More blog posts don’t always promise more traffic. If you publish posts that no one is searching for, then you won’t get as much traffic to make money from your blog.
I’m going to share with you some of the best yet free ways you can use right now to improve organic traffic to your blog.
Organic traffic from search engines is more reliable, gives you a better conversion rate, and is profitable in the long term.
You’ve already read about all those link-building guides and content strategy. These tactics I’m sharing with you are different, and you can start implementing them even if you’re a complete beginner.
1. Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing is a sustainable way to get free targeted traffic to your blog, yet many bloggers ignore it. Whether you are starting a new blog or have an established blog, you have to start building an email list.
You can use MailChimp or Mailerlite, both of which are entirely free to get started.
You can collect up to 2000 emails and send 10,000 emails to your subscribers in a month. Way more than you’ll need for a start.
By converting your visitors into leads, you can make them come back to your site recurringly.
The three steps to convert your visitors into subscribers include:
Once you setup optin forms, you will be generating leads on auto-pilot. This adds up over time. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll be able to build a list of hundreds and thousands of subscribers.
2. Use Quora
Quora is a QnA platform where you can ask and answer questions of your interest.
Quora is a fantastic platform to get targeted traffic. You can interact with people who need your help directly, without waiting for them to find you.
In fact, if you’ve started blogging recently, you can use Quora to gain exposure in your niche. It will help you get the initial traffic you need to make your blog popular.
If you work smart, using Quora, will help you get free traffic for the long term. You’ll have to follow a couple of steps such as:
- Answering questions on topics of your expertise
- Leave only one link per 300 words in an answer
- Writing answers that genuinely help without excessive self-promotion
If you start spamming Quora’s answers with links to your website, your account may get permanently banned, and your answers will be removed. .
3. Encourage Social Share
Social media is another excellent source of free traffic. People love to browse Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest to find topics and ideas they like.
If you encourage your existing visitors to share your content on their social networks, it can help you get more visitors and potential customers.
You can use WordPress plugins such as Social Snap or Addthis to add share buttons to your blog posts. It allows you to add floating share buttons to your posts, which really adds a boost.
The key is to make your content easily shareable.
Adding floating share buttons, adding more visuals to your blog posts, and engaging with your audience on social networks help you get traction.
Tools like Brand24 help you monitor your brand on the web. When someone mentions you or your brand, Brand24 will alert you, letting you know when and where to respond.
It also allows you to increase your followers on social networks like Twitter, where every time your blog post is shared, your username is shared with it.
People with similar interests will start following you when they see your content getting shared often.
4. Use Answer The Public
Did you know you can check the questions people search on Google in your niche?
Answer the Public is a keyword research tool that allows you to find questions asked by real users on Google. You can run a search for a topic, and it will show you hundreds of questions.
Each question has the potential to bring traffic from Google search because people are already looking for its answer.
By writing a good blog post and doing simple on-page SEO, you can easily rank for these questions as they are mostly longtail keywords.
Using Answer The Public, you can find low competition and high-traffic blog post ideas pretty quickly. This means free traffic with little competition.
Here’s a detailed guide on how to use the Answer the Public tool.
5. Optimize Your Existing Blog Posts
Your existing blog posts might be underperforming.
They might not get decent search traffic, comments, or shares on social media. Even though you did the keyword research before writing these blog posts, they just don’t bring any traffic.
In such cases, it is best that you re-write those blog posts and optimize them for a target keyword.
If any of your blog posts have not brought you much traffic in six months or longer, consider re-writing them.
An excellent way to start is using Hemingway Editor to check your writing style. If it is too hard to understand, chances are you won’t get many readers.
You should also use Grammarly and ProWritingAid to help you write excellent, errorless content.
I always follow the thumb rule of optimizing a blog post around a target keyword. Without a target keyword, it’s hard to get traffic from search engines.
6. Internal Linking
Internal linking is neglected by many bloggers. When you link one of your pages with one of your other pages, it is an internal link.
Linking between your relevant pages is always a good idea. It helps your readers, as well as search engines, understand what your blog is all about.
A robust internal linking strategy can help you rank your most essential pages higher. It will also prevent your pages from competing against each other.
In the long run, internal linking can help you build a solid site structure.
If you look at it from a user’s perspective, you’ll understand how this can help you reduce bounce rates, increase dwell time and page views, as well as decrease pogo-sticking.
In the beginning, you might struggle to find relevant pages to link to.
WordPress plugins like Link Whisper make interlinking pretty much effortless. It recommends related blog posts by scanning your content and allows you to add a link with an anchor text with one-click.
7. Guest Blogging
For many, guest blogging is the number one way to get recognition and free quality traffic.
A single guest blog post can get you thousands of extra visitors a month. Most of the time, you won’t have to pay anything to get your post published on popular blogs in your niche.
Guest blogging is a perfect way to become an authority in your niche if you’re a new entrant.
The quality of the traffic you get from guest blogging is far superior to social media and content stream channels.
Not only do you get more social shares and comments, but you also increase your chances for more link opportunities, such as getting an invitation for an expert roundup.
To find blogs that accept guest posts in your niche search, “your-niche + submit a guest post”, or “your-keyword + write for us” on Google.
Guest blogging will also help you build quality links to your blog, which helps to increase domain authority. It is a win-win situation for everyone.
8. Podcasting
Podcasting has been getting a lot of attention recently. Not only are bloggers publishing more podcast episodes, people who read the text are also appreciating more audio content.
Podcasts make it easy to consume content. Whether you’re working in a gym or you’re driving around, it is a lot more convenient to listen to a podcast than to read a blog post.
You can start a podcast sitting on your couch, it is that easy. You don’t need fancy gadgets to start. A microphone, a laptop, and audio editing software are enough to get your voice out on the web.
If you want to launch your own podcast show, we have a detailed step-by-step guide where you can learn how to start a successful podcast.
9. Publicize In Social Groups
Have you ever shared your content on a Facebook group?
If you did, chances are you know how effective sharing a single piece of content on a Facebook group is. If your content is solid and unique, you start getting decent traffic, shares, and recognition in your niche pretty quickly.
However, you might be ignoring Pinterest group boards, Quora space, and LinkedIn groups.
Pinterest has a feature called Pinterest group boards where you can collaborate with other Pinterest users to contribute pins to the group. It is collective work, and hence you won’t have to be focused on managing the group all day.
Just like that, LinkedIn also has group features, and LinkedIn groups are some of the most engaging groups on social media, especially for marketing and online business niches.
Quora spaces are another great place to share your content.
Quora spaces consist of questions and answers about common ideas & interests. You can add your answers with a link to your articles in areas related to your niche to get more visitors to your blog.
10. Optimize Your Blog Headlines
You can publish tons of high-quality blog posts, but it doesn’t matter if no one reads it.
On average, 8 out of 10 people that look at your headline won’t click on it, and only two of them will read the rest of the copy. The data makes it crucial than ever that you write compelling headlines.
Some might even say a headline is essential than the post itself. So, you must write compelling headlines that make people click.
You can use the Thrive Headline Optimizer WordPress plugin to A/B test and track the performance of two different headlines. Or you can use headline analyzers like Sharethrough to write better headlines.
Just make sure you test a few different headlines on your blog and record how your audience reacts to them. If you don’t test, you won’t have any data to act on.
11. Optimize Your Page Loading Speed
If your page takes more than 2 seconds to load, your visitors will leave.
Google’s page speed algorithm update confirms fast websites will get an advantage over slow websites. So, if your blog is slow, you’re losing visitors.
Increasing your loading speed can result in ranking jumps and more traffic from Google.
You can test your blog on Google Pagespeed Insights, Gtmetrix or Pingdom and check if your site is loading slow. If it is slow indeed, then you might want to check this and this tutorial.
Start by adding a cache plugin, resizing and making your images SEO-friendly and compressing CSS/HTML and scripts using plugins like Flying Pages & Autoptimize.
Shifting to a lightweight and SEO-friendly WordPress theme is a great idea, too.
If you are using a shared host with limited server resources and low response time, then migrate to an optimized WordPress hosting. It will save you time and money in the long run. Cloudways is an excellent option if you want budget-friendly managed WordPress hosting.
12. Participate in Forum Discussions
Forums are a great place to get free traffic because forums have been used since the early days of the internet to find information around the web.
Forum threads are a great place to interact with potential customers and highly targeted visitors.
The best way to start getting traffic from forums is by selecting the right forum in your niche. You have to choose a particular forum so that you can spend your time answering questions that you have expertise in.
You should also remember most forums have quality standards. You can’t spam people or leave links to your blog post as an answer. Your responses should genuinely solve the user’s problem.
You can find forums in your niche by searching “keyword + forums” or “your niche + forums.”
And in the end, of a few answers, you can leave a link to your blog or website just in case the user is interested to learn more about the topic. You have to be very consistent in answering forum threads to get recognition as an expert.
13. Use Push Notifications
Push notifications allow you to send clickable notification messages to mobile and smartphone devices.
Push notifications have become highly popular among bloggers and are one of the powerful ways to generate traffic on demand.
Unlike email marketing, if someone has to subscribe to your blog updates, they can simply turn on push notifications for your website. Each time you publish a new post, you can automatically, or manually send subscribers a native browser notification message.
It doesn’t matter if a subscriber is using the browser or not.
If the device is on and the internet is connected, the subscriber will receive your notification.
You can use tools like PushEngage or Subscribers.com to activate push notifications for your blog.
14. Repurpose Your Content
Repurposing content is one of the most underrated tactics among bloggers.
You can repurpose your content by publishing your blog posts into different formats, such as video and audio. Your old blog posts that perform well on search engines or get traffic from social media are great pieces of content for repurposing.
Start by recording a video on the topics you’ve already covered on your blog. You should also start a podcast and publish weekly episodes for audio enthusiasts.
For video content, Youtube is a fantastic platform. For audio content, iTunes is a fantastic platform.
By repurposing your content, you can expand your reach to the masses. By covering topics in your niche and publishing in all video, audio, and text formats will make you an authority and go-to expert in your niche.
15. Make YouTube Videos
Make YouTube videos in the same niche as your blog.
Video content without a doubt converts better than all other content formats. People retain more information when they watch a video and are likely to act quicker.
You can get laser-focused traffic from YouTube. It performs exceptionally well when you have a course to promote or when you have a product to sell. Needless to say, it works for getting casual blog traffic as well.
You can use tools like Tubebuddy to grow and make your YouTube channel profitable. Check out our YouTube guides by clicking on the “I want to read about section” in the sidebar.
Bonus: Free Infographic Checklist
What’s your strategy to generate free blog traffic?
Leave your comment below and let me know.
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