Is it possible to generate website traffic without a marketing budget? There’s a reason traffic volume is paramount to inbound marketers. It tells the success of any marketing campaign. Marketing is the process of creating brand awareness that attracts and acquires your target customers. The success of marketing campaigns can be measured by the volume of traffic generated.
For smaller businesses that are just starting, having a marketing budget might not be possible at first. So they’re thinking, “there must be a way to generate traffic on a $0 budget?”.
How to Generate Website Traffic Without a Marketing Budget
This post will walk you through how to generate website traffic without a marketing budget. We are going to talk about how small businesses can generate traffic with $0 marketing budgets.
1. Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a broader term for everything you can do to generate website traffic for free. Before we can talk about search engine optimization, blogging must already be taking place.
Every content marketing strategy must take into consideration how to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). The amazing thing about search engine optimization is that it is free to do except if you’re hiring an SEO company to do the heavy lifting for you. Both big and small corporations are given a level playing ground to rank on SERPs.
Greater results, even better than any paid marketing strategy can be achieved with an expert combination of on-page and off-page SEO.
There are many things your SEO campaign should include. Just to mention a few:
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Create Quality Content
Quality content is one that is unique, fresh, and informative. It has one goal it aims to achieve. That is to satisfy a user’s search intent. If you want to generate traffic for your blog or website, you should always aim to publish high E-A-T content.
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Build Quality Backlinks
The backlink profile is one of the top-ranking factors used by Google to rank web pages. If you must rank on Google and generating higher volumes of website traffic, you must build quality backlinks.
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Optimize Website Speed
Having a fast loading page is a great way to retain visitors that already found your website through search engines or referrals.
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Research Keywords
Keyword targeting helps you fill existing content gaps in your niche and rank faster on SERPs, generating more traffic for free.
Google Question Hub is a resource that helps you identify content gaps in your niche.
2. Leveraging the Power of Social Media
Social media is where all the netizens are at. Luckily, the natural use of social media is free too. You can reach a huge audience, engage, and hopefully convert them without spending a cent.
The goal of social media in generations of website traffic is to refer people back to your website. A great way to get started is to publish helpful content on your website, share on your social media pages while referring people for more information on your website.
In Google Analytics, website traffic generated by this means is known as referral traffic from social media sources.
3. Guest Blogging
Back in the early days of blogging, guest blogging was only a way to connect with other bloggers to share their ideas. It had no real economic value for both bloggers. Today, it is helping content marketers generate a lot more traffic than before.
In a nutshell, guest blogging is when you publish your articles to other people’s websites or blogs of similar niche.
The primary aim of guest blogging is to generate referral traffic from backlinks that point back to your website.
Guest posting is a win-win situation for both the host and guest bloggers. The host gets the ever needed fresh and unique content for their blog. You get an opportunity to earn referral traffic from your host’s website visitors
If you are lucky and your host gets a lot of page views, you would naturally get a lot of referral traffic from your guest post.
4. Go Local on Google
Search engine queries are becoming more localized. This is especially helpful for local businesses.
For example, it is much easier to rank for dental practices in Montreal than for dental practices in Canada.
Someone in Montreal searching for dental practices is most likely hoping to come in. So, optimizing your content to rank for dental practices in Montreal gives you a better chance of getting website traffic on SERPs and likely a physical visit.
Also, completing your Google my business page is another way to rank for local searches and generate
more website traffic without spending a dime.
5. Contribute to Industry Forums
Answering questions that real people are asking on industry forums is a great way to generate fast website traffic for your website. Forums like Quora, Reddit, Facebook Groups come to mind.
When you contribute to forum discussions, you earn the chance to subtly promote one or two links to your website.
Note that people generally hate promotional content. So you should not be caught with your hands in the cookie jar. Only include links that are helpful and provide useful information on the topic of discussion.
6. Create a Podcast
Podcasts are another way you can generate website traffic without a budget. Creating regular podcasts sells you as a knowledgeable member of your industry.
Creating a podcast is just the same as creating a blog post. The only difference is the medium of interaction.
Podcasts are free to create, and awareness for podcasts has increased over the last couple of years.
Inviting other industry bigwigs to be a part of your podcast can make it all the more successful. That way they are more likely to share with their audience and networks too.
You can equally round off by sharing completed podcasts on your video channels to serve as an alternative or additional content.
In summary
Different strategies abound that you can explore to generate website traffic without a marketing budget.
Organic marketing strategies such as shared above can bring long-lasting results better than short-lived results of paid marketing.
Most people naturally dislike promotional contents but you still find ways to make them less promotional but achieve desired results.
However, to achieve desired results requires you to put in a great deal of your time, energy, and creativity.