How to Promote a Website & Drive Traffic Free

You just created a website. You’re excited and all set to attract as much visibility as you can, gain new customers and make sales online. But, the problem is, you can’t really achieve any of these things until you learn how to promote a website and get it in front of the right audience.

Without finding ways to get your website in front of the people who are most likely going to be interested in your business, it is almost impossible to get the right kind of traffic and new customers you’d expect to attract with the new website.

Considering that there are a number of entrepreneurs with a new website going through this issue, in this article, I’ll be sharing with you the step by step plan you can use to promote your website from scratch, even if you just created the website today.

Create a Target Audience

The first step to promote a website free is to create a target audience. This is crucial because you don’t want to waste time promoting your website to the wrong people.

So, instead of building your website and sharing it with just anybody, take out time to identify the people that will be interested in your product or services or whatever it is that your website is all about.

For beginners, start with identifying the product, services or idea that your website is all about. Then go ahead and find out, who are the people likely to be interested in these kind of services?

If you’re finding it difficult, you can hop onto other websites or companies doing the same line of business and then find out their ideal audience. This should give you a clue on who needs to be in your audience and how you can get to reach them.

I’ve written a complete guide on how to find your target audience here. Get into it and find some ideas there.

Create & Post Content

Now that you’ve been able to identify your target audience, your next step to promote a website is to get over and create and share content that will attract this people over to your website.

But, hold on. Before you get to create and share content on your website, you have to identify the kind of content that will appeal to this your preferred target audience. Doing this gets them interested in coming over to your website.

Now, there are several ways to get started with this but one of the first crucial steps you can take as a beginner is to again head over to the other established websites in the same line of business as yours.

From there, find out the kind of content they are sharing with their audience and the reaction of the audience to those pieces of content.

For example, if you’re in an industry selling baby items, you should expect to see content related to baby items and baby topics on other established website similar to yours.

To make your research even more in-depth, consider checking out the key words used by your target audience in their searches on search engines like Google. This will give you an idea on their pain point, things that matter to them and the kind of content you should be creating for them.

There are also a number of other keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, Google Keywords tool, WordStream, that could also be really helpful to you as you get to find out the top searched key words for your niche.

Here’s a guide on how to go about key word research online.

Optimize for SEO

Since our goal is to promote a website free, one of your best strategies to achieve this is to optimize your website and each pieces of content you create for search engine visibility.

There are different aspects of website optimizations like on page optimization, off page optimization, technical optimization, link building etc. You need a decent knowledge of each of these aspects of optimizations to actually get started fully.

Now, talking about getting started, at first, you want to start with optimizing your website itself and getting it ready for search engine indexing, using the different types of search engine optimizations as listed above.

After your website has been optimized, you want to start optimizing each piece of content you create, with the right keywords at the relevant places.

Outside your content itself, you also want to optimize the other aspects of your content page like meta tags, meta descriptions, title tags, heading and images etc., using the right keywords and description for each aspects of it, to amplify your visibility.

Build Backlinks

After creating your wonderful posts and getting them all ready, Google will not “dash” you the number one spot on its search engine result page because you have a nice post. To get to that spot, it has to be well deserved.

And not only are you going to demonstrate some expertise and credibility with your content, you’re going to have to show that you actually deserve to be there.

Now, one of the ways to get credibility on the search engine is to gain back links. Back links are urls from other websites, pointing to your own website. Literally, the are to the search engines, what sharing and likes is to the social media.

When other websites link to your website, they are sort of authenticating the credibility of your content, ideas, solutions etc. and the higher the quality of websites linking to your pages, the better Google perceives your credibility.

Now that this has been cleared, to get to promote a website free of charge, you want to attract as much backlinks as possible. And to do this, there are some steps you can take. I’ll sharing three of these with you below:

Create High Quality Content: It is easier to link to very high quality content, compared to websites with low quality content. So, you want to go out there, look out for the top ranking content in your niche and find a way to best those pieces of content with your own content.

Share Case Studies & White Papers: Case studies and white papers are not just some every day kind of content. They are well researched content with a lot of depth, back story and details that demonstrate a popular way of doing things, an unpopular opinion, idea or concept. Most websites will likely share or reference this kind of content, compared to the usual every day content.

Reach out for Backlinks: If you create a worthwhile content with a lot of value for audiences from a particular website, reach out to that website for a possible backlinks. While this might not always get you a positive outcome, I’ve had a number of creators reach out to me for this and I linked to their website when the content is top notch and relevant for my audience. So, this works most times.

Guest Blog on other Websites

Guest blogging is one of the most important practices used by creators to promote a website free. It is a bit popular and the best part is that you can use guest posting to kills two birds with one stone.

Yes. Because outside getting you backlinks, guest blogging has a way of giving you some publicity, getting your brand in front of audiences outside your website and of course, positioning you as a thought leader of repute.

To enjoy all of these benefits, start with identifying the top players in your industry, find ways to write and share content on this website. In return for this, you will get a back link and publicity.

Outside websites, there are also magazines, newsletters, newspaper publications etc. find out those ones with a large number of your potential target audience and find ways to pitch content ideas to these guys.

Done successfully, guest blogging can be great for PR. And of course it can be a useful tool in building thought leadership while positioning yourself as the expert that you are, in your niche. This alone has its own way of boosting your chances of getting seeing, heard and known in your industry.

Share on Social Media

You can’t completely promote a website without using the social media. Yes. Not only is it an important aspect of your website promotional strategies, the social media amplifies your voice.

Okay let me explain.

Instead of creating and publishing content on your website alone, you can take up the links to your posts on the website, share it with your audience on social media, get a bigger reach and a new set of readers over to your website.

So as much as possible, as part of the promotional strategies for your website, get a handle on the top social media platforms.

No, you don’t have to be on all the social media platforms. Or just any social media platform because it’s popular. You want to review and select the top social media platforms with the largest number of your target audience. This is what will deliver the best ROIs for your effort.

As soon as you’re able to sort this, go ahead and create a handle on those platforms with your brand, using the right brand representation from the name to logo, profile pictures etc.

After this is all set up, you can start growing and gathering new likes, followers and engagements for your social media handles by creating and sharing posts on these platforms.

Pay attention.

To get the best results, you don’t want to share only links to your post from the website to your social media handles. At best, this will get you lower visibility per social media algorithms.

Try to share a mix of content relevant to your audience’s needs, your website content and other top trending posts in your niche, giving your own takes.

Engage in Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to build a deep and meaningful connection with your target audience. You can use this as part of the strategies to promote a website free of charge.

To get started, set up email opt in forms on your website. This allows users to optin to your email lists after reading your content.

With this, you can get to send emails to registered users whenever you get to publish new content. And have them come over to your website to read the posts.

Outside using your own email list to promote your content, for even bigger results, you can partner with other creators with a larger email lists in your niche and promote your content, using their email lists. This exposes your content to an even wider audience.

Final Words

There are so many ways to promote a website free without having to use paid ads. The strategies you just learned today are some of the proven steps you can use and get the best results, even if you’re just starting out today.

Keep in mind that building organic traffic for a new website might be slow at first, but eventually after a while, it catches up if you’re able to stay consistent.

On the other hand, if you’re eager to build a robust traffic from day one, you can still use these strategies alongside using paid ads either from the search engines like Google, social media ads or using other paid promotional options.

And finally, to create an even better result with your website promotional goals, reach out to our experts here, let’s review your website and find out what works best for you.

Now, it’s over to you. What are your biggest challenges when it comes to promoting a website online? Drop your comments below.