting your articles to directories, you can convert them to PDF and post them on the document sharing website as well, so more traffic is inevitable over time. The idea is to have your content everywhere.
Posting in forums:
This strategy is one of my favorites to get direct targeted traffic to my website. I won’t go into too much detail here because I have written an article on how this strategy is very effective for website promotion. You can find that article here … Using Forum Marketing to Advertise Your Business.
Suffice to say, I have been using forum marketing for free traffic generation for quite some time and the results are brilliant. That may sound like a stretch, but let me tell you that forum posting, if done correctly, can bring the most targeted traffic to your website today. In the forums there are many people who are looking for answers to the problems that you can solve for them. This is very VERY powerful and a method that you MUST implement ASAP.
Blog commenting:
Another strategy here that used to be used solely for backlinking purposes. I know how effective blog comments can be in generating one-way backlinks because I have used them extensively in the past for that very reason. But I don’t use blogging comments that way anymore. I think the relationship building and direct traffic aspect of this method is much more valuable than getting backlinks.
If your comments are valuable to the readers of that blog, people will click on your “name link” and go directly to your website. However, this is another one you need to be consistent with. Making a weird comment here and there won’t get you much of a hit. Leaving low-quality comments won’t do you much good either.
Think of blog comments as a way to communicate your experience to the blog owner and his loyal readers. If you are an active participant in many blogs, you can build good relationships and make your name known in many ways. Not only that, but this strategy is a great way to gain exposure so that you can offer your services as a guest poster on those particular blogs. Again, it’s about building relationships and getting your name out there.
So there you have 4 great ways to get free traffic back to your website. Of course, there are many more, but these are more than enough to get you started. If you are consistent with these and seek to provide value above all else, you will definitely see great results. Why not establish a 30-day plan to implement all of these strategies? After 30 days, you’ll see which ones work best for you and make adjustments here and there to get the most out of each method.
For your success
