12 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website (Without Paid Ads)

Consistently driving high-quality traffic to a website is pretty difficult.

Isn’t it?

But imagine what it’d be like if you can drive a massive amount of quality traffic to your website without spending a dollar on ads.

Wouldn't that be great?

In this post, I’m going to share with you 12 powerful traffic driving strategies that will skyrocket your website traffic in a very short span of time.

And most importantly – you don’t have to spend a single dollar on ads to achieve that result.

So ready to jump in?

Let’s get started.

12 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

#1 Write Answers On Quora

Quora is the world’s most popular and biggest Q&A website, with over 300 million+ active users.

Millions of people ask and answer questions on this platform every single day.

And just by answering questions on Quora, you can not only generate a massive amount of highly targeted traffic to your website, but you can also build your authority.

But most people are using Quora the wrong way.

If you do the same mistake, then no matter how hard you try, you can never generate a decent amount of traffic from this platform.

And that mistake is – Answering questions just for the sole purpose of generating traffic.

Yes, you heard it right.

I saw several times that people are just randomly answering questions that don't provide any value at all.

But that’s a wrong practice.

Even though if you want to generate traffic from Quora, it shouldn’t be just your only goal.

You have to be authentic and provide value on this platform to get the most out of it.

Here are the 3 simple steps you can follow to get massive traffic to your website using Quora:

• Step 1 – Find a question within your niche that has a decent following and less amount of answers. Also, before you choose any question, make sure you have a good knowledge of that topic or question.

• Step 2 – Write a kick-ass answer and try to provide as much value as you can. And don’t forget to include images because it makes the answer engaging.

• Step 3 – Link to your website as a helpful resource in your answer or use it as a signature at the end of your answer.

That’s how easily you can write answers on Quora and generate free traffic to your website.

#2 Create Contents on Trending Topics

Trending topics are like fire.

It catches user attention very quickly and you can use that fire to easily attract traffic to your site.

For example, whenever Google introduces any new algorithm update, blog posts related to that topic get a huge spike in traffic and social shares.

And you can pretty much do the same thing for your website.

But before you do anything, at first you have to find out what is currently trending in your niche.

You can use Google trends to easily find out the current trends in your niche.

Just head over to Google Trends and type in any search terms or topics related to your niche.

And then it will show you the trend graph of that keyword for the last one year.

You can even go ahead and change the time frame, country, and search type for evaluating the keyword trend.

Besides that, you can also have a look at the niche-based news websites, Twitter trends, popular community threads for finding out some hot trending topics.

And once you get those trending topics, produce the content as fast as possible.

Because after all, trend is all about speed.

#3 Publish Guest Posts on Other Sites

Guest posting is not only a great tactic for driving targeted traffic for your website, it also helps to build quality backlinks, that later on helps to rank higher on search results.

However, guest posting is not quite an easy task to do.

It takes a lot of effort and time for doing guest posting the right way.

But at end of the day, it’s insanely rewarding as well.

To start off your guest posting campaign, firstly you have to find out the websites where you can contribute.

For discovering websites that accept guest posts, you can use some search operators like:

• “keyword” + “Submit a guest post”

• “Keyword” + “write for us”

• “Your keyword” + “guest post”

Once you find out those websites, put them in a spreadsheet and start reaching out to the owners or content managers of that those sites.

If you don’t have any idea about how you can write outreach emails, you can even use the guest posting outreach template by milkshake.

But before you reach out to anyone for guest post contribution, make sure the websites at least have a decent authority and traffic.

I personally prefer to write for websites that have a domain authority between 30 – 70 and get more than 20k+ website visitors per month.

Now this evaluation metric can vary depending upon the niche.

So it’s always better to do your own research before you reach out.

#4 Target Low-Competitive Long Tail Keywords

No matter what tactics you use, SEO is still going to be the most profitable traffic source for the majority of businesses.

But to be honest, SEO is not easy.

Sometimes it takes months, and even years, to rank a single page on Google.

But still, 90.63% of pages get no organic traffic from Google.

What could be the reason?

The reason is – most people are targeting high search volume keywords that are super competitive.

And it’s almost impossible for a new or mid-range website to rank for those keywords.

But there’s a better way that you can use to get free traffic from Google without waiting for so long.

Instead of targeting high search volume and highly competitive keywords, try focusing on targeting the low-hanging keywords.

This kind of low-competitive long-tail keywords might not bring thousands of traffic, but those keywords are comparatively easy to rank.

And can also bring you a decent amount of traffic.

But the question is: how you can find out low-competitive keywords for your website?

For finding low competitive keywords, head over to Zutrix keyword planner and enter your head keyword.

Then it will find out relevant keyword ideas along with the search volume and competition.

Choose the keywords that have a decent search volume and low competition.

However, the competition metrics that you’ll get on all the keyword research tools are not always 100% correct.

So before you choose any keyword, do a manual SERP analysis to measure the competition of that particular keyword.

#5 Create Expert Roundups

Creating expert roundups is by far one of the most efficient ways to drive truckloads of traffic to any website.

On top of that, it will also help you to build up a good professional relationship with industry experts.

But what exactly is an expert roundup?

If you don’t have any idea about expert roundups, then let me explain…

Roundup posts are basically like a list post where industry experts share their opinion or thoughts about any particular topic.

Here’s an example of an expert roundup post published by SearchEngineJournal.

The best thing about doing an expert roundup post is – it benefits everyone.

The audience gets massive value, contributors get exposure on your site and you get a ton of free traffic to your website.

Not a bad deal, right?

At first, find out the experts in your industry who have a decent following and list them down in a spreadsheet.

Then come up with a kick-ass topic that attracts user attention and also excites the experts to contribute.

And finally, send emails to those experts asking for a contribution to your roundup post.

Most of them would say yes and eventually contribute to your post.

But still, I prefer to build a good connection with them by sharing their content, commenting on their posts, or by just appreciating their work, before I ask them to contribute.

#6 Update & Relaunch Your Old Contents

You don’t have to create dozens of content every single month to attract traffic to your website.

Instead of creating new content, you can just update your old content relaunch it like a new one.

First of all, you have to find out the contents on your website that are a bit outdated.

Then figure out what are the things you can do to improve that content.

For example, if you have a piece of content on “12 Best SEO software”, try to expand that list by adding more SEO software.

And you can even add infographics and more images to make the content attractive for the user.

Once you’re done updating your content, share it on your social media channels and sent out an email blast to your email subscribers.

That’s how easily you can utilize your old content to drive more traffic to your website.

And the best part?

Updating old content also significantly improves search engine rankings.

#7 Repurpose Your Contents

Repurposing content makes it easy for everyone to expand their reach without producing more content.

You can use the same piece of content and repurpose it into many different formats, like videos, infographics, and short social media posts.

And by doing this, you can reach a wide range of audiences on many different platforms without creating any extra pieces of contents.

Brain dean from Backlinko uses this method a lot.

If you look at the YouTube channel of Brian dean, you’ll see most of the videos on his channel are just converted from his blog posts.

And this saves a ton of time for him because he is not creating everything from complete scratch.

For example, if you have a published blog post on your website, take that blog post and convert it into a video.

And then upload that video to YouTube.

That’s how simply you can use the power of content repurposing to scale your content marketing game without putting too much of your time and money.

#8 Own Your Audience (Utilize Email Marketing)

Forget about traffic. If you’re not creating your email list from day one, you’re running your business at the edge of a knife.

As a business owner, you should never depend on any third-party websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.

And that’s because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

They might ban your site from their platform or might shut down their operations.

I’m not saying that you should never utilize these platforms for your business.

But at the end of the day, you have to keep in mind that there’s always going to be some uncertainties.

So what’s the solution?

The solution is: own your audience.

And how you’ll own your audience?

By building an email strong email list.

You can use any email marketing services like Getresponse or Convertkit to store and send emails to your subscribers.

And if you’re a WordPress user, then you can also use lead capturing software like OptinMonster to capture the emails of your website visitors pretty effortlessly.

Pro Tip: For encouraging your website visitors to give their email addresses, you can offer some short incentives like eBooks, mini-courses, a free version of your tool, free goodies, templates, or a checklist.

#9 Be Active in Online Communities

Try to be active and engage in as many online communities and groups as you can within your niche.

Online communities like Facebook groups, Reddit, and niche forums can work like wonders for your business.

But only if you use it correctly.

The truth is: promoting websites in online communities like Facebook groups became really tough these days.

Because most quality groups and communities don’t allow self-promotion to avoid spam.

And if your only intention is to post around your website links on these groups, get ready to get banned.

So instead of just thinking about self-promotion, try to provide as much value as you can to these communities by commenting on other user’s posts, providing valuable insights, and engaging with other group members.

When you keep your focus on providing value, it not only builds up your authority, but even if you promote your content occasionally, group admins will most probably approve it.

#10 Run a Giveaway or Contest

People love free stuff.

Isn’t it?

And you can use this “love” to drive an insane amount of free traffic to your site.

But how?

By running giveaways and contests for your target audience.

Giveaways and contests are outstanding to explode your website traffic, grow your email list, build your following and also improve the overall business reputation.

And generally, giveaways bring up many new users for your website and expand your reach.

You don’t always have to giveaway expensive things to attract your audience’s attention. Even a small book, eBook, software subscription, web hosting, t-shirt or hoodies can make everyone interested in your giveaway.

But at least make sure that whatever prize you’re giving, should be relevant to your business and the kind of ideal audience persona you have.

For running giveaways, you can use a tool like Gleam to set up and run your giveaways smoothly.

#11 Optimize Your Website For SEO

If you want to drive sustainable traffic to your website for a long period of time without burning money on ads, SEO is the only way out.

However, to be honest: SEO is a bit complicated.

There are hundreds of thousands of factors that come into play if you want to rank your website on top of Google search result.

But before you do anything else, the most important thing you have to do is – optimize your website for SEO.

It’s the first step that you have to take before you create any sort of strategy and build backlinks.

I can’t really list every possible SEO optimization tactic here because it would be insanely long and might be a bit complicated for you.

That’s why I’m going to point out a few basic yet most important SEO optimization tactics that you start to apply on your website from day one.

With that, here are the few things you have to do for optimizing your website for SEO:

• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and perfectly crawlable by Google bots

• Optimize your website for faster website speed

• Conduct a website audit

• Improve the user experience of your website

• Internal link your web pages

• Add schema markups

• Optimize your images properly with keywords

• Optimize your content with LSI and relevant keywords and ensure the content quality is top-notch

• Eliminate any duplicate content from your website

#12 Create High-Quality Long-Form Content

The quality of your content will play a very crucial role if you want to increase your website traffic.

But still, most people don’t pay much attention to the quality of their content.

You have to understand one thing: the internet is filled with crappy and low-quality content.

And if you do the same thing, you’ll ultimately get ghosted by your audience.

Because at the end of the day, no one wants to waste their time reading a crappy piece of content.

At the same time, if you publish in-depth and quality content on your website, it will help you to build trust, increase social shares, drive more traffic and ultimately bring more online visibility for your business.

In short:

Quality content = more visibility and trust.

However, you have to keep in mind that the definition of quality content is not producing 10,000-words of content pieces.

Instead of focusing on words, try to focus on the user intent and solving the problem of the user.

If you can satisfy the user intent with a 1500 word article, there’s no need to produce 5000 words article just for the sake of making the article long enough.

Conclusion

So these are the 12 strategies you can implement to drive traffic to your website without spending a dime on paid ads.

But keep in mind that these strategies might take some time to reflect the results.

It’s not like paid ads where traffic instantly starts floating around your website.

So you have to keep patience.

But that’s being said, when you’re just starting out and don’t have a big marketing budget, these strategies can be a lifesaver for your business.