There are several platforms that can effectively drive traffic to your website. These traffic sources can be either free or paid, and it can work for blogs, online stores, or any other type of websites.
For the best benefits of this article, we are not going to talk about traffic exchange or bot traffic softwares. It’s because these types of traffic generating methods can negatively affect your website, and that’s not the approach we teach on our blog.
Instead, we are going to talk about the platforms that could help you generate real profitable traffic without any risks or potential harm to your site.
So let’s start the analysis of free traffic solutions first.
Platforms That Can Drive Free Traffic To Your Website:
If you are a beginner or a low-budget marketer, dropping all your cash into paid advertising methods may not be the best choice. There are many great platforms that can drive free traffic to your website, without you needing to invest money.
The only downside of free traffic sources is that it can take time to start seeing results. Those who have patience, and implement the strategies right, will gain great benefits from those platforms over the time.
1. Google
According to the relevant stats, Google gets over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which adds up to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
So it’s no surprise why the most successful blogs focus on utilizing this fantastic traffic source. Google works best for blogs as a free traffic platform. It’s because blogs are the type of websites that contain the most written content, and Google loves to rank them.
Traffic from Google can be super targeted if you do your SEO right. Basically, you decide how you want to target your audience when writing every post by doing keyword research and choosing the right keywords.
For example, if you want to reach people who are interested in buying a leather living room couch, you target keywords like “best leather living room coach”.
But keyword research is not the most important thing. Ir order to do well with Google for free, you will have to regularly write quality blog posts that are relevant to your niche and are about 1800-3000 words long.
Content is the number 1 ranking factor of Google. To rank in the top results, you will need to make sure that you provide higher quality content than your competitors do.
The amazing thing about traffic from Google is that traffic can become passive. That means if you write a quality blog post and it ranks in the top 10 search results for a searchable keyphrase, the chances are that your post will stay there for a while and will generate traffic on the autopilot.
Essentially, your income from this free traffic platform can also become passive as you automatically generate traffic for the blog posts that you have written in the past.
2. Pinterest
The reason why this platform can be great to generate free traffic is that it pretty much like Google, works as a search engine. Millions of people daily search on Pinterest for different queries around different topics.
It’s all about the visuals on this platform, and you will have to create visually appealing Pins in order to succeed.
The Pins are going to be targeting different keywords, that are answering specific queries that users search on the platform. Those pins must be assigned to your created Pin-Boards that categorize your content and help Pinterest and its users understand what it’s all about.
As Pinterest works well for basically all types of websites, you can link those pins to your blog, e-commerce store, or any other type of site, and that’s how you are going to drive free traffic.
If done right, Pinterest can get you hundreds of thousands of free visitors to your website, and it can also become a passive traffic source.
To answer whether or not you should use Pinterest for your website, you need to take into account several factors.
While the popularity of men audience is quickly growing, the majority of Pinterest’s users are still women who look for different inspirations (and have money to spend!).
The most popular topics on Pinterest are health & fitness, travel, cooking, recipes, art, DIY & fashion, however, you should not feel limited to that, as Pinterest is massively expanding into plenty of other niches.
In order to succeed with Pinterest, you will have to create Pins that visually stand out, and you will have to do it consistently. The easiest way to create outstanding Pins is to use tools like Canva.com.
Consistency with Pinterest, should not always be hard, because it has another super effective tool to make the job easier.
The platform called Tailwind is an official Pinterest partner, and it allows you to schedule and spread out your content at the chosen time intervals. That means you won’t necessarily have to log into your Pinterest account every time you want to publish a pin.
This tool makes the whole process easier, as the scheduler allows you to set up your pins for the week or even month in advance within a single log-in session.
Also, Tailwind allows you to join different groups known as “Tribes” that are designed to re-share other people’s pins.
When you post a pin on Tailwind Tribe, you have chances of your pin to get shared multiple times along many accounts with the potential to go viral.
3. YouTube
Video marketing is the future and YouTube can be a great platform to generate free traffic. However, because of the fact that a lot of people feel uncomfortable in front of a camera, this traffic source only takes the 3rd place on our paid traffic list.
While it depends on your niche, it is often highly advised that you show yourself in front of the camera as it creates the most engagement and trust with the audience.
However, you can still create videos without filming yourself, if you can find the way around it.
There are tools, like Lumen5, or Content Samurai that can help you create fantastic YouTube content, by turning the articles into videos. So, you don’t always have to film yourself, or even talk over the video if you are not comfortable.
There is also a keyword system inside YouTube, and it also works as a search engine. Your created videos can appear according to a key phrase searched by the user.
How high they are going show up in the search results, and how much traffic you can get depends on the quality of your videos.
Here are the factors that define how good your video is for YouTube:
- the watch time of a video
- the ratio between likes and dislikes
- number of accounts subscribers
- click-through-rate
- relevancy of the keywords
Your video needs to be valuable, so the user engages and likes it. A great number of subscribers signals YouTube that your content is good enough to build the audience.
Also, having an engaging title and a thumbnail on a video will increase a click-through-rate and that will also push you in the rankings for more traffic.
Lastly, the right keywords should be used in the title, description, and tags to tell the algorithms and users what your content is about.
If you implement those things, you will regularly generate views for your videos, and that can turn into profitable consistent traffic to your website.
4. Quora
Quora.com is a question-answer platform, which can bring a good amount of traffic to your website if you follow the right strategy.
People ask questions literally on every topic there, and Quora can work well for every niche. All you need to do is to find relevant questions that people ask and provide high-quality answers.
Quora works as a forum, and it has an upvote system. The more helpful your answer is, the more people are going to upvote it. The answer with the most upvotes goes to the top, where most people get to see it.
Inside the answer, you will have a nicely crafted link to your website, which should not look like a spammy hook.
The link to your website must look natural and lead a visitor to relevant content, and it should be mixed in a helpful, in-depth and wordy answer.
Here’s a good example of an answer on Quora.com
Once you post the answer, and it gets approved by the admins, it will stay there forever generating traffic to your website. Some of the answers may get hundreds, thousands or even millions of views, so imagine how much traffic they can drive over the time.
The critical rule on successful Quora strategy is to not spam. Avoid posting short answers, that aren’t helpful to the readers, otherwise, they will never get upvotes and bring you traffic.
Platforms That Can Drive Paid Traffic To Your Website:
If you have a spare dollar or more to invest in driving visitors to your website, there are alternative paid traffic sources available out there. These traffic methods have a learning curve, and you should follow them carefully if you are a beginner.
We will talk about paid advertising and these 3 platforms work best for a blog, eCommerce, or any other website.
1. Facebook
As you know Facebook is free to use for social networking purposes, but it is not the case when it comes to advertising. While other paid advertising companies are slowly taking this platform over, Facebook still remains the most effective platform to acquire paid traffic in 2020.
You see, everyone is on Facebook nowadays, and Facebook owns an incredible amount of data on its users. The intelligent Facebook pixel system, which is based on all the user data, effectively allows the algorithms to understand what type of audience you want to reach.
With Facebook Ads, you can target people by different locations, interests, genders, ages, and even their monthly income.
The sky is the limit of what can you reach with Facebook, and you can get really creative within the process.
The best thing about advertising on Facebook is that its Pixel system allows to effectively retarget people.
For example, if a user visits your website once, you can display the ads to him multiple times by increasing the chances of conversion, or whatever your goal is.
Another example would be if you post a video ad and user demonstrates an interest by watching a part of it, you can easily use FB pixel to reach that same person with your ads multiple times.
Facebook allows you to create those ads on different objectives, including conversions, engagement, traffic, lead generation and more.
The main downside of this paid traffic platform is that it could take time and financial investment to see the results.
Normally, Facebook will require some amount of money on a table and a bit of time for its algorithms to figure out the best ad performance settings, but you can easily start with $5 a day.
Also, this traffic source has a learning curve, so it might take time for you to learn things and financially benefit from this amazing platform.
2. Instagram:
Instagram is a widely used social network, not only for entertainment but for advertising purposes too. You can create ads on Instagram almost in the same way as you would on Facebook. It’s because these two platforms are owned by the same company, and they share the same Facebook Ad Manager.
While almost everyone is on Instagram today, it still depends on your business, your audience, and its behavior to decide if advertising on this platform is a good idea.
Generally speaking, people on Instagram are usually keen to discover new brands and ideas, while people on Facebook, are more likely to stick with what already exists.
Also, Instagram has a younger demographics. The majority of Instagram’s active users are women under the age of 29, however, Instagram is greatly packed with all types of audiences.
A distinct thing to consider is that Instagram is primarily accessible via mobile devices, so if your business is appealing more on computers, Instagram would be a not that good idea to run your ads on.
When Facebook’s content is considered to be more informative, Instagram’s content is more based on graphics. That’s why Photo Ads can be very effective on Instagram, and if your brand is visually appealing, you should consider using Instagram as a paid traffic source.
One of the differences between Instagram and Facebook ads is that there are only 4 types of ads you can choose from when advertising on Instagram, while Facebook offers more than 10.
With Instagram, you can only choose from Photo, Video, Carousel, and Stories type of ads. Ad types like post engagement, lead generation, event response, page likes are not available on Instagram.
On the one side, it can be a positive thing for beginners because it makes the whole advertising process much simpler and less overwhelming. On the other side, for those who are more advanced, Instagram may seem lacking capabilities and features, compared to Facebook.
3. Google Ads
A lot of people think that Google is only a search engine based platform, but it’s not only that. Over the last decade, the company managed to expand into the advertising network too.
The way it works is different from Facebook or Instagram, and Google Ads (previously called Google Adwords) can ultimately bring you the most targeted traffic among all three.
It works as you bid on certain search keyphrases against other advertisers and the ad with the highest bid takes the top search results on the sponsored listings.
How much you will have to bid for your ad to show up on the search results, depends on the competition of a keyword. With Google, You will only be charged when someone clicks your ad, so you only pay per click (CPC).
Due to high competition, advertising on Google may come at the cost. That’s why it’s always better to use Google Ads if you have a high-cost product or service to offer.
Advertising on Google can generate intend based traffic, which could be highly effective. For example, if you are targeting keywords like “Laptop Repair In Los Angeles” you are reaching people who are already interested in laptop repair services around the Los Angeles area. This type of strategy brings closely targeted traffic that has great chances of converting.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Google calculates the Ad Rank, which determinates your ad’s place in the search results. To get into the top position, you will have to make sure that your advertisement and landing page meets the quality standards.
It won’t be enough to write a short copy and drop money to rank your ads well. The ad on Google must have an engaging title and valuable content inside, that is relevant keywords you are trying to rank for.
Final Words:
There are platforms that drive both – free and paid traffic to your website, however, it is always better if you start with the free traffic methods.
It’s because paid advertising requires some skills and knowledge, and it can be painful if you flush all your money without getting any good results.
Google remains the best free and super targeted traffic source that and every blog should utilize it. On top of that, you should also combine alternative free traffic platforms, like Pinterest, or forums like Quora.
Once you manage to generate consistent free traffic from these platforms, it might be the time to learn paid advertising and try Facebook, Instagram, or Google Ads. Keep in mind, that you don’t necessarily have to start with a high budget, and spending a few dollars per day can work out really well.
Thanks for the useful info.
Hey Elmer, I’m glad you liked the content!