Traffic is the currency in the digital marketing world. No matter you are running a blog, an online shop, or a popular social media account, gaining traffic is crucial for you to make money online.
Many businesses now tend to look for paid traffic sources and use advertising as an important part of their marketing strategies, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. If your campaign stands out in the highly competitive market, it can indeed deliver incredible results.
However, not every business has enough budget and a smart advertising strategy. Don’t worry. There are various free traffic sources that can be used to drive high-quality traffic without any budget.
Let’s dive in now!
Should I Use Free Traffic Sources？
The answer is absolute YES, for all types of businesses, whether or not they have an adequate advertising budget.
The fact is, if you are willing to invest enough time, effort and patience, free traffic sources can be a gold mine, even outperforming paid traffic sources.
Take paid search vs. organic search as an example. According to Terakee’s data, the organic desktop listings still produce 20X more clicks than PPC ads, even the ads sit high on the search engine result page.
It is fair to say that paid traffic doesn’t hold a candle to free traffic. That’s the reason why businesses of all sizes should leverage free traffic sources to get long-term results.
Top 6 Free Traffic Sources
In this section we will explore the TOP 9 of the best free traffic sources to help you drive more traffic to your website.
1. Organic Search
Organic Search has dominated website traffic for a long time. According to Brightedge, organic search accounts for more than 50% of all website traffic, surpassing paid traffic and other channels combined.
In fact, talking about organic search is talking about search engine optimization (SEO). In order to make your website rank high and have more online visibility and visits, it is imperative to make SEO a necessary part of your marketing strategy.
Optimizing a website is a complex and challenging job. It takes time, patience and lots of effort to achieve the final result you want. However, once done well, you can witness an incredible result with spending a cent.
Related Article: SEO Tips to Increase Organic Traffic
2. Email
Email marketing is one of the most targeted sources of free traffic with a high conversion rate. It is also one of the best methods to boost business revenue with a high ROI.
Strictly speaking, email marketing isn’t totally free, as the first step into email marketing is to find a paid email service provider such as Mailchimp. However, it is on the free traffic sources list because it needs you to invest a lot of time, planning and patience just like other free traffic channels.
Just build Your email database by offering a lead magnet, segment the audience, and create catchy email newsletter series.
3. Social Media
It’s no secret that marketers spend tons of time perfecting their social media feeds and business profiles these days. With countless users on these platforms you can easily reach prospects and customers for your business, build devoted brand followers and even drive leads and sales.
While many businesses tend to pay for social media ads, you can still achieve remarkable success on social media with little or no budget – by content marketing.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Tik Tok… The target audience of these channels vary. So first, you should have an overall strategy to meet your business goal, choose proper platforms, create engaging social content, and nourish your loyal audience.
Check out this article to learn more about making money by social media affiliate marketing.
4. Quora
Quora is a community-fueled Q&A site with more than 300 million monthly users. Such an information-focused site can be a great marketplace for businesses looking to build up a professional brand and become an industry authority.
With Quora, you can directly answer any questions about your industry, business, or products. You can show your expertise on around 400,000 topics on Quora. You can also get traffic back to your website from Quora by including your website links into your profile or your answers.
The best way to leverage this free traffic source is to make sure all of your marketing attempts focus on spreading knowledge instead of hustling or selling.
6. Guest Posts
Guest posting is about writing and posting on someone else’s website or blog. It is a non-monetary exchange that will bring win-win results to both sides. You can get brand exposure from others’ blog while they can utilize your high-quality article to support their own content marketing goals.
Aside from referral traffic, guest posting can benefit your SEO performance if the backlink is from highly authoritative websites.
It may be difficult at first to reach out to bloggers in your niche and get a response from them. However, try more as you can and you will find that exchanging guest posts becomes a natural routine.
6. Reddit
While many marketers still don’t realize how popular Reddit is, this awesome platform is worth exploring for brands that want to keep up with industry trends and understand what their customers are thinking.
Reddit describes itself as the “front page of the Internet” because of its focus on aggregating social news. In fact, Reddit is a collection of thousands of communities of individuals built around topics or interests, called subreddits.
Like Quora, the Reddit community rule is strict. Therefore, please remember to post original content and participate in a sincere manner rather than a hard-sell way.
Final Thoughts
While this list of free traffic sources is not complete, you can get started with the proven ways above to get tons of free traffic and thus boost your website sales.
Remember, nothing can be done overnight, especially getting free traffic. Once you have determined your free traffic strategy, stick to it and wait for good results.
As for the question of whether paid traffic or free traffic is better, my suggestion is you should do both. Remember your goal is to get as much traffic as possible, so you’d better try different traffic streams, test and optimize the sales funnels, and get insight about which traffic source is more suitable for your business.
Besides, if you are an affiliate network/ad network looking for advanced affiliate marketing software, or you are an affiliate marketer wanting to make more money, Offerslook’s referral program is a good place to get started.
