10 Easy Ways To Drive Free Traffic To Your Site

Driving traffic to your site is crucial. Let’s say you did your research, you know the best articles to write that people are searching for in your niche with low competition (by the way, if you don’t know how to do that, click here), and you release your articles out there, you’ll notice something if you’re like 99% of bloggers — You’ll realize that no one reads your articles!

It’s almost like you created a ghost town. In fact, that’s what it is. You’ve made articles that no one in the world gets to see. You see, it takes time for Google to trust your site enough to recommend your content to people searching it up on Google. That time is usually 6–8+ months sometimes even longer at around 9 months. It’ll take 6–9 months for an article to get to the highest-ranking it’ll most likely get. That’s a long time to wait for some traffic to trickle in as you get closer to that time. 

Something you can do now
However, there are some things you can do to bring traffic to your blog without waiting months to see if the article would be well-received by people. Let’s look at what those methods are, how can you drive free traffic to your site without paying anybody a single dime. 

1. Start a YouTube channel 

You don’t have to start a YouTube channel with the purpose of growing an audience there on YouTube, instead, YouTube can be a great place for you to make a simple video that addresses a concern that somebody may have when they search it up on YouTube. 

Let’s say somebody has a question of, “How many page views do you need to blog full-time?”. If your blog is about making money with blogging, you can make a video to address that question and lead viewers to your site if they want to learn more. 

The simplest way to make a YouTube video is to pick up your phone or camera and start recording. You don’t need to be a video editor or have an expensive camera or a microphone. Oftentimes, a very simple video of a person talking as they are walking is enough. 

You obviously should invest the money you make from your YouTube channel back into your channel. That means, getting the proper equipment, learning how to edit videos better, etc. But any talking head video shoot on your phone would be enough to start getting views and attention on your blog. 

Another thing you can do if you don’t want to show your face is to record your voice and add stock footage, animation, or whiteboard drawings over it. 

Click here to learn how to start a YouTube channel with a less than $100 budget

I’ve been experimenting with ClipChamp. ClipChamp is a paid tool. It allows you to record your screen and voiceover and add stock footage from their library easily into the video as you’re editing. You can do this on your browser or you can install ClipChamp on your computer for easy access. 

If you don’t feel comfortable talking into the mic (something I’ve come to realize I absolutely sucked at), here’s something you can do, you can use the text-to-speech tool already embedded in ClipChamp. There are also other text-to-speech tools out there. You may have to pay for those. 

You can just put the texts in there, it’ll make an audio file for you without you needing to play it out for your microphone to catch and record. Then, you’ll add stock footage and texts over it. 

Edit: So I found out that Medium has a tool that readout your articles. You can write an article, publish it on your blog, import it into Medium, play the text-to-speech option, record it with a microphone, and then put stock footage over the audio. That is how you can make a youtube video with text-to-speech for free. However, the audio may not be as clear as a paid text-to-speech tool. 

Something to note with text to speech is that YouTube may not allow ads on your channel if it’s text to speech. You may lose out on YouTube ad revenue. I’ve seen some people talking about how that rule only applies if you got repetitive content (ie. you’re reading from a book, a Reddit post, etc) but I’m not too sure on the whole thing. I’ll update as I find out more. 

Putting your videos out there is a great way to drive quite a bit of traffic to your site. In fact, if you were to start two brands in similar niches, one with YouTube and the other with a Blog, you’ll build up your brand faster with YouTube than with a blog. 

Although many people have found that you can usually earn more with a blog than with YouTube eventually since you can get more personal with your audience on a blog with their email address. 

If you got a blog, you must start a YouTube channel. It’s just a smart thing to do even if you aren’t looking to build up your YouTube channel and just looking to drive some traffic to your blog. 

Click here for the 12 most profitable youtube niches 

Click here to learn how MrBeast made 54 million on YouTube 

2. Start posting on Tiktok

If you haven’t noticed, our attention span has been getting shorter and shorter. Tiktok content is great for those with a short-attention-span which is pretty much all of us. 

Tiktok is another great way to get your name out there and drive some traffic to your site. 

3. Join Facebook groups for Bloggers

I have personally found this strategy to be very useful. My site is still relatively young at this point and a lot of my monthly site traffic comes from Facebook groups for bloggers. 

You’re free to join any of them. What you’ll do is go under somebody’s post and put a link to your blog. 

Placing a link to your blog without saying anything else can still drive some traffic to your site especially if the article is interesting to people but the most effective method is to find a post that is in your niche that you can segway to your own post.

An example could be a post on SEO that somebody posted on the group. I blog about how to make money on the internet including how to make money with a blog so I can comment something like, “Amazing post! SEO is for sure important for any bloggers to learn. It can drive a lot of traffic to your site if done right. Speaking of driving traffic to your site, here’s an article I wrote on 10 free ways to drive traffic to your blog check it out!”

That’s what you’ll say in a comment. It’s very easy. If you can’t find articles similar enough to your own to segway into, just put a blog post link in the comment. Some people will still click on it. 

4. Comment on blogs in your niche

Commenting on someone else’s blog can also be a great way to drive traffic to your own site. There’s usually a box for you to add a website link if you got one. Someone may get curious, “Who’s this person?” and check out your site. They may also comment on something in return that can be great for SEO if they use a lot of relevant keywords. 

5. Guest posting 

This one is a bit tricky. It can be very hard to find a good blog to guest post on. You shouldn’t guest post on other people’s blogs too much because you’ll be spending a lot of time writing articles for other people’s blogs that’ll bring them traffic and money instead of to your own site. 

You’ll also have to think about how big of an audience someone else’s blog has. If they got no audience, what are you doing wasting your time writing for someone else’s blog? Nobody is going to see it! 

The blogs that have a lot of audiences would be more tentative to let you post on their blogs as well. 

It’s not uncommon to email 300 people only to get 1 okay from a mediocre or a less-than-average blog. 

Guest posting definitely can help bring you traffic if done right, if the blog you guest post on has high Domain Authority and has a lot of audiences. 

I’d say don’t spend too much time guest posting, your time is better spent writing high-quality content and building up your brands across different platforms. With time, your articles will rank and people will find your brand through different means (ex. YouTube, Twitter, Tiktok, etc). They’ll naturally want to link to your posts if it’s good. Those backlinks will be organic. Good blogs will also be fine with you guest posting on their site at that point.

95% of your time should be spent on creating high-quality content. Many bloggers will spend 50% of their time reaching out to find blogs to guest posts for or blogs to build their backlinks. Most of the backlinks will be poor-quality and offer a temporary rise in domain authority. 

Be patient in building up your brand. The smartest thing to do is to focus on high-quality content creation and safe ways to drive traffic to your site. 

6. Twitter 

You can promote your content on Twitter with a simple search. Add your own input to something somebody tweeted. Add a link to your site. Twitter links are no-follows which means they aren’t good for backlinks but they can be good to bring your blog in front of more people. 

7. Reddit 

Reddit is another good place to place links to your blog posts. Make sure you follow the community guidelines so you aren’t posting and promoting your own blog when it isn’t allowed. 

8. Medium

Once you created your Medium account, you can go to this link (save this link, Medium hides it because they want to own your content, importing a blog post doesn’t mean they own it, it’s hard to find the import link on their platform) to import your articles from your blog. Don’t directly post on Medium as it’ll create duplicate content that Google doesn’t like. Instead, import your articles into Medium.

You’ll be allowed to post 3 times in a 24 hours window on Medium. You’ll be asked to attach 5 tags. That’s how people will find your articles. You can also comment on someone’s articles on Medium to get them to notice your blog. 

Medium only gives you 3 free reads per month so if you want to comment on more than 3 articles per month, you’ll have to pay the $5 membership fee. 

Another great thing about Medium is that you can make money if a paying member of Medium reads your posts. 

Read this article if you want to find out how to make money on Medium. 

9. Quora

Answering questions on Quora is a great way to introduce your blog to people. Quora links are no-follows meaning it’s not good for building backlinks. But, if you get a lot of views, that link could become do-follow which in turn, increases your domain authority. 

10. LinkedIn 

You can comment on someone’s post and include a link to your article. If you are building up a blog and you don’t want your contacts on LinkedIn to find out, you can create a whole separate account specifically for promoting your blog posts. 

How long does it take to build up your brand?

It can take 1–2 years of consistent effort to build up your brand during which there might be times you want to give up because no one is reading your content. You must stay strong and persist if you want to make it. 

Many people will teach you backlinks strategies that can give you a temporary boost in your pageviews but can get your site banned if Google thinks you’re trying to outsmart their algorithm. 

There are people who paid for site traffic and illegal backlink strategies. While they may be doing well in the short-run (3 months), they may actually see a permanent decline in their sites when Google realized what’s up. 

Be patient in building up your brand. It takes time. Put in the time to write great blog posts, go beyond what other bloggers are not willing to do, put in more stats, a personalized table, do an experiment, write out your experience, create a YouTube channel and a Tiktok account, put out great content on a consistent basis, and give it time. 

If you’re producing high-quality works, your pageviews will rise, your traffic will come. 

Click here to learn the 50 ways to make extra money this month 

Final thought

There are so many easy and free ways to get your brands in front of people, not all of those methods are equal. Some of those are more effective than others. For me, I found what has worked for me quite well so far is to visit Facebook groups and comment my own blog post links. 

Other methods (ie. Twitter, Reddit, etc) aren’t as effective as Facebook group comments. 

Try different methods to see what works for you the best and focus more energy on that method. 

I’m also going to start a YouTube channel with a (text-to-speech voiceover because I suck at speaking into a microphone) to try and drive more traffic to my site. I’ll write a comprehensive article on my experience and you can read it to see how well YouTube works in bringing traffic to a blog. Maybe that’ll convince you to start a YouTube channel! 

Click here to learn how to build up your brand as a content creator