It’s 21 century outside and it means that even your grandma thinks about running her online business (if she doesn’t yet). Millions of tech guys and offline entrepreneurs have launched their websites, celebrated that great achievement and ran into an iceberg named Marketing, that drowned not only the whole project but also their motivation and dreams.
One of the biggest challenges of running an online business, of course, is marketing. And not just because it’s complicated but also because of our perception of marketing. There are so many articles and classes regarding different aspects of marketing that people generally got confused from the first days of learning it.
Therefore we offer you to separate your online marketing thoughts and operations in two spheres: Traffic and Conversion. This might sound very primitive and even wrong marketing insight, but, at least, it’s easy to understand․ Suppose you are waging war on two fronts, from the first war you should fight against all the difficulties to drive people to your website, on the other you should make your website better converting. And once you come from war to alliance you will succeed with marketing.
What we are going to cover today is the very beginning of online marketing – Free Traffic Sources. Once you have launched your website, the first rational question out of whole confusion would be: “well, and how do I get the traffic?” and of course you’d never think about spending a penny on that traffic. In our next articles we will cover other traffic sources as well and, of course, we will speak a lot about conversion.
So this post, for sure, will give you 100% working ideas and brief descriptions of free traffic sources, but bear in mind, if you don’t want to spend money on marketing you will have to spend your time on it.
Meanwhile, please do not blame us for not mentioning SEO and SMM as a free marketing tool, as we think everyone knows that these are sources one should take into consideration when running any online business. So work on those channels and improve them without any doubt and read about 5 new channels below!
Guest Posting (Guest Blogging)
Guest Blogging is when you ask other blog authors to publish the blog post you wrote for them. At the same time, you are giving a value (which can be good ideas, specific information or useful tips) to their readers and getting a benefit for yourself. Properly picked websites with a relevant audience will provide high-quality traffic.
For example, you are providing construction services in California. You find a famous blog about construction, contact them to ask for a guest post-publication. In case you get approved, your blog post should contain valuable information for readers, also don’t forget to mention your company in the article. Despite the fact, you get powerful backlinks that will help your SEO and increasing traffic flow from that blog.
So the first steps are to find websites that are on the same niche as yours. Make sure they keep blogging, find their email and just contact them. Many of those websites would probably have “Write for us” page, thus you would just need to fill the ready-to-go form and submit it! Some of the blog owners will probably ask you for money to publish, many of them may ignore you. The advice, for sure, is one – just keep looking for more blogs and try to get published as much as you can!
Quora
Asking questions and answering them on Quora, or even reading others opinions undoubtedly is an interesting work to do. If you research a little bit you would probably find questions regarding the business you do. To cut it short – people might be looking in quora exactly for the service or product you provide. While checking those questions and answering them, offer or mention your services in your answer.
I can imagine your surprise when you see your competitors under those questions =).
Note that answers should be valuable to get upvotes. As many upvotes your answer gets, the more people see your answer under that very question.
Below is an example how our Sam answered to question “What form maker plugin would you suggest?”
Email Marketing
Yes and yes. Many of you may consider email marketing is no longer effective, but with a strategic approach, email marketing can still generate good traffic. Moreover, it brings one of the best converting audience to websites. Services like SendInBlue provide freemium packages to use, so on the first stage, you just need to collect email data from your audience.
However, email marketing is so widely spread that people get too many promotions and newsletters every day – so resourcefulness and creativity are highly needed to succeed. Check out the affordable email marketing services available in the market today.
Business Directories
Let me bring an example, imagine a creative agency that provides services via their website. They, for sure, have implemented all of the previously mentioned and many other marketing strategies. At the same time, there are companies that gather all the creative agencies in their website or companies that gather all type of the agencies but in exact area, or even listing websites that spent a lot of money to connect businesses with potential clients.
Get listed everywhere that is possible, participate in public competitions. In case if you are providing digital services, get listed on freelance websites, create some products to showcase on different marketplaces. You never know the audience of those websites but the fact is that you are risk-free in the position of spending money.
The best example of business directory probably would be Clutch.co. This is a well-known business directory of companies that are providing services online. Your potential clients may find you filtering by your company location, industry, hourly rate etc.
Vloggers
More and more people are running vlogs (video blog) nowadays, not without reason. The fact that millennials and generation-z are more comfortable to watch videos than reading an article makes it very clear that one can’t succeed in marketing without the help of YouTube or other video sources in the near future (if not already).
Nowadays, video production is not that hard stuff to do like it used to be. We don’t really suggest you to start making videos but to contact vloggers in your field and ask them to involve you in their material.
Look, many of vloggers are making “top 10 of something” videos and getting millions of views. Those videos can be an awesome source of traffic for you, increase your brand awareness.
Many of vloggers would probably ask for money, try to get deal with barter, especially when you provide digital products. Offer your services for free and get on YouTube with the help of vloggers.
Sum Up
As you have probably noticed, this wasn’t A-Z guide on how to increase your traffic for free, but, for sure, good and working strategies to try. Check the compatibility of your business case with these strategies. Pick one or two that suits you the best and get involved in it. Read, try, analyse and again try! Results will come with time, so never give up, keep developing your knowledge, follow us on social networks and subscribe to our newsletter to receive weekly marketing tips & tricks.
You will rock!
