In our today’s overcrowded online marketing space, starting a new blog project on a complete zero $0 marketing budget and want it to be successful isn’t impossible, not going to be an easy ride either.
Don’t get scared! You’re covered.
In this post, am going to share with you 6 proven time-tested tactics you can start using immediately to generate website traffic with zero marketing budget.
With many online marketing channels (especially social media platforms) becoming more of pay-to-play platform, is increasingly difficult to drive that targeted traffic for free.
But that’s not to say you can’t take your blog to greater height and make it popular by generating website traffic with zero marketing budget.
You just have to be sure of what you’re doing, employ proven tactics, stop waiting time, energy on unproductive tasks, concentrate on things that matters and do them consistently.
Consistency is the key driver to success.
When I decide to start this very blog you’re reading, my plan is to drive at least 90% of its targeted traffic through free referral channels with zero marketing strategy, and that plan is what I stick to till this moment of writing this post and beyond.
As a matter of fact, most of what am going to share with you below are part of the strategies or tactics I had planned on using to drive free targeted traffic to this blog without spending a cent on paid marketing channels.
My first plan of attack is executing what I called “strategic guest blogging” and is at the top of my action plan list. Many well-known authority blogs have used this same guest blogging approach to built their online business to a thriving height with an amazing result.
Couple with that, I have some other proven tactics combined that I believe with careful planning and execution, the expected result will be nothing short of amazing.
So, without wasting much of your time, let’s get started.
6 Guarantee Tactics to Generate Website Traffic With zero Marketing Budget.
#1. Guest Blogging.
While I was struggling to increase traffic to one of my blogs, I tried guest blogging as one of the tactics to achieve my goal, did it worked?
Yes, It worked!
But something didn’t go well with it that I couldn’t benefit much from my efforts or guest blogging tactics. I wasn’t consistent with it and not even strategical in my approach towards it.
I just want to have my post out there on someone else blog, so far the host blogger accept to publish my content, am all done.
If you’ve been approaching your guest blogging campaign from such tactics or angle, you’re not going to get much value from it – neither traffic nor links.
This I how I intend to approach my guest blogging campaign to generate more traffic, leads, and exposure this time around.
#Step1. Research High Traffic Blogs With Large Social Influence.
First, I have to get the idea of building backlinks out of it if I must get anything meaningful from my guest blogging campaign. Sure, I do have one or two links in the body content and certainly a link to the blog in the bio section.
But this is not my primary reason or objective and shouldn’t be yours either, offering greater value for the host bloggers community and getting exposure should come first in mind then any other thing is secondary.
This is one of the reasons you’ll need to research on high traffic sites with massive social media followers. This is because more than just link building in the process, you need to get your content in front of massive relevant audience.
And, well, I know this is too thrown around and you must have read it a thousand times if not more than,
“Matts Cutts – so stick a fork in it: Guest blogging is done”.
Well, Matts Cutts didn’t put an end to guest blogging as a content marketing tactics, what Google is getting tired of are spammy guest blogging for SEO links juice. So if you’re doing guest blogging for link building primarily, your days are numbered.
Let’s move on.
Since you’re trapped on cash for marketing, your utmost focus should be on sites with large followings and highly engage audience.
Here is how to do some research and find blogs with massive social media engaged audience.
First, if you have access to an influential marketing tool like Ninja Outreach, this process might not take you too long to conquer.
All you have to do is log into your Ninja outreach dashboard, click on “social prospecting” on the menu list, enter your niche “specific keyword” into the search field and check the box near to it – choose between blogger, influencer, executive, company, and journalist.
The Ninja Outreach app will return a list of top figures in your industry so you can go through it to see if one match your criteria. The good thing is that from the app interface you can see each influencers Twitter followers count, website URL and a link to his twitter page.
All these are good metrics to determine the success of your guest article if you eventually land one on the influencer blog.
If you don’t have access to such tool, here is another reliable way to find authority blogs in your industry that accept guest post from bloggers.
Head over to Google search engine and type in your primary keyword. Let’s say you want to write for a content marketing blog.
Enter a search string like this “content marketing” + “write for us“. You can do this for any industry or specific niche topic you wanted to write guest post on.
Now, look at the top blogs in that industry that accpet guest bloggers, you can from here visit the page directly to read each blog guest blogging guidelines, or check out their last ten articles to have a feel of what content quality the blog published.
Or you can take the blog URL to Alexa and dig more about the blog audience demographic, traffic volume and sources, etc.
These steps are necessary because you don’t want to waste your time submitting content for a site that won’t add any value to your online business.
Here are couple of things to watch out for in any blog you want to guest blog for:
Readers engagements.
Social shares.
Traffic sources.
Domain Authority.
Number of blog followers on social media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc..
#Step2. Send Your Guest Post Pitch.
Now that you’ve identify the right blog to submit your guest post, is time to send in your guest post pitch to the gatekeepers.
Before doing this, make sure you have read the guest blogging guidelines properly and have understand what the host bloggers want from guest contributors before sending in your guest post pitches.
From experience, some host bloggers have no problem with writing your content 100% complete before giving them a heads up about your guest appearance.
While some bloggers demand you come up with some content ideas and let them choose what best fit their blog and their audience, then you can get to work.
So, read each blog guest blogging guidelines carefully, it helps maximize your approval chances.
#Step3. Write and Submit Your Guest Post.
That’s it! Is time to write your content and submit for your host blogger’s approval. If you’ve done your research with care and keep eye on simple details, having your guest article published won’t be difficult at this stage.
But one thing is sure you must do to achieve better success with guest blogging campaign, and that is “consistency”.
There are no magic bullet in online marketing, no matter how good and effective any marketing tactics is, if you’re not consistent in doing it, you probably won’t see the expected or necessary results.
#2. Search Engine Traffic – SEO.
No matter what online business you’re into, time will come that you’ll need a good percentage of your customers to find you through the search engines. Especially Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines.
According to a research/experiment conducted by Groupon marketing team, organic traffic will actually responsible for 64% of your overall traffic. Given that most direct traffic are actually organic traffic.
And with search engines driving more than 51% of all website traffic, you actually don’t have too many reasons to ignore search engines traffic, especially if you want to start attracting paying customers to your website.
But here is the thing, search engines traffic might come at no monetary cost to you (that is if you know how to optimize your content for search traffic yourself) but it does come at a cost that you can’t ignore:
knowledge.
Patient.
Trials and Errors.
Consistency.
Expertise.
Discipline.
Ability to learn and follow through.
Etc.
All these qualities take time to develop into their useful form that will bring anyone closer to success. So also the game of SEO is not for the impatient marketers, if you’re looking to start a blog today and drive thousands of visits from search engines immediately, you might get a bit disappointed.
It doesn’t work out like that.
If you’re ready to put in the required work necessary to achieve better search engine visibility, here are a couple of things you need to do to put your website search engine optimization on the right track.
#Strategy1. Title Tag.
Your blog homepage title tag which comes in between the header section of your website HTML source code is very important to your website on-page optimization.
This title tag tells both search engines spiders and your human visitors in one simple sentence not more than 70 characters what the blog topic is all about.
If you can’t summarize what you’re doing on your blog in a few words, I already said it in the past that you probably haven’t think through on your most targeted audience.
If you’re on WordPress, you don’t have to be a code geek to add your title tag. With WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO, All-in-one SEO and even by going through the setting page on your dashboard, you can enter your title tag easily.
#Strategy 2. Site Meta Description.
Regardless of whether the meta description help increases search visibility or not, you need to write an eye-catching sentence that includes your niche primary keyword.
There is a reason for this, when users search for keyword phrases related to your niche, and your website pop up among the search result, Google bold these keywords, this help entice the user to click through.
Again, with SEO plugin in WordPress, adding your website meta description is easier.
Note: For each page you create on your blog MUST be assign with its own title and meta description tags. So it goes too for each post entries on your blog.
#Strategy 3. Get rid of Duplicate contents.
There are many instances of what could be regard as duplicate contents on a blog, but for the purpose of our study today and for space, let’s take a look at the most common culprits on a blog.
Tag, Author and categories pages.
If you use tags and categories on your blog, the best way to get rid of them not to cause duplicate content issue is to instruct the search engines not to index these pages and to ignore them.
There is a functionality in Yoast SEO plugin that let you do this. So you don’t have to worry about how to fix this issue.
WWW vs Non-WWW Version of your blog.
According to Google, www.mysite.com is not the same as http://mysite.com. There are lots of variations of this instances, but let’s keep with the two for a moment.
You’ll need to tell Google how exactly you want your website URL to be treated, is it www.mysite.com or my site.com?
To do this, first, you’ll need to verify the ownership of the two version of your site URL by placing a set of codes in your page HTML header section.
Login into your Google webmaster dashboard and click on add a property (if you haven’t add it before). Google will require that you install a bit of code into the header section of your web page to verify you’re the owner.
Copy and paste this code into your web page header section. Most professional premium themes will provide a small box in the theme setting page where you can add any code snippet into the header section of your web page.
To verify the other version of your blog URL, you don’t need to copy and paste the code again, just add it as a property in your webmaster dashboard and click on verify on the Google verification page.
Now, on your webmaster dashboard, after selecting the website you want to modify it setting. Click on the small gear icon on the top right corner and.select “site setting” from the list.
That’s it.
#Strategy 4. Publish the right content.
Take note I didn’t say “publish great content”, or “epic”, “pillar”, whatever the name marketers have given to useful content.
What is the right content and why is it different from great content?
The right content is that information that identifies a particular problem, provide actionable useful information to solve that problem and the consumer of such information find it exactly what it need to better or improve the value of its living.
No matter how great, lengthy, epic etc….a content is, if the consumer of such information didn’t derive any or maximum benefits from reading it, you’ve not done a good job.
If after reading your content, the user has to visit other websites to get more information on that particular issue, you’ve definitely left something out of your information.
You need to be publishing the right content and be consistent with it. Search engines spider love webpages that get frequently updated.
#Strategy 5. Build, Earn, Claim, and Beg for Links.
Yes, just do it!
If it takes to beg, claim or build it, just make sure you’re getting quality links to your webpages. Don’t wait till people get notice of your great content and start linking to you on their own (link earning), you might have to wait for ages.
Go all out and attract the right links to your content.
A big part of the search engines algorithm ranking factors heavily depend on links signals.
#3. Create and Join a Community.
I have to tie these two together under one section, because the objectives are one. The goal is to get people involved indirectly in your blog conversation.
First, let’s take a look at how joining relevant bloggers community can help generate website traffic with zero $0 marketing budget.
I belong to several bloggers communities though not many of them really worth the time. So you’ll need to keep testing and keep close eye on the type of blog topic that get people talking, voting and sharing the most.
Most bloggers communities operates on a voting system, contents with the most votes get to the front page and that’s where the traffic and engagements starts.
Bloggers community like GrowthHackers, Kingged, Bizsugar have well in the past drive free targeted traffic to my content because those content receive enough votes from other members to remain on the front page.
There are lots of these bloggers communities on the internet today, some are specific or closely related to a particular niche topic, while many of these communities will allow you discuss anything from pro-Obama to Anti-Obama.
Submit your published content to these communities, most will require that you register to get your content syndicated and some will state that you don’t submit any post publish later than a week. So read the community guideline before submitting your content.
So read the community guideline carefully before submitting your content.
Now let’s look at how you can create your own relevant bloggers community and generate targeted traffic with $0 marketing budget.
In fact, this tactic will cost you nothing in terms of monetary cost, all you need is the zeal and desire to maintain it for long.
Facebook Group.
With over a billion user on Facebook alone, you definitely can’t go wrong using Facebook to generate website traffic with zero marketing budget to your website.
As of January of 2014, 74% of online adult uses social media platform, and of that figure, 71% of it uses facebook. This means only 3% of online adults still doubting whether to use facebook or not.
Where else can you get that kind of gathering in one single place?
Sometime late last year, Mark Zuckerberg posted this on Facebook. Let that ring some bells in your head for a moment.
So how do you create your very own Facebook group that help increase the flow of traffic to your website? This is what we’re going to treat in this section.
You can approach your Facebook group in two ways.
First, you can create a group solely for your blog audience that helps foster up the discussion going on your blog and drive direct traffic back to it. Or you can create a Facebook group related to the topic of your blog that is of interest to your audience.
There are pros and cons to the two approach, each one has its own benefits and disadvantages.
When you create a group that is not directly tied to your blog as a brand, it makes the discussions going on the group floor less about your blog contents. But it does help bring more enthusiasm and sense of responsibility among the group members.
A group created to focus on the discussion about your blog content and audience bring along some sense of caucus, family, or tribe among group members.
It help creates a very strong bond among members that help build the community faster, encourage regular discussion, but it does limit the expansion or reach of the group beyond your blog readers.
How you approach creating your Facebook is up to you. What are your goals, vision, and mission for creating the group? The answers are for you to find out.
After creating your Facebook group, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind, get doing and strictly abide with:
Don’t add people without their consent – it’s annoying.
Promote your group on Facebook.
Promote your group on Your Website.
Get high profile bloggers and marketers to join.
Cross promote with other relevant Facebook groups.
Keep your Facebook group free of spam.
Be available.
Set your rules, and don’t be the first to break them.
For a guide on how to create a thriving facebook group, check out this detail post written by Ryan Stewart for Moz.
#4. Target LongTail Keywords.
I told you above in #2 that one of the tactics to generate website traffic with zero $0 marketing budget is SEO, targeting long tail keywords will let your SEO strategies pay really well.
Since effective keyword research is mostly the foundation a better search engine marketing campaign, you’ll need to do your best in this area so things can work perfectly.
What are long tail keywords?
This shouldn’t be new to you anymore, but for the sake of novice or beginners marketers, let’s recap what are long tail keywords. Here is Google definition of what longtail keywords are.
So, How can Long Tail Keywords help you generate website traffic with zero marketing budget?
The answer is simple.
Going after the long tail keywords (three, four or even five search phrases combined) can help you rank higher for more related keywords phrases easier than those head search terms like “content marketing”, “affiliate marketing”, “make money” etc.
Unless you’re a Wikipedia or a publishing powerhouse with thousands of $$$ on marketing budget and lots of leg walk to get things easier and quicker, small business owners can’t compete for such search phrases and win the game.
Instead of trying to battle it out with the well-established brands for high volume search phrases (two-word search phrases), go after the low/medium search volume long tail keywords phrases and drive your share of the search engine traffic.
Besides this fact, those head search terms will only result into driving untargeted search engines traffic.
Next question, how do you find these long tail keywords?
Here I will show you some proven tactics to do just that quicker and with less research on keywords findings.
First, I use places like Quora to quickly dig up long tail keywords without using any keyword research tool. All you have to do is visit Quora and type in your seed keyword like this.
Let me give you something very special secret tips here.
If you spend a whole one-month doing keyword research using any keyword research tool, I bet if you can discover such great long tail keywords that real human are asking from real people.
These are real life questions being asked by real people and answered by real human experts in their respetive fields. I took the first one in the image above and plug it into Googe search engine, here are the results.
You can see from the Google search result above that even the top ranking pages are not exactly targeting the search phrase, so here is your chance to win the spot. But you have to give Google very strong reasons to rank your content top by producing better content.
To increase your chances of hitting top spot, scroll down the bottom of the search result page, there you’ll see other related search phrases you can sprinkle into your content that can further drive more related search engine traffic.
But be careful with this approach, as not all related search phrases Google display will be relevant to your primary keyword phrase. Only take what best fit and related to your content topic.
The arrows in the image below point to 3 search phrases closely related to the main search phrase. Unless you’re citing “Shopify” or using their marketing strategy as a case study, there are no reasons to mention it in your content.
I have discussed how to use Google keyword planner combined with another keyword tool named Keyword.io to find long tail keywords in this post, you can read that section to learn more about researching for long tail keywords.
#5. Give Away Your Product in Exchange for Reviews.
When Dave and his team completed the Ninja Outreach app and need to get the word out for it, one of their tactics is to give some licenses away for free to bloggers in exchange for an honest review on their blogs.
Dave started reaching out to relevant bloggers in the industry with a free license of the software in exchange for a review and affiliate marketing partnership on a 50% commission with several other licenses for their blog audience.
I was lucky to be among the bloggers Dave approach for this awesome offer, here is a copy of the email message.
There are other gains you will derive from using this tactic.
You build real substantial exposure for your products, brand, and person in the process.
You build backlink too. Increase sales potentials.
Word of mouth is generated.
If you can get lots of relevant bloggers interested in your product in exchange for a review on their blogs, this could mean massive success for your product and lots of free targeted traffic to your blog.
#6. Get on Reddit.
Here is the slogan: “the front page of the internet”.
With over 20 million unique visits per months, you definitely want to get your slice share of Reddit traffic.
Reddit can be an incredible source of free targeted traffic if done right. And it can be confusing and not yielding any result if you don’t follow the rules especially.
Reddit like most communities works on votes but with a bit of twist to it.
Voting on Reddit is called “Karma”, which is the individual score for content submitted. Karma is the positives and negatives rating of your content by other members of the subreddit.
The more positives votes your content receives from members, the higher its chances to appear on the front page which can lead to more exposure, traffic and engagements.
One of the key success to Reddit marketing is to engage in relevant subreddit section directly related to your website topic. But you don’t want to make all your contributions to the subreddit about your website content.
unlike other social media gathering places, down votes on Reddit might not only get your submission into the bin, but might in some instances get you banned depending on how severe the case is.
Another thing you might need to keep in mind is, don’t go too much narrowing down your subreddit selection, the wider or broad the subject, the better.
For instance, subreddit like SEO might not offer many potential like that, is best to find related but wider subreddit with lots of discussions and members.
Sharing your content on Reddit is easy, just click on the share a link button on your Reddit profile page and you’re ready to roll. Keep in mind that you can share two types of content – content with link and content with no link.
Make sure you share in the appropriate section and read the rules by the side before hitting the share button. A good rule of thumb is to share in subreddit with at least 20,000 users in it. This will help give your content better exposure and maximize result.
The key success to Reddit marketing is participation. You need to be contributing positively to the community, engage regularly in your subreddit, and share valuables contents.
Conclusion..
Base on the fact that you’re with $0 marketing budget, I have carefully examine every tactics I discuss in this post and ensure no single one of it will cost you a cent to explore.
They’re all for you to try without spending a dime.
What other ways do you generate website traffic with zero marketing budget? Share with us in the comment box below.
The post 6 Killer Tips to Generate Website Traffic With Zero Marketing Budget appeared first on Just Website Traffic.