10 Best Ways To Grow Your Web Traffic Without SEO (Infographic)
This article was previously published on my personal blog
Getting traffic, it’s the lifeblood of each and every a website. Paradoxically, it seems like everybody is struggling to get enough of it. The reason? Getting traffic, it’s hard!
In 9 year of experiments in Online Marketing, I’ve tested a lot of techniques. I will try to enlist the ones that resulted more useful to provide a steady and reliable traffic source for me and my online businesses.
After you have traffic, don’t forget that alone, it’s not enough. Consider your visitors as “selfish.” If they do not find what they are looking for on your website, they will not make the actions that you want them to take (sign-up, share, etc.)
Why? It’s because of the supply and demand. If you’re not offering anything valuable and rare, you will not get anything worthy and remarkable back (as a list subscription for example.)
1. Interview Someone in Your Niche
I’ve applied this strategy in my pursuit to grow my first online business. A video games magazine that I had then sold in 2013.
My approach consisted in asking small-medium online games creator and gaming clans (mainly players that teams up to play together at multiplayer games) for interviews.
The reason why I choose these two groups was that:
- It’s was easy to question them. They are always doing the same stuff, and it might change just the context (the peculiarities of the game they created or the games they play to, i.e. shooting games.)
- They have a strongly tied community of players and members that play every day and follow any update.
Doing these Q&A, resulted in a massive increase in traffic and backlinks for me. My error was at that time (we are talking about 2008–2009, Social Networks were basically inexistent.) to not collect the targeted email of the ones visiting my website.
In fact, the people that you will interview will just share only one time your article. Then, don’t forget to catch the emails of who comes to your website and utilize it again after, to not lose value.
My second tip is to create a good title for your interview, to rank on Google for the name or company of the person you’ve interviewed.
2. Write About Others
Analyze what others are doing well (example), do a teardown (example), write a case study (example), or if you’re talking about a topic, just quote some interesting thought or practice that you’ve read about or seeing people applying.
Then send this link to the directly interested, and ask them to reshare.
3. Add Your Link in Your Email Signature
Simple as that. This tactic might sharp curiosity for you in who you are entertaining a correspondence with, and it can then create a point of contact to get to know you better (your story, achievements, etc. or simply your business).
It doesn’t cost you anything, and it’s an easy way to get a steady amount of traffic.
4. Do a Contest or a Giveaway
I’ve applied this tactic several time for my video games magazine.
When you have a magazine in this field, you’re constantly in contact with the PRs of the producers and distributors.
As my website was ranked #3 on Google for “video games reviews/recensioni videogiochi” in Italy at that time, I didn’t have that many problems to partner with video games companies and to organize giveaways with copies of new games coming out or accessories involved.
It was a win-win situation. These producers were promoting their brand new products and brands, while I was able to get people talking about my magazine and sharing the contest with friends back.
One of my most viral contest was a fantasy football that I’ve organized with the Italian distributors of PES. People that were subscribing were asking their friends to join them in the league (again, this was before Social Media, it makes you think how much they changed the game making virality and share much easier to happen. Before we had mainly just emails and word-of-mouth.)
An unusual practice, suitable especially for who is in an Online-related niche, is to create a contest or a giveaway and insert as a requirement to participate, to share the contest on social media (to do it just use Paywithapost.)
As this is also an excellent way to build your email list, don’t put half of the value that you can get in the trash, and make sure that your contest or giveaway is related to your niche/industry.
5. Be a Regular On Forums
Write compelling answers to users problems in your niche’s forums.
This could be simple as going on Quora or Stackexchange and answering Popular Questions in your topic. Or being a constant in a subreddit related to your field.
If you’re particularly successful in what you do, you can even do an AMA, answering people questions. This tactic was used by Sam Priestley on Reddit to get visibility.
This strategy works in the long-run and only if you apply it consistently. If you want to do it, then, do it often and systematically, or you will get just half of the value back.
You will benefit not only in terms of traffic from this strategy but also regarding your authority and in understanding better your customers.
6. Ask Your Readers to Share
Simply make easy for your visitors to share your post. If it’s valuable and remarkable, they will share it a lot.
How to do it? I use Monarch on my websites do that. It’s an easy-to-use social share plugin that allows you to integrate share buttons on your site quickly (I’m not an affiliate with this company).
7. Create an Infographic
As according to one research, 90% of all information transmitted to our brains is visual, your readers will probably love visuals contents.
To create an infographic you don’t have to be a Graphic Designer. Just use one online tool to create it like Canva.
You can even just turn visual one content that you’ve already written or just a part of it.
8. Offer Your Help For Free
Have you ever get the feeling of talking with someone, visiting their website, or reading about their practices, and think “He could do this much better.” or “Why He Isn’t Doing X?”
If you have specific skills in a certain field, this probably happened to you.
The next time some useful tips come in your mind just write an email and send it to the directly interested.
One time a copywriter that was subscribed to one my email list, just hit the “Reply” button giving me some copy suggestions and email marketing tips.
I appreciated them, and now I still keep in contact and exchange thoughts with him.
9. Get Interviewed
Find a podcast interview site relevant to your niche, and pitch them for an interview.
The web is so overcrowded, especially in some industries, that to find somebody that might be interested in interviewing you it’s less hard than you might think.
This tactic will also result in helping you create authority and being recognized in your industry. And to connect with your new interviewers, that have a lot of different connections in your niche.
10. Write a Review or a Testimonial
Have you ever used the product or followed the advice of someone around the web and this resulted in you getting results?
Well, write a testimonial in your blog talking about the person or the product in question. This will be extremely useful for that person, as he probably put a lot of effort in developing that content with your specific result in mind.
Once you published the testimonial, send him the link and ask him to share it with his audience.
