In my latest video, I cover eight effective ways to get more traffic to your affiliate marketing websites (and any other type of website for that matter).
I’ll have a recap of the key points dropping soon, but for now check out the video and accompanying transcript below”
Transcript
Hey, how is it going? It’s Sam Frost here and in today’s video, I’ve got a bit of a treat for you. We are doing something that everybody loves, we are doing things for free. So what I’m going to be talking about today is eight different ways that you can get more traffic to your website for free. So whether you’re starting out in business, maybe you’ve just founded your first company and you’re looking to grow and you just don’t have the funds available to do marketing with.
Or maybe things are a little bit tighter in your business at the moment and you want to still grow but without having to spend too much money on your marketing. Whatever your mission or purpose or drive is, I’m pretty sure you can agree that there’s always an advantage to be had in trying to generate more traffic and then more leads and sales from that traffic for free without having to spend money.
So, yeah, what we’re going to do in this video is we are going to cover eight effective ways that you can generate more traffic for your business website with no monetary cost. Now, what I want to make really, really clear is that there will be some cost in terms of time. So, there is no magic silver bullet that we can press for free that’s going to flood your website with traffic beyond something like going viral which you can’t really predict. It’s going to be slow, there will be work involved. But, what I’m wanting to do here is basically say if you got a bit of spare time but you don’t have money to spend, how can you use that spare time to grow your business?
So, yeah, let’s get into it. Before we do, please consider subscribing to my channel. I’ve got lots more digital marketing content to come and drop a like as well. And also, at any stage, if you’ve watched any of my videos including this one, if you got a question, if you’ve got a comment, if you’re not sure about something, just drop a comment in the description, drop your question down there. I will do my best to answer every single comment or question that is left on YouTube. So I really do want to help you out.
So without further ado, let’s jump into things and let’s look at the first way to generate more traffic for your website for free. So the first way to generate more traffic for your website for free is to make sure that you’re on page SEO is on point. So if you’re not familiar with the term, SEO is short for search engine optimization.
It’s basically all about making sure your website is more likely to rank at the top of a Google search for a key word like how to train your dog or Toyota Supra buyers guide or B2B digital marketing consultant or something like that. Whatever your keyword or keywords are. You obviously want to be as high as possible in Google and in other search engines like Microsoft Bing as well.
Now, there are two components to SEO, to search engine optimization. I’m going to talk about both in this video but the first one we’re going to look at is on page SEO or on page search engine optimization. Now, this is all about optimizing the content that’s already on your site as well as the structure of your site.
To make it as likely as possible that Google is going to look at your site and go, “Hey, someone’s searching for how to train your dog, your website talks about how to train your dog and lo and behold, the two match up.” And it’s easy for Google to work out that what you’re talking about is closely matched to what the user’s searching. Because ultimately, what Google wants to do is provide a good user experience. What they want is for someone to use Google, find a solution to a problem they’re looking for, find a product they are searching for and walk away from that thinking, “Man, Google made it so easy for me to find what I was looking for.”
So, on page SEO is a huge topic. There’s loads and loads of things we could discuss. We could go into a whole separate video about this and I will be doing so. But let’s look at a few of the key things you need to get right. First, you’ve got to have a website that’s structured well. So what I mean by this is it needs to be laid out in a way that’s actually easy for both humans and the search engine to understand.
So, if you’ve got one page with everything jumbled together and you’ve got no real clear keywords or any kind of I guess structure to what you’re doing, it’s just like a mixed bag of lollies you’ve pulled out of a bulk sweets bin. You are going to be confusing Google, you’re going to be confusing human readers and it’s going to be much harder to actually get your website ranking.
So think about having a structure that’s really logical. For example, you might have a homepage, an about page, a contact page, maybe a disclaimer page as well. And then you might have something like a services page. So your services page lists at a high level all the services you offer and then you might split out into a sub page level, so service one, service two, service three. And as you can see, everything is all split out nicely into its own little subsection that makes it really easy to understand where you are on the website at any given point in time.
So, that’s one key aspect to SEO is having that good architecture and that good structure. If you do want a single page website because you like the way it looks, that’s okay. But you just going to have to accept the fact that you really got to have your optimization on point to make it really clear what each section of that single page website is talking about. The key thing to avoid is just having some jumbled mess that looks like a sort of buffet at three o’clock in the morning. It’s just not a good look at all. It’s going to make your site rank not so well.
And another key part of on page SEO, once you’ve got that structure down, is basically making sure that your website actually loads quickly. So people hate waiting. Google sees slow websites as being a negative SEO factor. So, use something like Google’s Page Speed Insights to make sure that your website is actually structured to load quickly. The faster it loads, the better the user experience is going to be, the longer people are going to stick around and that will actually have a positive SEO impact.
And another key part to the on page SEO puzzle is also to make sure that your website answers the sorts of questions that people are looking for. Now, I’m going to speak more about this as this own standalone point later on in this video. But, the first point, really, on this is just to make sure that wherever you’ve got a page on your site, like a services page, you actually say what that service is. So don’t just have a photo or a video with no context. Have some text that’s going to explain it. If your services is personal injury lawyer New York, then actually talk about that.
You don’t have to be insanely specific with the way you lay out the keywords, these days Google is pretty good at picking up on things, by and large. Obviously, you can get more advanced with how you do your own page SEO. But the main thing is, every page should have at least one keyword, ideally, that makes it very clear what that page is about, that makes it easier for Google to basically scan the site and say, “Okay, we know that this page is about personal injury lawyers in New York.” Or it’s about how to train your dog or it’s about how to buy a Toyota Supra.
Whatever it is. You’ve got to make it clear with those keywords. So the first point is just to make sure that your on page SEO is good. So if you’re not too sure what to do, basically go and do some more research on on page SEO or drop a comment below and I’ll help you out.
The second part of SEO is link building. So, I won’t dwell on this too long because link building, once again, is a massive subject, we could go on forever. But, basically, Google looks at two things to determine where websites rank. The first, as we mentioned, is the content, the on page SEO. The second piece is whether that website that they’re thinking of ranking has links pointing to it.
So what I mean by link is really any way you go online, when you click on a link on a page and it takes you to another site. Now, there are things called do follow links and no follow links and we could get right into the nitty gritty technical detail but that’s for another video. The main thing to think about at the moment is that having good quality websites linking to your site is going to benefit you in the long run because it gives your website more votes of confidence, really, that’s the way I would describe it. It’s like Google is looking at your site and saying, “Okay, the content aligns with what the user is typing into Google and now other websites are linking to that site. So it must have something going for it.”
So, as far as finding link building opportunities goes, once again, a huge area of discussion, we could go on for days about this. But some places you might want to look at things like local directories, so not crappy, old school rubbish web directories that list everything but highly focused directories for example here in Christchurch, after the earthquake, there was a directory, I can’t remember if it’s still running or not but it was called Rebuild Christchurch. It was all about websites and businesses that were still operating in the Christchurch area after a lot of businesses closed down.
It was a really high quality site, there was some really useful information on there because even some of Google’s index were outdated as far as what businesses were open and what were closed. So that would be an example of a good quality local directory. Maybe there are suppliers you work with on a frequent basis who would be happy to link to your website because you sell their product as a reseller or they sell your product as a reseller, something like that. This is a really common one for B2B businesses.
Another area you might look at is actually looking at things like social media profiles. Now, they’ll often have an opportunity to add a link. It’s usually a no follow link so it won’t be as powerful but it’s still got the potential to actually drive referral traffic back to your site anyway. And there’s all sorts of concepts like anchor text diversity and pillow linking and all sorts of things we could get into.
But, long story short, as long as your links aren’t coming from poor quality junk websites, so they’re not dodgy link farms or Russian hacker websites or anything like that, the more relevant they are and the higher quality they are, the more value they’re going to bring to your site and the more likely it is that they’re going to help elevate your search engine rankings. So between on page SEO and link building, those are two really good ways to actually get more traffic to your website for free.
Now, the next point I want to talk about here is another offshoot of SEO and that’s making sure that you’ve got the right content on your site to drive more traffic. So, one of the most effective ways I’ve ever come across to grow traffic for free, although it does take a lot of time, but it sort of pays off really nicely in the long run is finding questions that people are asking in your niche or your industry and then creating content tailored around those questions.
So, I’ll give you an example of a website that I work on. It’s primarily run by my brother, he does a really, really good job at this. It’s called Garage Dreams. We’ve grown that site really nicely, Ben’s done some amazing work with a little bit of guidance of me, I’d like to think. And over time, what we’ve done is we’ve just found questions people are asking about classic cars, answered them and you can see here, from this Google Analytics traffics shot, you can see how that traffic’s grown.
It’s not happened over night, it’s taking quite a long time. But it’s almost been a bit of a compounding effect. As we’ve added more content that’s been targeted to people’s searches, people’s problems that they’ve got, what we’ve done is we’ve just kept stacking on more and more traffic. With each of those new bits of content, each bit of content that gets put out on that site is really good quality. We don’t add anything junk, anything that’s thin. It’s all good stuff.
But, you can see that sort of compounding effect, just like saving your money in a bank account or on the stock market. It sort of compounds over time. So if you want to learn how to actually get more traffic by doing this, you’ll obviously need to know what sorts of questions people are searching. One way to do that is actually to use Answer the Public which is a really simple keyword research tool. And what I’ve done is in the link, I’ve left a link in the video description for this video, linking you to another video of mine where I show you how to use Answer the Public to find questions that people are searching so that you can create content from them.
I mean, long story short, it’s pretty simple. You load the tool up, you put in your seed keyword like dog training or classic cars or marketing consultant or lawyers or whatever your base topic is of your business. And then it will show you questions people are asking. And then you can answer those questions with good quality content, whether that’s blog posts or stand alone articles or a massive guide or a case study or whatever the case might be. That is another really good way to drive free traffic to your website.
Hopefully, over time, that content starts ranking in Google, people click it, they come to your site and lo and behold, they start becoming customers. So between on page SEO, link building and adding that new content, that’s three really effective ways to drive more traffic. The next few I’m going to cover I won’t spend so long on so pay close attention as we move through them.
So the next way to get more traffic to your website for free is to use questions and answer sites. Now, the biggest one of these is quora.com, I think Quora is how you pronounce it, I’m not sure. That’s how I’ve always done it. Basically, Quora is a site you can go on, you can register for free. People ask questions, you can answer those questions and then you can leave a link in your question response back to your website.
Now, you don’t want to be too aggressive here, you don’t want to just answer stuff purely for the sake of leaving a link. That’s pretty transparent when you do that, some people are way too aggressive and then moderation can be quite strict. But what you find is that pretty much wherever anyone is asking a question, especially if your industry has got an international focus, so I find this is really effective for software companies or B2B companies can do really well with Quora. But, lots of different businesses can do well.
Pretty much, as long as you’re not too hyper locally focused, what you’ll find is that you’ve got questions you can answer and you can then give good information, you can answer the question and then basically say, long story short, for more information, check out my site, check out this product we offer, check out the service we offer, check out our free guide. What I recommend you do is you have some sort of resource or asset that basically expands on the common questions people are asking on Quora or on any other Q&A site and then you link to that.
Don’t just link straight to a hard sell of a product, it’s far more likely that you’re going to get stung by the moderation. So if you’re actually a bit more adept at saying, “Hey, look, here is,” … For example, if someone wants to know about how to train a dog, you might have a dog training business where you would answer the person’s question and then you might link to another video that’s hosted on your site or another blog post rather than looking to the book a consultation page which is obviously a lot more promotional.
The great thing with Quora is that you can track your stats, you can see your stats climbing over time if you’re answering good questions, you can actually build up a bit of a reputation as an expert in your niche. I won’t claim that it’s going to be an overnight success for you. It will take time to start seeing results. And the other thing that you do want to do as well is make sure you save every response you give. So save them in a text file or a Google sheet or something like that because if your answers or your account ever got deleted, you’ve got a whole lot of content there you could repurpose for blog posts or for something else. So just bear that in mind.
I do know that some people have spent ages contributing on Quora and then suddenly had their accounts shut down for whatever reason. Maybe a mod who was a competitor got annoyed with them or they broke a rule. So just be careful with that. Now, Quora is not the only question and answer site but it is the biggest and it’s the easiest place to focus in the first instance.
So that’s where I recommend that you spend more time. So yeah, quora.com, check it out, register an account. Look for questions that people are asking, you can also search in Google, you’ll often just see Quora questions come up.
You can go back in, make your response the best response by far. That’s one of the best ways to get yourself heard on Quora and drive more traffic for free. Just remember not to be too aggressive with it.
Now, the next way to drive more traffic for free to your business website is Facebook groups. So you’re obviously probably aware of Facebook pages, you’ve probably got your own Facebook profile and chances are, you’re probably in Facebook groups as well. Now, pretty much any industry, any niche, any vertical, is going to have Facebook groups. They can be locally focused, internationally focused, doesn’t really matter. There’s just so many of them.
And groups keep seeming to get more and more engagement and share of the timeline on Facebook, whether that will change or not, I don’t know. But groups are definitely one of the better opportunities at the moment, especially when you’re starting out a business. So what you can do is you can go on Facebook and you can look for groups that are in your niche. So if you’re a dog training expert, you might for dog owner groups or dog training groups or something like that.
And when people are asking questions, you can actually jump on those threads and respond. Now, what you have to be super careful with with Facebook groups, just as I mentioned with Quora before, is you mustn’t be too promotional. The biggest mistake people make is they join the Facebook group and then they start spamming that group with links to their own website and they’ll personal message people who are in the group who are asking for advice and break all the rules and spam comment threads and all sorts of things like that.
You will just get booted out of the group, you’ll get locked out. You won’t be allowed to join again, you’ll have your posting privileges taken away and you won’t actually make any breakthrough traffic to your site because people can see through that stuff anyway.
On the other hand, if you can go into it with a long-term investment mindset and say, “I’m going to set aside half an hour a day to really do a genuinely good job at providing free content, answering people’s questions and then occasionally just interspersing a few little bits of your own content on your website,” that has a much better effect. So don’t go in with the mindset of I’m going to just go plaster this Facebook group with my content. It won’t work. It will be really ineffective and you’ll just get shut out of all the good groups and you’ll be left, really, with no opportunity, nowhere to go.
So, if you’re going to do Facebook groups, it can be really lucrative. When I started my consulting business, some of my first clients came from Facebook groups where I would just go in and I would answer people’s questions 100% for free, give them some good IP and then what I would do is wait for them, basically, to come to me and say, “Hey, that was really interesting, can you now do this for me because I don’t want to do it myself.” So just play that patient, long game, it will be so much more successful.
Now, the next point, the next way to generate more traffic for free to your website is through email marketing. Now, I know you’re probably sitting here and going, “Well, hang on, how can I do email marketing for free because isn’t there a cost?” Well, the solution is really simple. It’s called MailChimp. MailChimp offers a really simple, basic platform that allows you to send up to I think 2,000 contacts on your list for free.
It’s not like an unlimited plan, there are limits to it, obviously. But, it’s a great way to get started. And even if you have a little bit of extra money and you don’t have a email marketing system, I guess it’s not free obviously, but it’s one of the best places to invest that extra money. The money is in the list as they say and my background at affiliate marketing, we always used to say the money is in the list. And it really is true. A good email list is an asset for your business.
Whatever happens, you can pick it up and take it away with you. If your website gets hacked, maybe your shop gets burned down or something like that, you’ve got an email list that you can communicate with and email communications tend to be really, really effective as well at driving good conversions, providing you do that email well.
So, what you want to do is sign up with something like MailChimp, start collecting email addresses, put a form on your website, a pop over, something like that, however you want to do it, I’ll leave it up to you. I will have more videos about email marketing. But the main thing is, don’t annoy your list with heaps and heaps of spammy emails. Deliver them good quality content that pushes them back to your website and you will be able to generate more traffic for free with that method. It really, really does work well. Email marketing is old school but it still works and it will remain working, I think, for many, many years to come.
The main thing to bear in mind is you need to be aware of privacy policy rules, especially if you live somewhere like Europe with GDPR, you’ve got to be careful with the stuff. Whatever you do, don’t go stealing email addresses of other websites, pretending that they’ve signed up to your email list. That won’t get you anywhere but in trouble. So, as long as you’re collecting leads in an ethical manner, you’ve really got nothing to worry about whatsoever. And email marketing is a great way to get more traffic to your website for free.
Now, the next opportunity I want to share with you for generating more traffic for free is the use of what we call parasite sites. Now, parasites is just the term I heard, it’s nothing gross, it’s not a medical problem, it’s not like something from an alien movie. Parasites just means other websites that rank well in Google that you can create your own listings on, that you can create your own profiles on, that you can add your own content to that may rank better than your current website does. And then you can drive traffic from those parasite sites back to your own website.
So, a good example of this is medium.com. Medium.com articles can often rank really well in Google, so you could create a medium.com account and start publishing keyword optimized articles. You can be more aggressive in your link building to them if you’re starting to get into link building. You can be a lot more aggressive linking to parasite sites like a medium.com article than you could be with your own site in terms of doing linking without getting penalized by Google.
Now, I won’t get into the black hat, gray hat, white hat, kind of stuff. Let’s focus more on just providing good content and just saying wherever you’ve got an opportunity in your niche, where you see a kind of site that keeps ranking over and over again, maybe you’re googling keywords and you think, “Oh, this is interesting,” YouTube videos just keep popping up. Well, there’s another parasite opportunity.
You create YouTube videos, create better ones than what are already on there for those keywords that you’re trying to rank for and then go out there and rank those YouTube videos you’ve created. Push people back to your website with links in the video description and so on and you’re basically leveraging other websites to help grow your own one.
And that’s simply because these other websites have much more domain authority, much more website authority than you do. Really, YouTube, for example, super trusted, it’s owned by Google. YouTube videos can sometimes get indexed in about five to 10 minutes for certain keywords, I’ve found. Now, they won’t always rank number one but I found it pretty easy to get a lot of videos ranked quite well in Google, often easier than I could rank my own website pages. So I’ll rank a video and then I’ll push people from the video description out to my own website, another great example of parasites sites.
So what you want to do to find parasite sites is just google your keywords in your niche and see other websites that keep popping up, things like YouTube, medium, any of those kind of websites, LinkedIn and Pulse articles or LinkedIn articles as they’re known. Anything like that where you can create your own ones, you’ve got the opportunity to join that platform and start generating your own content. And could you then push those competitors off their purchase and take those places and start driving more brand awareness and traffic that way.
So parasite SEO. A little bit old school, some people aren’t so much a fan of it. If it’s done poorly, it can really cheapen your brand. But if it’s done properly, there’s nothing wrong with it. If you create a great video that accompanies your blog post and then the video ranks number one on Google, you’ve not made the internet a worse place, you’ve made it a better place by delivering something useful to people. So don’t feel bad about parasite SEO.
Now, the final piece of the puzzle in today’s video I want to talk about is forum and blog commenting. Now, this is as old as the hills itself. I’m bound to get a few people who are a bit more sort of modern marketing-minded, coming in here and say, “Oh, don’t spend your time doing forum and blog commenting.” But, the truth is, there is still some validity and purpose to it.
Forums, discussion boards, and blogs on certain niches, these can get huge amounts of traffic that’s often very targeted and most of them will allow you to register and start commenting or responding or asking questions, all those kinds of things, forums especially. Blogs can be a little bit more locked down but we’ll take about them in the same context.
So let’s say you find a forum that’s in your niche, maybe there are people asking questions in that forum that you solve that problem pretty much spot on. What you are able to usually do is create an account, create a profile, respond to those questions and then do something like leave a link to your website or your solution or your white paper within your forum post.
Maybe you can do it in your forum signature. So you know, you’re not allowed to leave links in the posts themselves but in the signatures, people will see your response, they’ll read it and then they’ll look in your signature and be like, “Okay, I can click here and get more information.” Same thing goes with blog posts.
The secret here, really, is to deliver very good quality content. What you don’t want to do is be that person who leaves comments that’s like, “Nice article. Thanks for the helpful advice. See here for more information.” You’re not going to get anything from that. That’s just spam, it’s crap, it doesn’t solve any problem for anyone.
But, if you go on a forum or a blog and someone asks a question and you can do a really good job at giving them a solution and then you can gently ease your way in with some of your own promotional stuff. But be very, very careful about how you do it and make sure you always focus on giving a great experience first to the reader without them having to click any further. That can be a good way to generate traffic. And there are people who do really good business on forum and blog commenting, just driving traffic to offers that they’re selling or free downloads or things like that.
It is old school, it’s like back from the early days of affiliate marketing when I first started out. But the truth is that as long as there are communities of people who are passionate and interested about certain topics, whether that’s a forum or a discussion board or a blog, you are able to go in there and you can become part of that community. You want to build up your trust, make people realize that you’re not there just to try and hijack traffic and drive it to some scummy offer.
Instead, you are there to actually provide value and in exchange for providing that excellent value, I guess there is a bit of an implicit understanding that you might be able to do a little bit of promotion as well.
Now, you might find that you spend a whole lot of time doing a really detailed forum post. You leave a link in it and someone reports it for spam and it gets deleted, a bit like with Quora as I was talking about before. That’s why wherever you leave a detailed forum post, I suggest saving the answer first so that you could always reuse it in another platform if it gets deleted or doesn’t get approved. And just be super super cautious with how you do things.
You know, you’re better off to spend really a long, long time building up, 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, doing your forum or blog commenting, building up a bit of a reputation as someone who provides great content rather than just blasting your way in there and trying to drop heaps of links.
So, I hope you found this video really useful. If you’ve wanted to generate more traffic to your site but you just don’t have the budget to spend on advertising, what I’ve shared with you today are eight effective ways to get more traffic to your website for free. Now, exactly how successful you will be with these methods really does depend on how well you apply them. There is no guarantee that things might not change. You know, maybe Facebook groups might be wiped away by Mark Zuckerberg and they’ll no longer be an option for promotion.
But, for the time being, at the time of recording this, these are eight ways that you can actually go and generate more traffic to your website and grow your business without having to spend money. You’ve obviously got to spend time. But if you’ve got time and you don’t have money, this is a good way to start. It will also help you learn some of the really key basics of effective digital marketing.
So, if you’ve found this video useful, please leave a like, please do consider subscribing as well. I’ve got loads more digital marketing content coming on this channel. And if you’ve got any questions, comments, concerns or queries, leave a comment below. Otherwise, thank you so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you on the next video.
Very helpful advice, thanks Sam. I definitely need to focus on growing the traffic to my site!
Great tips – thanks Sam!