Every website has a goal, and in all but a few tiny exceptions, the means to that goal is exposure. You need more traffic, regardless of your stated goal. The quality of that traffic is important, but you can’t be picky if you don’t have any to begin.

The other reality of running a website is that it can be quite expensive. Even discounting web design, you have fees for hosting and domain registration, hiring social managers and content producers, and more. This can stretch a budget to its limits, and then it comes time to build traffic only to find the best methods require paying for ads and exposure. It’s just too much.

Thankfully, you can still earn traffic without paying a cent, it just isn’t as fast or as targeted as it could be. Try out these ideas and see if they get you started.

1. Implement Detailed SEO

The best possible SEO probably requires hiring an SEO firm to go over all of your content and all of your pages but this is a list for free traffic generation, which means hiring a firm is out. You’re just going to have to make an SEO checklist and go over it each time you post content.

• Site factors: make sure your site loads quickly and the user experience is unhampered by poor design decisions.
• Linking: each piece of content should link out to a relevant source, and should link to one or two other pieces on your site. Internal links can be dropped if you have a related posts widget.
• Keywords: research the primary and long-tail keywords for each article you post, and include them in the post. Don’t shoehorn them in just to have them; integrate them in a meaningful way.
• Meta: optimize your meta titles and descriptions for best visibility and attraction in the search results.

This is a basic start, but it should give you a foundation from which to begin your research.

2. Guest Post on Industry Sites

If your site is in a position where it needs to build traffic manually and can’t attract it based on its own critical mass, you’re likely a new site. This means there are likely a few other sites in your niche with larger audiences than yours. Approach those sites and ask about guest posting opportunities. Posting on those sites with a link back to your site will help draw their traffic to your page. Since their site is in the same industry, chances are they will be interested users. Just avoid paying for guest posts, which defeats the purpose of free traffic creation.

3. Use and Engage Through Social Media

Social media is free to use in terms of money, for the most part. Facebook is growing less so, as they encourage paid promotion and advertising. Other sites, like Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn, are all good sources of potential free traffic. Pick relevant social sites, learn their ins and outs, and put them to use.

It’s important when you’re using social media that you don’t use it as an advertising platform. You’re there to humanize your brand and engage your users, not to post billboards and TV commercials.

4. Create Deep, Detailed Content

Of course, you can’t draw users to your site and expect to keep them without content. The best content – that is, the content that tends to dominate search results – tends to be detailed, in-depth articles that provide plenty of value to readers. At least 1,000 words, digging deep into a topic and providing insight that can’t be found anywhere else. If you’re struggling to decide what topics to cover, look for what other industry blogs are doing and try to do what they do, only better.

5. Create Video Content

 

Video content is useful in a few ways.

First, it’s an automatic way to prove your attention to detail and dedication to a topic. Making a video is a lot harder than writing an article. It requires more resources and more research to make presentable.

Second, it’s extremely visible in search results. Relevant video content gets snippets including a thumbnail, and that image on the otherwise imageless search results page is incredibly attractive, just based on human psychology.

Third, video content opens up YouTube as both a source of monetization and a new social network to leverage for more users.

6. Use and Optimize a Mobile Site

Mobile users are quickly taking over the Internet, with a huge amount of standard traffic every day coming from mobile users or site-specific apps. It may be a bit of an investment to create a responsive design to cater to these users, but it’s well worth it in the end.

If you already have a mobile site, make sure you’re implementing all the same SEO as you are on your main site. This is easy if they’re both the same via responsive design; if they’re separate subdomains, make sure to carry over the optimization. Don’t forget to promote your mobile site in any advertising you choose to pay for.

7. Build and Leverage an Email List

An email list isn’t necessarily going to get you new users; after all, you have to attract the users to get them to sign up in the first place. What it does, however, is allow you to put new platforms and new content in front of an automatically interested group of users. These users can then share your new content and follow your new profiles, allowing you to begin with an immediate base of users. For example, use your email list to promote when you sign up for Instagram, to get any current Instagram users automatically following your profile.

8. Claim and Use Off-Site Profiles

Most businesses end up having profiles on review sites and other such locations, aggregated from industry skimmers or user submissions. Local businesses with physical locations have the most, with sites like Yelp aggregating reviews. Search for your business name and look for any site that has a profile for your business. Contact the site and claim your profile page, fill it out and treat it as an off-site advertisement you completely control. You’ll be able to turn these into passive traffic funnels with relative ease.

9. Create and Give Away Free Content

After you’ve been running a blog for a while, you can fairly easily take your most popular posts and convert them into longer, more detailed ebooks. Sell or give away these ebooks, with only a social media share or other metric as payment. Word of the quality of your content will get out, and people will come around to claim a copy.

If you have in-house developers, consider creating apps as well. Having a presence on the iTunes store and the Google Play store can be very beneficial, particularly if the purpose of your app is generic enough to attract users based on its function alone.

10. Interview Industry Veterans and VIPs

Users trust you when you give an interview. The concept is that you have to be in a position of some authority to give an interview, when in reality anyone can ask anyone else a few questions and frame it as an interview.

When you interview popular veterans and important people in your industry, you’re getting easy, free value out of their answer. If your interview is compelling enough, the people you’re interviewing may very well link to your site to show their users the Q&A session. This funnels more traffic to your site, and all you had to do was come up with a few interesting questions.

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