How to Get Website Traffic with $0 Marketing Budget

Today any business owner understands the importance of having a strong online presence. Creating a good website costs money, but obviously it is not enough. Making your business available to your potential customers is the first and foremost task for your marketing team. But what will you do if you have no money left for marketing? How will you drive traffic to your website with $0 marketing budget?

Surprisingly, there are some ways of driving traffic to the website without any additional money investment. Let’s take a look at the most effective techniques for increasing your website traffic for free.

Make Research

I hope you’ve made some research before starting a business? You should carefully inspect your business niche and know who you wish to attract with your offer. Make surveys and learn your potential audience: what are social groups, what is the age, are they men or women. Knowing your customers is essential for building a proper marketing strategy.

Test various strategies to know what your customers expect from your product or services and to learn what techniques work the best for your clients. The best and easiest way to do this is finding a controversial topic that may be attractive for your target audience and share an interesting post with them.

Focus on SEO with $0 Marketing Budget

Good SEO is extremely vital for any business website. Establishing a proper optimization strategy for your website means a lot for traffic and brand awareness. When your website is ranked high in SERP, it drives more people to your site and thus increases its traffic and, as a result, conversions.

On-page optimization is a constant work. You should never give up SEO and always check the latest algorithm updates and innovations. If you run a local business, your website should follow the newest tendencies in local search engines optimization.

Pigeon, the latest Google algorithm update, has brought some additional requirements for local business websites that highly influence their ranking. Thus, domain authority is very important for local websites as well as their proximity to the center of the city. Keywords are still important, but keyword spamming may be recognized by Google as a bad sign and your website may be banned. You can get more local SEO tips from this article.

Speaking about links, you should always keep in mind that buying links is a very bad strategy that may cost you website traffic and may get your website under Google penalties. Google algorithms Panda and Penguin monitor websites in terms of bad unnatural links and may ban your website. So focus on gathering only natural links to your website.

Create High-Quality Content

Content on your website is closely related to search engine optimization. Google improves its algorithms and with release of its latest nestling – Hummingbird – internet search becomes more and more focused on users and less on website owners. Search engine leaves no chance for websites to cheat with links. It pushes bloggers and website owners to high-quality content creation.

High-quality content means it is created with users needs in mind, not for Google or other search engines. Your business should offer helpful info that users will wish to read and share.

Running a blog on business website adds a lot to customers’ engagement and conversions. Constant updates allow your website to keep visitors’ interest and stay visible for search engines. The best types of content for creating leads to your website are:

• FAQs. Even if you have a page with answers to the most popular questions, you may post interesting articles on the most vital topics that stir interest among your customers;
• Viral content. People often use Internet for entertainment. And they are ready to share with others the content they find worth sharing. Viral content is the kind of content that “creates massive attentions” as Moz calls it;
• Guest blogging. Is a perfect way of driving organic traffic to the website from other resources. Create a high-quality content, include natural mention of your business and offer such posts to websites that have authority among users in your niche. First, it helps raising your brand awareness and tell people around the web about you and your product or services. Second, you get quality links to your website.

In any case, your content should be appealing for users and be very catchy and informative so users wish to share it with their friend on social media.

Engage with Users on Social Media

Social networks are one of the most effective means of driving traffic to the website. When you have a high-quality and interesting content you should allow people to share it with others across the internet.

First, create a social media account for your brand. On Facebook you may create a special brand page that offers some additional resources and services for promotion. However, when we speak about $0 budget for marketing, you don’t necessarily have to use those special services. Just remember a few simple rules:

• Have less accounts. Despite you might wish to establish your presence in most social networks, it’s better to create just a few to update them regularly. Having social media accounts that are abandoned or updated once a year doesn’t work in your favor;
• Be creative. On social media you have just a few seconds to attract users’ attention and make them wanna read your post. Choose catchy words and short sentences to drive people to your page;
• Add attractive visuals. The latest research provided by Twitter shows that users are 5x more likely to read and share tweets that include images or video rather than those with plain text. The increasing popularity of Pinterest and Instagram opens various opportunities for driving customers and establishing close relationship with users.

Thus, Starbucks makes a good use of its Instagram account showing various kinds of photos. Here you can find catchy snapshots of company’s products, menu, service team and happy customers. All this content creates a nice engaging atmosphere.

Starbucks’ Instagram Account

Today one of the coolest ideas for creating a loyal social media community is getting so-called “brand advocates”. The survey of McKinsey show that gathering early feedback on product among people on social media may be beneficial for brands. People usually trust friends and family more than adverts. Studies show that users even trust online reviews from people they don’t know.

Users’ reviews cost nothing for a company but they can bring loads of new customers. Inspiring customers leaving feedback, testimonials and reviews is a complicated process but it pays off with trust to brand and higher conversions. You may add some gamification to the process of engaging brand advocates by offering discounts, coupons for shares or comments. Check out this infographic to learn a bit more about the techniques you can use for driving brand advocates to your business.

A Field Guide to Brand Advocates

Host a Contest or Make a Survey

It works better when you already have at least a short base of customers or social media followers. People like contests, interviews and surveys and like participate in various researches. The main idea here is offering users a question or questions that may interest them. Some quirky or funny questions often work the best.

Thus, design studio owners may offer such questions as “What were the weirdest things you found in your vacuum cleaner?” or “When do you think the best time for changing kitchen curtains is?” Such surveys allow people to share with others their own experience and tell funny stories about their friends and family. People are more likely to interact with brand’s website or social media account when they have an opportunity to speak about themselves, so surveys are a perfect technique to drive their interest to your website, and thus – to increase traffic. Such users’ stories may become a great basis for a website content. You can turn such stories and jokes into nice posts what can drive some more traffic to the website as well.

You can even use your weak points to get some more traffic and followers. If your logo is bad, ask your followers to give you tips how to improve it. People love to give advice so it can become a great opportunity to achieve more traffic and maybe even get some new logo projects.

Nice Tip: You can use a free service SurveyMonkey that allows you creating various polls and surveys and then share them with your Facebook followers with the use of a free application.

SurveyMonkey

The techniques mentioned above are great for any startup project, whether it has a marketing budget or no. You can use some of them or choose a complex solution for your business. But remember that high-quality content is one of the coolest and cheapest ways of driving traffic to website with zero budget.