How to Increase Your Website Traffic With a $0 Marketing Budget Boost

Picture this…

You’re passionate about health and fitness. In fact, you’re a registered trainer and you’re currently a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s Master of Nutrition and Dietetics Program.

You're passionate about health, longevity, and creating lasting change in the lives of human beings.

You want to take all of this profound wisdom and offer it in digestible (no pun intended) content on your own personal blogging website. So, you purchase a domain, you get hosting and you build your site.

You finally press “publish”, cross your fingers, close your eyes, and wait for the onslaught of web traffic that will be coming your way.

Only…

Nothing happens.

This is because the proverbial

“If you build it — they will come."

Is a lie. You’ve done your homework, you’ve gained the knowledge, you’ve built a site, and you’ve produced impactful and valuable content — but that isn’t enough to get traffic to your site.

What’s worse?

Well, in this scenario, chances are you don’t have the funds to hire some Gen Z-er to help you build an expensive Facebook advertising campaign.

You need free traffic…

That’s what this article is about. This article is going to go over exactly what you can do to generate free traffic to your website or blog. It will also underline the benefits this type of traffic can yield.

So let’s dive in…

The Traditional Model of Driving Traffic to Your Site

If you’re just starting out, chances are you believe the most effective way to generate traffic for your site is through SEO optimization.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Moz.com, it entails, “the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”

Now, for regular Tom, Dick, and Sallies like you and I, we would generally need to hire someone to help with our SEO efforts. It’s noted, however, that hiring an individual or agency to help you with SEO could run anywhere from $500 to $10,000 a month depending on your needs.

I don’t know about you, but even the low-end financial commitment would be a huge blow to my available budget.

Like I promised, this article is about how to generate traffic to your site with a $0 marketing budget.

In these next few sections, we’re going to uncover more of how to do that.

How to Gain a Website Traffic Advantage With a $0 Marketing Budget

We’re going to break down this section into two parts, that way, we can keep our thoughts organized seeing as the method is going to take various elements working in conjunction to be successful.

Those two parts are:

1. Creating organic content on content platforms
2. Driving the content from the platform to your blog

After we outline those parts, we’ll then take a look at the results of what driving free traffic can yield.

1. Creating organic content on content platforms

Most of us who blog, are really writers when it comes down to it.

We have that itch to take what is in our mind and manifest it into the written word. Now with Statista noting that the number of bloggers in the United States is set to reach 31.7 million users in 2020, an increase from 28.3 million in 2015, more and more people are looking to blogging to publish that writing for the world to see.

However, when we start out as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed bloggers, we make one or more crucial mistakes:

• We write and publish on our blog and hope readers will flock
• We publish on content platforms (Quora, Blogger, LinkedIn, etc.) and only allow individuals to read that content on those platforms

Now, creating content is the most important element to all of the rest of this strategy.

Without content, you don’t have a blog.

So, if you aren’t creating content yet — you should be, regardless of how “good” you feel it is. You must be creating constantly — that’s the only way to get better.

If you are already creating content — great!

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to create content on the “content platforms” (let’s use that term “content platforms” as a catch-all phrase for LinkedIn, Blogger, Quora, etc.).

You’re always going to want to create on a content platform first. After that, you can syndicate your content on your own blog. You also don’t need to worry about any SEO backlash due to duplicate content across different sites seeing as we’re throwing out SEO strategy altogether.

Why are we even focusing on a content platform if we want to get eyes on our own site?

Because no one knows our site exists…

Furthermore, these content platforms see over half a billion unique monthly users (LinkedIn at 260 million active monthly users and Quora at 300 million unique monthly users).

You need to be able to capture only a fraction of a tenth of 1% and you’ll still see a positive impact!

In practice:

If we wanted to give a hypothetical example, let’s say we’re still doing the health and nutrition blog and we just posted our article on Quora answering one of the posted questions — great, we’re ready to move onto the next step.

2. Driving the content from the platform to your blog

Now that we’ve generated our content, we need a way to get the views of that content over to our site.

We do this by incentivizing our site visitors to travel away from the content platform and over to our site.

Have you noticed a pattern with many of the successful “content producers”?

What do I mean when I ask that question?

Well, when I was starting out, I never took much consideration why some of the top content producers put footers in their articles or links in their bios. It was only until I did some research as to why these content producers did this did it all make sense…

They did this so they could leverage the traffic onto their own site!

Okay, so what do I mean by all of this?

Let’s take an example of a successful content producer on a site like Quora:

Now, I have kept the anonymity of this content producer as to not blow up their spot.

This isn’t about giving free publicity — it’s about identifying the underlying principles of this marketing strategy.

You’ll see that in their profile, they have included a link to their site where the reader can further connect.

This happens all the time.

What are the effects of utilizing this type of $0 marketing strategy?

I’m glad you asked — this is what we’re going to address in the next section.

The ROI of This Marketing Strategy

So all of this is fine and dandy in theory, right?

But let’s keep unwrapping this proverbial onion in order to see the return on investment.

Wait… can we even call it return on investment if we haven’t invested a single dollar?

Perhaps our investment is rolling up the sleeves and getting to work.

I’m going to go with that story…

Anyway, I digress.

So, with this strategy, it’s possible to start generating website traffic.

Now, I want to be clear — I don’t have access to any of the content producers’ backend analytics with this strategy in mind, so I’ll be using all of my own metrics.

Do you want to know the best part about all of this? I don't really think my metrics are even that “impressive” (at least compared to what many people commonly believe is needed to enterprise a blog).

Okay, in order to break some of these metrics down, let’s remind ourselves of some of where we are with our strategy:

• We are constantly producing content on various content platforms
• We are showcasing links in our profiles and within the content in order to market our blog

Not all the traffic of the content is going to follow the link and come through. Furthermore, with some content platforms, it’s hard to track exactly which content is driving the most traffic (this is especially true when you’ve created hundreds of pieces of content).

What this means is it’s hard to give a generalized ratio of the traffic that will be redirected, i.e. we cannot say for every 1,000 views of content you can expect ten site visitors.

Anyway, see image 1.1 below for some of the metrics from my own personal site:

Now, many of you might be balking at the number of views this site had from the date range 10/1/20 to 10/31/20.

I know I used to believe that the only way to be successful was to have 25,000 views or more — and really that number was just generated out of thin air.

There are too many variables to discuss regarding the “spikes” and the “dips” in the daily view count — what’s important is to consider the amount for the given sample.

Most importantly — for someone like you reading this — doesn’t 7,000 pageviews in a month seem achievable?

Okay — so we’re getting views of our site, so what?

Well, the “so what” comes into play when we “enterprise” our blog.

What I mean by that is when we offer something of value to our site visitors in exchange for money.

This is what blogging is all about, right?

• Being able to influence the world around you with your gifts, abilities, and knowledge
• And be rewarded for those gifts, abilities, and knowledge with an income

Now, this article isn’t about how you can create products and offer them up to your audience. That’s already talked about ad infinitum and I’ve written about it before.

Instead, let’s assume that you’ve already equipped your site with products — you’ve really had no way of selling them.

Our sample notes we’ve generated 7,000 views of traffic — what kind of return does that mean?

Well, in the image below, you’ll see the earnings from the sale of digital products from those 7,000 pageviews:

The point of showing you this isn’t to flaunt anything in front of you.

The goal here is to illustrate a measurable and attainable strategy.

For a lot of people (myself included) those earnings are very impactful on day-to-day life. Now, of course, the actual take-home is lower than that seeing as there are no taxes paid in this figure, however, it’s still an impact.

We can see the ROI from operating under this type of strategy.

Let's Recap What We've Learned:

In order to be a successful creative in the online content space — you don’t need to pay thousands of dollars to market your creative abilities.

You need the right strategy.

A strategy that can help radically change how your blog is viewed and received online can actually come at zero cost to you.

What you need is:

1. The ability to write content on content platforms
2. Strategically offer ways for the traffic on those content platforms to continue learning about you, your products, and your services. This is done through linking on your profile.

You don't have to be an "internet celebrity" to be successful

I've always been enamored with the successful entrepreneurs “behind the scenes.”

I’ve met a lot of people in my travels and I love it when I come in contact with a person who is working for himself or herself and making a good living doing so.

They are following their muse and using their knowledge, skills, and abilities to make the world a better place.

Isn’t that what we’re all looking for as creatives?

We have ideas as to how to make this place a little better — we just need to know the right way to market those ideas.

Many of us think the only way to be “successful” in the creative online space is to have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, to have a gigantic email list, and to have a website that sees millions of hits on a monthly basis.

But when we peel back the layers and see what marginable, sustainable, and attainable growth looks like — we see that we actually don’t need any of that.

Heck, we really don’t even need a financial investment of $10,000 a month from some SEO professional to get started.

We need:

• Drive
• Ability
• Patience
• Strategy

That’s really it — and then you can have what you’ve always wanted.

The freedom to work for yourself and operate a blog that helps impact the lives of thousands of individuals.

Ready to Make More?

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