Whether you have your own blog or working for an employer blog, the major challenge is to increase blog traffic for free.
It means you might not be having budget to invest in paid promotion or your employer may not be ready to allocate a budget for the same.
Also, there are many startup founders whom I know used to ask me the same question on consistent basis – how can I increase my website traffic without spending any money.
Hence I decided to write a blog which can help or answer this problem.
So let’s dig into it.
16 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic For Free
1. Focus on SEO
SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the traffic that you get from search engines when users search for their queries.
But to make effective use of this free traffic is not an easy task. You have to perform best SEO in your website, mainly on-page SEO.
Here are some of the tips you need to consider for optimizing your website for better on-page SEO:
- Include Targeted Keyword in Title Tag, URL, Meta Description and H1 Tag
- Make Sure Your Website Loading Speed Is Good
- Try to Make Use of Long Tail Keywords
- Try to Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippets
- Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
- Make Use of Schema Markup
- Have SSL Certificate
- Make Sure There Are No Broken Links In the Website Optimize your website for better on-page SEO Share on X
2. Publish Quality Content – Skyscraper Technique
This is one of the best tips you find it getting repeated from all the experts who write on increasing website or blog traffic.
When you write a blog content make sure that it is of very high quality.
So what does high quality mean? – Simple, It should be the best blog on the internet.
Now do not get scared on how to do that.
Brian Dean has made our job very easy by providing us with a technique called as Skyscraper technique.
You can read about it here: Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days
Having a high quality blog published on your website can get you lots and lots of traffic for free.
3. Blog Consistently
For you to get blog traffic for free, then you should blog consistently.
Do not blog for 1 week consistently and then give a gap of 1 Month. Consistency is what I recommend and it should be maintained at any cost.
If you feel like you cannot write 5 blogs per week, no problem. Just write 2 blogs per week. But it should be consistent.
When writing these blogs on consistent basis keep in mind that it should of quality content, as mentioned in above point.
4. Make Use of Social Media
When I mean by social media I do not mean about sponsored promotion. Remember, we are discussing on free ways of traffic.
Create accounts in top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Post there in consistent basis.
Other than just doing self promotion of your own blogs, keep liking and commenting on other posts. Re-share others posts if you really feel that it can help your audience.
Make the best of groups in platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Send an invitation for joining in those groups.
The chances of your invitation getting accepted mainly depends on well your profile is optimised. So make sure you are optimizing all your social profiles.
5. Participate In Forums
There are many question and answer platforms where you can participate and help others by answering their questions.
The best such platform is Quora.
Answer questions related to your blog niche, and if needed give a backlink back to your website in each of the answers you write.
But please do not write answers just for the sake of giving link to your site. You should answer the query in a very well structured manner and with lots of words. Only then you can build trust and people will click and read your blog.
6. Do Blog Commenting
Comment on others blog.
Please make sure that your comment is very long and try to give your opinion about that blog or add some new points to it.
Do not just comment for the sake of commenting and getting a backlink to your site.
One of my favourite person whom I know does this blog commenting in a very effective way is – Ryan Biddulph
7. Internal Link Your Blog Posts
Do not underestimate the power of giving internal links from one blog post to the other in your website.
Internal links will help a lot for users to stay for a very long time and also for search engines to crawl your content easily.
Internal links will help improve your website domain authority over the time.
But please make sure you are not stuffing your blog with too many internal links. Also, make sure you are giving internal links to relevant blogs. Make effective use of anchor text for this.
BTW – If you are not aware on what anchor text is – Anchor text is the clickable text to which you provide the link.
8. Create YouTube Videos
Wait, I know what you might be thinking in your mind now. You might be thinking that we are discussing about free ways of getting traffic and creating YouTube videos might be a costly affair.
Not at all. There are many free tools like Screencastomatic which will help you create videos for free.
There is also another tool called as Lumen5, which can help you with creating free videos.
9. Publish in Medium.com
There are many websites which accepts already published content, that too for FREE. One such popular platform is Medium.com.
Medium.com has around 200+ Million visits per Month. Make the best use of this traffic by republishing your blogs there.
When you publish, give the original source link at the end of the blog and also make the effective use of tags.
10. Send Newsletter By Collecting Emails
By sending emails related to your blog updates you can get the traffic for free on consistent basis. But for this to happen, you need to have the list of email Ids.
That was the reason why most of the blogs try to capture your email in exchange for a free resource.
Again doing email marketing also does not involve any cost. You can use tools like Mailchimp for this purpose.
11. Make Use of Free Analytics Tools
You might be wondering on how analytics tools will get you free traffic.
Free analytics tools like Google Analytics will help you in getting very good insights like which are the channels that are getting you good traffic and which are the channels that are not performing well.
Based on this analysis, you can strategize and focus more on particular channels which will help you get more free traffic.
12. Update Old Posts
Search engines favors updated content from time to time. So when you update your old posts with more content and re-publish them again then there chances that Google will favour your blog.
This will increase your chances of getting free traffic, mainly from search engines.
13. Understand Your Audience Requirements
People will come to your blog only if they feel that particular blog is going to help them out with resolving their queries or providing with fresh and updated information.
For this to happen, you need to understand who your audience are and what are they looking for.
Some tips for doing this is looking at various questions asked in forums like Quora, checking out popular blog comments etc.
14. Mention Influencers In Your Blog
This is one of the techniques which can skyrocket your blog traffic over night.
Mention in your blog about the influencer who have very high following and inform him about it. You can request him to check the blog and provide some feedback.
Doing this increases the chances of that influencer sharing your blog in his/her social channels. Now all the followers of this influencer will come to see your blog link and might visit to your website.
This is one of the killer strategies which can work, if planned and implemented well.
15. Guest Blogging
Now do not get scared when I mention guest blogging. You need not spend any money for sponsored posts and there are many bloggers who are ready to publish your writing in their blog for a free of cost.
The best way to approach them is by sending emails. You can get the email id mostly from their contact us page.
Remember, if you send 100 emails at least 1 person might reply to you positively. But the only problem with this approach is – it is time consuming and need lots of efforts.
But trust me, it’s worth investing your time into this process.
16. Analyse Competitors Strategy
Last, but not the least is to analyse your competitors.
You can analyse all your competitors strategies like –
- How frequently are they publishing blogs
- How many words on an average are they writing for each blog
- How frequently are they publishing in social channels
- What is the kind of content they are promoting
- From which websites are they getting backlinks from – there is an awesome free tool called Ubersuggest for this.
Based on your competitor analysis you will get more ideas on how to promote your blog more effectively and earn free traffic.
Conclusion
By making use of the strategies mentioned above in a very effective way, I am sure you can get lots and lots of free traffic to your blog, with out your requiring to spend a penny.
Please feel free to mention about other free ways you have used for your blog.
Happy blogging 🙂
