Do you already have your website? Congrats! But it’s just the beginning of your road to success. Now you need to make it visible on the web. I am talking about promotion and hope you won’t be terrified by the word at once.
Not every startup has enough budget to invest it in a paid advertising campaign. Great news! In this article, I’m going to feature some tested strategies of promoting your website and increasing your traffic for free.
Are you ready to put some effort into a promotion that won’t cost you a cent? Then we start.
1.Guest Blogging
With guest blogging, you can establish a presence within your niche, enhance your backlink profile, and make some connections in your industry. All these connections are your secret promotional weapon that works in the long run.
The tactic of guest blogging works very simple. You just write articles for other blogs.
When you write for cool sites in your niche, you are placing content in good places where the right people can easily reach them. Who are those “right people”? Everyone interested in your topic, those who enjoy your content and look for more of it.
This will bring more traffic to your website.
2.Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Everybody knows what is Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. It is the process of getting your website ranked highly on search engines.
What is great about this strategy? It brings consistent, passive traffic to your website. Undoubtedly this is the best website promotion tactic if we think about scalable, long‐term results.
However, on SEO slang, there is a “spike of hope” which rapidly degenerates into a “flatline of nope”. In plain English – you notice a nice traffic boost when the post is first published and promoted, but this referral traffic fades soon, so you need to maintain this strategy.
3.Promotion on Reddit
You need to know how to tap the “front page of the internet” to reap the benefits of its huge potential. For those who don’t know much about Reddit, it is a great place to share and discuss any topic that doesn’t go against the rules of the resource with millions of users.
Reddit is a very special place for marketers. You can’t just burst into it with your blatant advertising. This won’t work. I will tell what will happen. Smart and skeptical redditors will detect you immediately and put a ban on you.
So how to promote on Reddit? Think well before saying something. The info must be really worthy.
4.Promotion on Quora
Quora is also classified as an online forum, but it differs from Reddit. This is an entirely user‐generated question‐and‐answer site. Being a Quora user, you can choose whether you want to ask or answer the questions.
Quora is similar to a knowledge market. It is a good place to answer questions within your niche, establish authority and generate some traffic for your website along the way. The strategy is time-consuming, it requires dedication and some expertise. But don’t worry, if you make everything right, it will pay off.
5.Facebook
Most of us have accounts on Facebook. But using social networks and trying to market there are not the same things.
There are two ways of doing social media marketing – the “organic” way, where you do it through community building/marketing, and the “paid ads” way. The latter is relatively quick to set up and there’s a kind of guarantee that you will reach your goals.
The cool thing about Facebook is that it needs no introduction. The platform is huge, billions of people are using it, and most of the people you know are on it.
So, marketing on Facebook is just a matter of how you target and engage your ideal audience.
6.Twitter
Twitter is considered to be an all‐in‐one approach to hitting your business objectives. What can it be used for? For leads generation, website promotion, increasing of brand awareness, performing customer support, and many other activities.
Twitter is especially helpful for reaching new audiences and keeping track of what people are saying about you.
7.Blogger Outreach
To put it simple, outreach is a strategy where you bring your content in front of bloggers and industry influencers. Your goal is to make them talk about you and link to you.
A lot of people just reach out to their targets and ask them for a link back to their website. But this act can hardly be called a great outreach, which, I believe, is about a lot more than just asking for a backlink.
8.Promotion through creating a free resource
This strategy is all about creating valuable, unique content, which is centered around your brand or product. The content is accessible for free.
It may be a printable PDF guide or a series of tutorial on YouTube. In any case, you need to focus on providing your audience with something valuable, then you’ll start to observe the wonderful word‐of‐mouth advertising at work.
Please remember that quality is the key here. Even free content does not gain traction if it’s unoriginal or low‐quality.
9.Respond to comments and engage in conversation
This last tactic on our list is all about going back to the basics. Sometimes the greatest solutions are the simplest. You can build a relationship with people and spark their interest to your website by initiating a conversation.
Monitor what people say in your niche, what they say about your brand, then strategically enter the discussion where possible.
Over to you
In fact, there are lots of ways to promote your website online. Not all of them are included in the list above.
Which strategy is the most effective for you depends on your unique competitive landscape and the resources at your disposal: timeframe, skills set, team size, etc.
My personal opinion is that SEO proved to be the best long‐term method of traffic generation. It can be done even if you have no budget at all and bring passive, scalable results, whereas most of the other methods are one‐off and require consistent effort.
What do you think? Did any of these strategies bring you huge success or your miraculous method was not mentioned above?
Please write your stories in the comments below.