Fahim Ahmed
The Internet has become the most visited destination in this era of digitization. It has changed the world in so many ways. Especially it has caused a paradigm shift in the world of business.
If you are an entrepreneur, it has become imperative to have an online presence. And if you don’t then it’s time to revisit your plan. Most of the world’s population has Internet access which means more focus and attention for your business.
Why Do You Need More Traffic
If you have a brick-and-mortar store you might also want to have a website to showcase what you are offering. It will give your business a solid boost. All you need to grow your business on the Internet is virtual visitors. These are people that are keenly interested in buying the thing that you’re selling. It doesn’t have to be a physical object or product. You can share ideas, stories, and news to grab an audience and make money out of it.
And even if you are not selling any products online, having an online presence can improve your business credibility and help it establish itself as a brand.
How To Get More Website Visitors
There are effectively two ways that you can drive traffic to a website. The first way is driving website traffic through organic means. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to drive traffic to your site. It involves things like search engine optimization, setting up a blog, social media marketing, and so on and so forth.
You can also drive traffic to your site through digital marketing. This is another popular way to get more online visitors. But digital marketing and online advertisements are expensive and momentary. So if you don’t want to spend a fortune on attracting website visitors, you should try the organic way.
But it is not so easy to attract organic traffic to your site. You have to be very careful with your strategy and make sure you don’t lose money instead of earning. Many people use digital marketers to assist them to expand their businesses.
Others take the traditional route to increase website traffic. There are a lot of ways you can get traffic to your website. Some companies even spend millions of dollars on online advertising to increase brand awareness or sell products. But the best way to sell something is by not wasting a single dime on marketing.
And for that miracle to happen you need organic traffic.
In this era of the Internet, there is a lot of misinformation and fake news circling around—scammers luring people to get money out of them in any way possible. There are digital marketers who are selling expensive courses that claim to teach “proven traffic gaining system” or “how to make money online”.
But in reality, most of it is a hoax, and you will spend more money on these crappy courses than actually earn money from your website. And please don’t try to do black hat SEO using some cheap gig from Pakistan or India. This will only make things worse and you can be blacklisted from search engines like Google.
Instead of running after these clickbait titles and courses, let us look into what you can do yourself that will help you increase your website’s traffic organically and help you better rank in search engines.
How To Drive Website Traffic Organically
In a sea of utterly overwhelming digital overload, it’s difficult to stand out. The internet is overcrowded with information and there are over 3.5 billion searches per day. But only pages that rank at the top usually get the most traffic and make loads of money.
It won’t be easy for you to compete with well-established sites like Amazon or Alibaba. If you are just starting out chances are you won’t even get a single website visitor in a day. But don’t worry about it. Most of the big online blogs and companies also didn’t have any visitors just like you.
But they were determined to grow their business and didn’t give up. It is becoming difficult to drive traffic to new websites as there are so many websites with the same information available already. To rise above that noise, you need to understand some basic principles.
This isn’t just about implementing the latest secret for driving traffic or hacking your way to the top of Google’s search results pages. No. This is about instituting tried-and-tested methods that the biggest online marketers use to create authority and drive traffic over time.
How Long Does It Take To Get Organic Traffic
There are a lot of methods that you can use but it is much preferred if you concentrate on no more than 7 methods. So choose accordingly the ones that will suit your business most and focus on those methods to see results.
Keep in mind that you won’t see any overnight changes. You will have to be patient and keep working on your website to make it more user-friendly and interactive. If you do everything right and optimize your content properly, you might see traffic coming your way in 4-6 months. But for that, you need to improve your website’s authority and build some credibility within your niche.
Although these methods work for both E-commerce and Blogs. But when you are selling products online, you need to give more effort and look for some other form of social media marketing to get the best result and increase your sales.
Before we begin, you need to make a list of your target audience and if you are running a blog make sure you select a niche and work accordingly. That being said let’s dive into what you can do to increase your website traffic organically.
There are a lot of conventional ways by which you can drive traffic to your website. But you will have to understand the fundamentals behind just how traffic works. Some of the most common ways to drive organic traffic to your website are using SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and so on and so forth.
While it is awesome to have free organic traffic, it is much more important to turn this organic traffic into returning website visitors. For that, you need to have enriching content or products that people crave.
There are a lot of tools that can help you grow and keep track of your traffic. Make sure to use them wisely. Remember, if you’re not tracking the traffic that’s coming to your website, you’re wasting your time marketing online.
Organic Traffic Methods That Bring Result
Now that you have an idea about the ways you can drive traffic to your website, let’s look into the strategies that you can use to get these visitors and gain organic traffic. You don’t have to pay a single dime for it but you will have to spend a lot of time.
And since time is more valuable than money, in that it can only be used once then it’s gone forever, there’s still a significant cost involved depending on your skill level. Here are some proven formulas that will help you get those free organic traffic.
1. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you are running an eCommerce store or a blog or any website and you have no idea about SEO you are already losing a lot of money and organic traffic. SEO is the process of getting “free”, “organic” or “natural” traffic from search results on search engines like Google or Bing. Most of the organic traffic that your website will be getting is from very well search engine optimization. It helps you achieve greater visibility and higher rankings in organic search results.
2. Write Exclusive Content
Always remember “content is king”. Keep creating unique content for your audience to keep them engaged with your website. If you can provide information that is very useful and insightful your website visitor will cherish it and they will keep coming back for more. Some people use clickbait to attract new website visitors but this is not an ideal strategy to follow. Although try to use a catchy or informative title to let your visitors know about your website content.
3. Get Engaged On Quora
Quora is the most useful and effective platform for your website to get free traffic. It is an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, followed, and edited by Internet users. Get engaged on quora and help people find a solution to their problems or questions that are related to your blog or content. It is a great platform for people to find out about your content and website and you will eventually get some quality organic traffic.
4. Showcase On Instagram
Instagram is widely popular for sharing photos and connecting with people from all over the world. So why not use this opportunity to showcase your product? If you are selling something online, Instagram can be your best tool to present it to the world. Post some amazing photos and stories and keep people engaged with your brand. Many people have built multi-million dollar businesses solely by using Instagram. So give it a try.
5. Be A Content Creator On YouTube
YouTube is the second most popular search engine and is owned by Google. It is a great source for driving traffic and earning some extra money. People love to watch videos online rather than read a blog. So this could be your chance to gain some exposure for your business, blogs, or yourself from YouTube. Make some videos related to your blog and publish them with the link in the description section. People will visit your website to learn more about that topic and you will get a lot of free organic traffic just from YouTube.
6. Try Guest Posting
Guest blogging is a fantastic way to promote your content from other websites like yours while writing some content for them. It is a great way to get in touch with other bloggers like you and cross-post on each other’s platforms to get free content and free organic traffic. It also increases your website authority on search engines and helps you with SEO.
7. Post On High Authority Websites
It is very similar to guest blogging. Find some high-authority websites and see if they allow guest blogging. Websites like Medium.com allow people to write posts and also allow link-dropping. External links from high authority sites help your website to have a greater presence on the Internet and help you rank higher. You will also get tons of free organic traffic as they have millions of active users.
9. Dominate Email Marketing
One of the easiest ways to get free traffic is through email marketing. It’s free of cost and takes very little time. But for that to happen you need to have subscribers on your website who are willing to read about what you have to say or buy what you sell. Create a lead magnet and build a sales funnel immediately if you haven’t already. Offer your customers some free ebooks or products and use contact forms to get your customer’s or subscribers’ emails. Keep them informed about your new post or product through email marketing using tools like Mailchimp.
10. Create A Free Online Course
Creating free online courses might help you shed some light on your website and you can get some organic traffic. People love free courses and if you can provide something valuable they would want to see it. Make sure you are an expert on the topic that you choose and give as much information as possible. You can also upload courses on websites like Udemy.
11. Publish Quiz And Trivia
People like taking quizzes about almost anything. It is a really easy way to get some organic traffic. You can quiz your audience about a tv show that you recently watched or on any opinion that is trending. Keep the topics relevant and you will see a lot of traffic on your website organically.
12. Create a Great User Experience
It doesn’t matter how fancy your website is. If you do not have high-quality content and provide a great user experience you won’t be getting a lot of traffic on your website. For that, your website needs to be smooth and easy to navigate. Your audience should be able to get the necessary information that they are looking for. And your website should not redirect your audience to any other crappy sites. Make sure your pages load instantly and all your posts are up to date.
13. Keep Up With The Trends
When your competitors are busy doing SEO you can get some organic traffic by researching trends. You can write a post about what’s been trending and let it do the magic for you. You will get a good amount of traffic from writing about the stuff that’s been trending because people are continuously searching for that topic. But this traffic is just a one-time thing but you can get some leads from there too using a contact form. You can know about the latest trends using the Google trend platform.
14. Hire a Content Creator
Sometimes it is really difficult to write about any topic. After hours of brainstorming, you might end up banging your head on the desk for ideas and topics to write. And even if you manage to write something it might not be tasteful. So why not hire a professional to write for you? Yes, you can do that too. Just hire a professional writer or blogger and pay them to write for your website. You will get top-class content and a lot of website visitors.
15. Collaborate With Influencers
Influencers are the new marketing tool that every big brand is using. Although some might think it is unconventional, everyone will agree on the result. Influencers can help you promote your product or business among their followers. It is a very easy way to reach out to so many people at once with a single post. So try to collaborate with influencers and build your brand image.
16. Make the Website Responsive
Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket. A recent study shows that people are engaging more using their mobile devices rather than their desktop. So to get hold of a maximum number of organic traffic your website has to be responsive. It has to be mobile-friendly. If your website is not responsive Google will not index your website. So make sure you can reach out to as many people as possible.
17. Use CDN And Caching
Your website speed is a huge concern when it comes to ranking in search engines. All search engines eliminate pages that are very slow and unresponsive. 0.8 seconds of load time is considered good speed and 50% of the websites load before 2.9 seconds. Try using a CDN to improve your load time. And also use a caching plugin to better serve your web pages.
18. Post Content On Reddit
Another great way to drive traffic to your site is through Reddit. Reddit is a very popular platform for sharing ideas and content and especially memes. You can share your content with millions of people on Reddit and engage in conversation with them. It is a good source of organic traffic.
19. Coupon And Promo Code
If you are an affiliate marketer you can use this chance to make money and drive traffic to your website. You can offer promo codes for all the affiliate websites you have signed up for. People always look for this kind of promo code and coupons.
20. Use Free Giveaways
Free giveaways are always interesting. You can find a lot of subscribers doing giveaways without spending a dime. You can offer your website visitors an ebook if they signup as a subscriber. This way you will get their email and they will have a book to read.
21. Allow Guest Posting
Allowing guest posting opens a lot of opportunities for your website. If your contributors can post useful pieces of information or blogs your website will have credible content. The more content you have the more chances of getting organic traffic. Websites like medium get millions of monthly hits.
