7 ways to promote your website for free
Tips on boosting your website traffic without spending a penny
You’ve successfully built a website, launched a few campaigns, created several landing pages to promote them, but realize you aren’t attracting as many visitors as you have wished to. What’s the issue here, you might wonder. Well, building a successful website isn’t just about making it pretty and launching it, it is about attracting visitors and making them interested in what you have to offer.
Promoting doesn’t necessarily mean spending tons of money. In fact, you can even do it without spending any! Here are seven effective methods that anyone can use to boost their website traffic for free.
BLOGGING
Blogging is a good way to start attracting new visitors and potential customers. Write easy-to-follow guides, share interesting ideas and insights, give useful tips, provide content that is of interest to your readers. However, it’s not just any type of content, but relevant content.
A consistent and relevant theme is the key to producing a high-quality blog, after all, people don’t just randomly go to your website without any purpose. If your website (your business) is about headphones, you could be writing headphone reviews for your blog. If it’s a photography online portfolio, you can create a blog with photography guides, equipment lists, and product reviews. It’s all about establishing credibility, showcasing your expertise, expanding your outreach, and building up your brand.
Having quality content is the first step to promoting your website. Without content, you won’t be able to share it with others and people wouldn’t know who you are. And if people are interested in what you are writing or producing, they are very likely to share it with others. Indirectly helping you to spread out your content and potentially beginning more people to your website.
GUEST BLOGGING
Writing a blog on your own website is definitely a good thing, but at the same time, with so many people blogging worldwide, you might soon realize that actually, no one is really reading it.
So what can you do? One simple way, you wouldn’t need to spend a penny but might require some effort to persuade others, is to write in someone else’s blog. There’s a saying right, “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Go and get your name out there, and hopefully if the people like your content, you will be able to attract and bring them over to your website. While I can’t guarantee you that this will definitely work, plus it will take some time before you can see the results, but at least it’s worth trying to see if this works for you.
EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing, such as newsletters or direct marketing, is a good way to keep engaging with your audiences about anything—new product launches, promotional sales, product features, company updates, etc. It is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your website.
Source: Affinity
People won’t necessarily be visiting your website on a regular basis, but will most likely be checking their email regularly (or even daily). According to Statista, there are around four billion email users worldwide in 2020, and the number is expected to rise to 2.6 billion by 2025. The likelihood for readers to come across your content or promotion via email is just much higher than pure direct access to your website.
No matter how you are designing your email communication, just make sure to add a call-to-action and attach your website link. After all, the end goal is to drive more traffic to your website and, eventually, boost your website ranking to attract more.
GIVEAWAYS
Giveaways tab into human emotions. The thought of having a chance to win something, the happiness of getting something for free, the feel-good emotion of doing something good, creating giveaways will be able to satisfy those needs.
Giveaways could be of any kind, a valued coupon/gift card, free products, free service, etc. This tactic usually generates quick and high traffic over a period of time, and it is up to how you would want to make use of this opportunity. For example, create a mailing list for upcoming or exclusive deals.
How to do a giveaway depends on the platform that you will be using. But in general, it will usually involve using social media since what you want is to boost engagement and convert it to traffic.
INFOGRAPHICS
I’ve previously talked about blogs, so why bring up infographics specifically? Creating good quality infographics (and/or relevant images) adds colors to your text article, it is visually much more interesting and engaging with readers. Not only that, but infographics have a huge potential to be shared by others (hopefully also credited), especially since you need to spend time to digest the content, summarize, visualize, and create the graphic. Also, you are likely to be able to use it on social media too. Here’s an example by Venngage who surveyed 200 marketers on their visual content strategy in 2020:
Source: Venngage
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search engine optimization (SEO) is probably the best method when it comes to promoting your website “for free”. The higher you rank on search engine results pages (SERP), the more likely people can find your website when enquiring for answers. You generally would want to focus on two big aspects when it comes to SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO refers to everything you will see on your website—written articles, graphics, videos, meta descriptions, tagging. Some would even include the technical aspect under this category, such as website structure and web design.
Off-page SEO refers to everything done outside your website, which would not affect the structure, scheduling, and publishing of your content within your domain. This includes external linking, backlinks, audience engagement, social media, etc.
Last but not least, social media, the 21st century standard of communication. Why did I place social media at the very end? Not because it starts with “S” (well, it just so happens that it’s at the end according to alphabetical order), but because of everything that I’ve mentioned above, all could make use of the power of social media to reach out and engage with more people. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, each already have billions of users. With the “right tactics” and “right method”, you can easily tap into billion of existing users and start promoting.
But here’s a catch, there is no one-size-fits-all content and tactics for these social media platforms, you would need to tweak and customize your social media content to fit different purposes:
Facebook – text (at least a few sentences) with a visual component, biggest user base among all social media platforms.
LinkedIn – more formal tone, best for reaching out to professionals.
Twitter – short and sweet with a gif or image, best for engaging with audiences.
Instagram – nicely designed graphic or edited photo, relatively higher visual standard, primarily for reaching out to young adults aged between 18 and 34.
You don’t necessarily need to spend tons of money to promote your website. Luckily there are already tons of available guides online, and with the right tactics, you’ll also be able to boost your website traffic and generate more leads for free. But before we go, let’s sum up the seven methods that you can use to promote your website without hiring a specialist right away.
- Blogging
Publish new and relevant content to capture the interest of your potential customers. - Guest Blogging
Reach out to other’s platforms to attract their readers to your website. - Email Marketing
Updating your audiences regularly with emails straight to their mailboxes, maintaining a long relationship with them. - Giveaways
Giving something away for free, able to instantly boost your website traffic and generates leads over a period of time. - Infographics
Create visually interesting and compelling graphics not only to attract readers, but other people will also be interested to share and credit your content in their article. - SEO
Optimize your website so it can rank higher in search results and be more visible to the public. - Social Media
Best free promotional method, can easily connect with billions of existing users to promote your website.
There are plenty of ways to promote your website for free, you aren’t limited to using one but multiple ways to achieve your target. More importantly, choose the “right” method for you based on your goal and capability. Regardless of which methods you’ve decided to take, I hope this article could give you a sense of what you can do to improve your website traffic.
And if you’re still at the beginning stage of your website building journey, feel free to check out this guide to know more about website building and tips on how to choose the “right” platform for you—content management systems like WordPress, or website builders such as Website.com.
SOCIAL MEDIA