When you’re developing a new website it’s hard to see any short-term wins when most marketing tactics are long-term strategies. The problem is it takes time to get the ball rolling and effectively drive traffic to your website.
At the end of the day, marketing is really about getting the word out about your company and product. You don’t need to wait for articles to rank to see some quick results when there are alternative means of getting your traffic sales going.
Some tactics may require you to shell out a few bucks while others I’m about to list are absolutely free. Read on about some creative ways you can drive traffic without needing to know too much about SEO.
Leave comments on popular websites
The first tip is to comment on really popular websites with an enormous amount of traffic. When websites with huge followings publish an article they can get hundreds of thousands of people reading these articles in a short period of time.
You can capitalize on their subscribership by being among the first to comment on an article. Most comments allow you to link the URL of your website from your name.
Avoid shallow comments like “Great post! Keep ’em comin!” These types of comments will not get you noticed.
Try to give an insightful comment that actually holds some value.
Thanks, Brian for all your hard work on this topic. I find that a lot of what you publish works for you because of your reputation and authority. For smaller website owners, it’s much more difficult to get companies to link to our content because they’ve never heard of us before.
It doesn’t matter how extensive and in-depth our ultimate guide is on any given topic-people aren’t going to care as much. Broken link building gives us that spark that we need to attract a little more responses from companies that we’re reaching out to through email.
It also helps to attempt to contact the people you’re about to pitch to or ask for a link beforehand on social media. Even comment on one of their posts or articles they’ve recently published. It’s the only way to break the ice before in order to get noticed and increases the likelihood of a response
Christian Carere
This comment is insightful and is written from experience on link building through outreach.
People will relate to it and find value in the message that’s being offered. Of the thousands of people that end up reading the article with your comment on it, you will get a percentage of that traffic, if your comment is insightful enough to warrant someone clicking on your name.
With a one-sentence comment, people won’t even know you exist.
Be sure to choose websites that are within your niche and have a lot of organic traffic flowing through its pages.
Seek out Instagram influencers
Have you ever wondered how the Kardashians make so much money? They are massive influencers on social media.
With 199 million followers, one post from Kylie Jenner about a product and those products sales are through the roof.
It’s no secret that you can pay Influencers to mention your product in a post.
If you’re seeking out influencers that have a million followers, it’s going to get expensive pretty quick.
In fact, even if those influencers have 100,000 followers, you’ll be paying quite a bit of money from the get-go.
The secret is to look for micro-influencers who have 10-17k followers. For a few hundred bucks you can get them to post a story about your product.
An Instagram story allows viewers to swipe up and go directly to your website. This option is also cheaper than a post because stories disappear after 24 hours.
This is a measurable strategy to drive traffic because you can get good data on the effects of every campaign you run. Since the story is only 24 hours you can see the direct impact that your influencer is having on your product sales and website traffic.
Invite guest authors
Without going too deep into how “content is king” let’s start by just accepting that fact and consider that in order to get the best content, you might need to pay some decent writers.
You can advertise guest posts by publishing a “write for us page”, but if your blog isn’t big enough to attract really good writers, the truth is you’re going to get a lot of low-quality pitches and submissions.
Invite writers who have experience in writing in your niche and have published articles on your topics in the past year. You can offer to pay for every 500 words and ask for articles anywhere from 1500-3000 words.
One of the key hiring criteria is that you’ll want your writers to have a high number of followers in their social network. The idea is that they share their articles with their network when each article goes live.
This gets your website in front of a lot of new faces every time a new writer is hired which can drive traffic when they publish content on your website. You can keep this tactic going for as long as you want to keep building your audience.
This tactic develops your social media network and increases the traffic to your site.
More traffic to high-quality content usually means more backlinks so you can expect your domain authority to rise as well as the value of being a writer on your blog.
Once your website has enough traffic and domain authority you won’t need to pay guest authors to publish content on your site-they’ll be asking you for the privilege of writing for your blog.
Find affiliates
Affiliate marketing can get your products in front of a huge audience if you’re set up to do it well. Rather than go through the whole setup of listing your product on an affiliate network and trying to get affiliates to pick it up-go straight to the source of traffic.
Piggyback off of your competitors to find affiliates who are already promoting their product. For example, type into Google:
[your competitors name] vs.
You should see a number of options in the drop-down menu. Search for these comparisons to find articles that have already been written by affiliates.
Rather than setting up an entire affiliate campaign, offer to pay the author to insert your product within the article.
Or better yet, pay them to write a new article comparing your product with the most well-known competitor in your niche.
You might be wondering “Why help my competition?”
It’s true, you may be conceding some sales to your competition with this method, however, you’re also gaining more search visibility at their expense because there are already people searching for comparison articles on their product.
By going directly to the affiliates, they get to make more money and you get the luxury of using their traffic to your advantage.
Be a Twitter helper
One tactic that has proven successful in the content you publish on your site is to try to help people above and beyond what anyone else would do. When you’re genuinely making an effort to help people with their issues, people will genuinely want to help you in return.
Use Twitter to find people tweeting about the various aspects of problems that your product solves. Rather than tell them about your product, tell them how to solve their problem without promoting yourself in the slightest.
It’s a noticeable trait to be genuinely engaged in providing free advice and consultation. When people see how much you’re giving without taking it comes full circle.
This strategy isn’t a short term strategy, but it will pay off when you least expect it. The whole point is to do this without expecting a payoff.
The perspective of being of service needs to be genuine, to begin with, so if you’re counting your tweets and the number of times you’ve helped people, you’re going to get salty if there’s no immediate return.
Help people unconditionally in order to establish a reputation as someone who cares about their clients and knows their industry inside out.
Offer tools and scripts
People love free tools-especially when they’re useful for accomplishing common tasks they couldn’t do otherwise. Free tools are an excellent way to drive traffic and build long-term backlinks from people who find your tool useful.
You might be thinking “I’m not a programmer and I don’t have money to invest in a tool”
No problem.
Go to Code Canyon for a list of tools you can pick up for literally next to nothing. This website offers scripts and codes you can install on your site to provide visitors with free tools.
Obviously, the more involved the tool is, the more you’ll need to pay. But installing something like a mortgage calculator can literally cost you less than five bucks.
The effect of having one on your real estate website will land you thousands of extra visitors and backlinks.
Just look at the traffic and backlinks for Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker.
Ubersuggest is absolutely crushing it.
Offer a free tool that’s worth using for more backlinks and visitors to your website.
Join a social group
Seek comfort in the masses. Look for groups on social media that share quality information and can help network your business.
You can find a group on Facebook in just about any type of niche.
Avoid groups that have millions of members. It will be too hard to get noticed and they tend to be more spammy.
Stick to groups that are more private with at least 1000 members. If you’re a new member, don’t promote your business at all within the first 10 posts or comments you make.
Your first impression should be made with quality comments and insightful posts that aren’t promotional.
As you gain a little more credibility, you can then drop links to your website when it’s appropriate and will help in explaining a point.
Share members’ posts on your social network and they will do the same for you.
Be social, engaging and interact with your members on a level that’s social as opposed to promotional. Being genuine and a real live human being tends to more effective than a content posting robot when it comes to being able to drive traffic.
Stay consistent with your efforts
Every strategy mentioned will work to drive traffic to your website. If you can commit to making the efforts required to execute these tactics consistently for a 12 week period, you will see the difference in the number of visitors that are landing on your site. For a no-obligation consultation on your website, feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.
Related reading: Why Consider SEO During Website Design?
