Posted by Maybe you’re just starting out and you don’t have money to pay for traffic. What can you do to get eyeballs on your offers and start making sales as quickly as possible without paying money up front?
Here are seven methods that are proven to work. Choose whichever one makes the most sense for you, get started and within days you can begin making sales.
1: Do Expert Roundups.
Ask a bunch of experts the same question and put all of their answers into an expert roundup article. This can be any and all experts in your niche.
You might be asking for their best tip for marketing on Facebook, for example. Once you get the article written, nearly all of the experts will be willing to promote the article, publish it, link to it and so forth, bring you all kinds of new traffic.
2: Be a Podcast Guest.
You know things that other people want to know, and you can share this information on other people’s podcasts.
But here’s the rub: While you’d probably make a terrific guest on a podcast, the person running the podcast doesn’t know this. Or more to the point, they don’t know you.
So instead of saying, “Hey, can I be a guest on your podcast?” You want to approach them for something that is much smaller. Remember that it’s easier to get a big favor if you ask for a small one, first.
Here’s how to ask for that small favor: Make a list of podcasters in your niche. Choose a pertinent topic (or topics) to write about. Then ask each podcaster for a quote that you can use in your article(s), as we did in the expert roundup above.
Let each podcaster know you’ll be linking back to them. Most, if not all, will say yes to this small request because it’s flattering to be acknowledged and quoted as an expert, plus they’re happy to have the link. Plus, if you’re getting a lot of experts, they want to be included and not excluded.
These experts will notice they are featured with other experts in their niche. In fact, you’ll email them and let them know you’ve published the article featuring their quote, and tell them to feel free to share it, too. This will get you free traffic.
Then in a few weeks you can go back to each of these podcasters and ask if you can be featured on their podcast. Some will say yes, some will say no, and that’s okay. Keep in touch with all of them and sooner or later they’ll probably ask you to be on their podcast.
There’s another payoff to using this method, too. in the future when you approach someone to do business or be on their podcast, you can reference all the influencers who are featured on your site, and this will make it much easier for them to say yes to your request.
3: Create Ultimate Lists
After you’ve done a few expert roundups, start creating ultimate lists. This could be the ultimate list of travel bloggers, or the top 100 SEO blogs, or the top 100 recipe sites.
Then go to Fiverr and pay someone to create a badge for each of these roundups. For example, ‘The Top 100 Keto Websites by Your Name’, and make these available for everyone on your ultimate list. People will put these on their sites, providing a link back to your site.
By doing the expert roundups first, you’re creating rapport with some of these influential people. Then when you create an ultimate list, they are much more likely to place the badge on their website and share the list with others, too.
4: Post Partial Articles on Medium.
Contrary to popular belief, Google does not penalize you for duplicate content. This means that whatever you post on your own site, you can post on other sites as well.
Here’s the strategy for posting on Medium: Take the first few paragraphs of your article and post it to Medium. At the end of those paragraphs, post a link to continue reading that sends them back to your site to finish the article. Then use a pop-up or content upgrade to collect their email address.
The more you do this on Medium, the more new traffic you’ll get. And as you continue to collect email addresses, you can send out notifications each time you publish new content which will drive more traffic to your own site. Follow up with offers and you can see how lucrative this can become.
5: Post Full Articles on LinkedIn.
Using the Medium strategy of posting a few paragraphs and linking to your site doesn’t seem to work nearly as well on LinkedIn. Maybe this is because LinkedIn is a social media site. But what does work well is posting the entire article on LinkedIn and then offering a ‘cheat sheet’ that is available on your website.
For example, maybe you write an article about 7 ways to get free traffic and you post it on LinkedIn and on your site, too. Then you create a cheat sheet with all the steps to each of the 7 strategies and you offer that in exchange for their email address.
Offer the cheat sheet, or the step-by-step instructions, or whatever your content upgrade might be to the LinkedIn readers with a link to your site.
This works best if your freebie is a visual graphic, such as an infographic or anything that is more than just plain text. The same information given in a visually appealing infographic is worth more than plain text, and people will click over from LinkedIn to get that.
6: Repurpose Your Content into Video
When people watch your videos, they are more engaged with your content than at any other time.
Take your written content and your podcast content and use it to do live videos on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. You can do these lives videos on all of these platforms at the same time.
Watch to see what topics are super popular that you want to discuss, and do live videos on those as well.
When you’re live on these sites, talking about different tactics and strategies, let viewers know that if they want your free cheat sheet / manual / video etc., they just need to go to your site and claim it.
You can get traffic to your site, build your email list and of course pitch your products and services.
And here’s the important thing to remember – someone who has just watched your video is far, FAR more engaged in what you have to say and offer than someone who, for example, just read a tweet. That’s why the traffic you get from your videos is going to convert at a higher (odds are MUCH higher) rate than most other forms of traffic.
7: Leverage Contests and Giveaways.
Not just any contest or giveaway is going to be effective, but if you build one specifically on a points-based system, it can bring in a good amount of new traffic. For example, participants get 5 points or contest entries for sharing the contest on Twitter, and 5 more for sharing on Instagram, and 20 points for blogging about the contest and so forth.
You can also provide referral links, so that every person they get to sign up through their link provides them with another 5 entries or points.
Using a point system makes the contest or giveaway go viral. Be sure the prizes make sense for your niche. If you give away iPhones but your niche is gardening, you’ll get lots of entries from people who don’t garden. But if you give away the top 10 gardening books, then you know that people who are entering are mostly gardeners themselves.
Your winners can be randomly drawn or prizes can go to the people with the most points, or you can do a combination of these two so that some prizes are randomly drawn and some go to the top point earners.
And you can run a new contest every month or even every week for consistent new traffic.