Wondering how to market your small business website or blog with a limited budget?
While you can have the best product or service in the world but without an effective marketing strategy, no one will know about it.
The same goes for growing your blog. Just because you have launched a new website that doesn’t mean everyone will come flocking to it.
With over 1.8 billion websites on the Internet, it’s very unlikely anyone will notice your website/blog. You have to get the word out about your blog.
Although the competition is very stiff, remember your goal is to attract target audience to your website.
So how can you get more potential visitors to visit your site?
Well, nothing is ever truly free. You’ll either need to spend money or time (or both) to drive more traffic to your website.
If you’re just started out, if you’re tight on budget, follow this 5 proven ways to increase your website traffic and get your page up to the top of the search engines in no time.
How to market a website for free
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will help you to get more “organic” traffic. If you work on it properly, you’ll be able to improve your website page rankings and drive more free traffic from search engines naturally.
To find the best keywords for your niche market, you can use the Google keyword planner tool.
Make sure you use strong keywords in your website titles, headings, Meta description and include your main keyword throughout the content. Remember to add all your keywords in your blog post tag too.
If you’re adding non-text content like photos, graphs, media files or JavaScript, don’t forget to include text with your keyword in the title tag and alt tag so the search engines have something they can read.
In short, using the right SEO strategy can help you to gain organic traffic and a higher page ranking.
2. Reciprocal Linking
By having other website link to your website can improve your site’s traffic and reputation.
Reciprocal linking happens when two or more people agree to link to each other on their respective sites. It’s a win-win situation.
But don’t start linking randomly to a large number of low-quality, irrelevant sites. You want to do it the RIGHT way.
When it comes to getting inbounds link to your site, we should value quality over quantity.
Is the link contextually relevant?
Make sure you exchange links with sites that are related to the topic or niche of your site.
Are you adding value to your content?
Always linking to high-quality content related to your site that will benefit your readers.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media is one the best ways to promote your website or blog for relatively little investment.
Although it’s free to get started with social media, you might want to choose those that offer the best potential to reach your target audience.
Different social media platforms attract different target audiences. Make sure you’re using the right platform for your marketing effort before investing time in building your social media profile and growing your followers. Learn How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for your Business.
There’re lots of effective and fun ways to promote your business using social media. You can run giveaways and contests with landing pages to get new customer contact information and gain more “likes” and followers. Running live video stream on Instagram or hosting a twitter chat can be a great way to promote your products and services.
If you’re doing it right, you’ll be able to build a brand awareness, loyal audience and boost website traffic.
- 7 Tips to get started with social media for your small business
- 5 Important Elements of a Successful Social Media Strategy
- How to Create Instagram Stories Images for your Small Business
4. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a content marketing and SEO technique where you write an article and give it for free to other blogs or websites to promote your brand.
Having your articles published on high profile website or popular blogs will draw an initial surge of web traffic followed by a constant trickle of return readers with no further effort on your part.
It’s a great way to reach new readers, establish yourself as a niche expert, build backlinks to your website and ultimately drive more web traffic.
However, you’ll need to write good and unique content that add value to someone else’s blog or website. Then, you have find quality sites for your articles to be published and persuade them to post your articles.
What about people guest-posting on your site?
It’s hard to generate great content on a regular basis on your blog. Allowing guest posting on your blog is a quick way to get free content for your site and at the same time help other people to grow their audience base. It’s a win-win for both parties.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of allowing guest posting on my website. If you’re interested in having your articles featured on this site, check out this guideline.
5. Create Quality Content
Excellent content is the backbone of successful marketing strategy. In order for the above techniques to work, you need first and foremost to have good content on your site.
Creating quality content is of utmost importance to your website. You need to provide the kind of content that other people want to read, share with their friends on social media and promote on their own blogs.
What is quality content?
It’s the type of content your audience needs and can’t get anywhere else.
Ask yourself what special areas of knowledge or expertise do you have that can benefit your readers?
Are you providing information that your audience wants or are you only focused on getting something fresh on your site?
So how do you create great content? Depends on your time, budget and talents, you can either write it yourself, having guest bloggers or freelance writers to write it for you.
Tip: Subscribe to the blogs in your niche and take time to make a comment that gives value to the post. Blog commenting is another overlooked opportunity to promote your website for free.
Consistency is the key
Of course there are many other ways to get free traffic to your site. But these are best 5 effective ways that you need to focus on in the beginning, Put them into actions and stick with them consistently over a period of time, they will most certainly increase direct traffic to your website or blog.
What other free methods are you using to promote your website? Feel free to comment below.