A website is an essential tool if you are serious about business. But no matter how good your website is, it won’t move the sales needle if you haven’t got traffic.
Writing detailed answers to web searchers’ questions is the number one way to get traffic to your website for free.
In this post, you’ll learn how to get traffic to your site for free. By the end of this post, you’ll know how to find article titles, how to gauge their traffic potential and your chances of ranking for titles.
You’ll also learn how long it will take to get traffic for free, how much traffic you can expect, and what the traffic might be worth. I’ll also share some tips I’ve learned to get traffic for free.
Free Traffic Sources
No matter how pretty and clever a website is, it’s useless without traffic. The whole point of a website is to influence your visitors and convert them into customers. To that end, your website needs a ton of traffic, but you already know that, and you also know you have two main ways of getting a ton of traffic.
- You pay for it
- You get it for free
Let’s look at each now in turn in a little more detail:
Paying for Traffic
Paying for traffic can be smart so long as you are confident in your product and your marketing skills. It’s all about the numbers, get your offer in front of enough people, and you’ll convert a percentage of them.
Are the conversion rate and profit margin big enough to cover returns and non-converting advertising? Once you get this figured out, you are making money. Trouble is, the market is constantly changing, folks’ tastes change, and so does traffic cost.
The forces of supply and demand price traffic, so the cost can be hard to predict. You’ll only know if buying makes sense if you already have a handle on your gross margins, conversion rate, and return rate.
In my experience, traffic often doesn’t offer a sufficient ROI. And that can be frustrating and eats into your already earned income.
What if you didn’t have to pay for traffic? What would that world look like? And that’s what we’ll cover next.
Free Traffic
Free traffic, is that just a myth? Free traffic is possible, and it’s known as Blogging, but we might as well tell you early in the story getting free traffic isn’t fast or easy. To get free traffic, we’ll need to write articles that bloggers call posts, and these posts answer our potential reader’s questions. More on how we can find out what those questions are a little later.
Just paying someone to read the top three webpage results from a Google search and rework the content won’t work (known as spinning). Spinning content will hurt your website long-term, and bloggers will hate you.
No, our post will need to be well-researched and expertly written with accompanying original pictures, graphs, charts, etc., whichever is appreciated. The point is the post must be top quality, better than anything already on page one. If you can’t improve on the post that’s already on the net, don’t write it.
Because Google’s algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day, thanks to AI, it cross-references our post with others in our niche; that way, it can tell if our post is covering the subject thoroughly.
This is just one example of what Google is looking for; they have thousands of ways to tell if our post is good. One of the main ways is by checking how long a reader spends on our page; if they go back to search and keep searching the subject, it’s a sign to Google our post could be better.
You get the point; Google is smarter than we’ll ever know, so rather than trying to outfox Google (as many try to do), we should do the best job we can, being as helpful to the reader as we possibly can.
No magic to fee traffic, that’s it!
If you want to turbocharge your passive income journey, then consider buying a site; check out these ready-made sites for sale. We built them all using the same WordPress platform and principles we used to create multiple websites that generate passive income.
Where Does Traffic Come From?
While there are a ton of platforms out there with tons of traffic, there is only one we need to talk about in detail, and you already know who that is – Google. Google is the number one bringer of traffic. While platforms like Facebook and YouTube are obviously massive, they don’t bring traffic to your website like Google, and that’s because Facebook and YouTube want to keep their traffic on their platform. It makes sense, seeing as they are in the advertising business.
Google, on the other hand, is a different type of platform. The whole point of Google is to connect the potential reader with the very best answer on the net. If Google started copying website content and offering the content directly, the net would quickly die, and Google knows that very well.
Google’s share of search is 90%. Obviously, Google’s search engine success is critical to our free traffic mission.
- Bing
- Amazon
- Yandex
- Baidu
- YouTube
How To Find Google Post Titles
Finding posts to write in our niche is not difficult. It is known as the Search Analysis phase. In your niche, you’ll likely know what the big queries are. The big queries are the questions you answer every day, you know, the ones you’re sick of answering.
But let’s assume for a moment you don’t know where to start, then begin by opening a spreadsheet and title it Search Analysis Queries.
The Search Analysis process is as follows:
- Open an incognito page
- Open Google
- Begin to search for a well-known query in your niche
- Allow Google predictive text to populate the text bar and note the list.
- Check the “People also ask” section for interesting queries and note the same.
The goal here is to find as many search queries as you find interesting; the best-yielding ones are often the ones you hadn’t or wouldn’t have ever thought of.
Note, just because we have found some interesting queries, it doesn’t mean we’ll write them. First, we must assess traffic potential but also competition.
How to Gauge Potential Post Traffic
Gauging post-traffic potential is difficult. Even the best-paid tools out there guess traffic numbers, I know this because I have real numbers on my websites, and they only rarely match what the traffic tools say.
The method I use is free, the best kind. It’s not accurate at guessing numbers; it’s more of a weighing machine. Its strength lies in letting us know how popular one category of search is over another one. This is type of information is super helpful when deciding which post category to write first.
If you know your niche pretty well, then as said earlier, you’ll already know what the big hitter categories are.
Anyhow, here are the steps to gauge category popularity:
- Log into google as Incognito
- Open Google Trends
- Set to USA
- Search broad category 1 – for example, “Spinach.”
- Search broad category 2 – for example, “Bread.”
The overall niche in this example is Food. Google trends return what you’d expect – Bread is a far more popular search than Spinach (I hate spinach), but importantly, it lets you know by assigning a recitative value to the popularity.
Ok, so that’s the category gauge method to show you which post you should write over another. But what about the query itself? What can we learn about potential traffic from it? The answer is a lot, and it’s plain old common sense.
A search query such as “How to make bread” will be a ton more popular than, say, “How to make brown bread at home without oven.”
When assessing your list of potential post titles, using common sense will direct you to the title that will bring more traffic. That said, the one that could bring the most traffic may not be the one we write because we must first access the competition.
If a competitor has written a really good post already, so good in fact we could improve on it, then it’s smart to move on and find another post title from your list.
Gauge Competition
Competition is what prevents us from writing all the obvious post titles. You know, like “How to make bread”. Post titles such as these would bring a ton of traffic, but the competition is fierce, and a newbie site doesn’t have a chance of ranking. Writing such a post would be a waste of time.
We’re not saying that you shouldn’t write this article in the future when Google shows you some love. But for now makes more sense to write what we call the long tail phrase, -“How to make brown bread at home without oven.” They bring less traffic, yes, but the chances of winning a page one ranking are much much higher.
To be clear, we want to write only the post titles we think we can win.
How Long To Get Free Google Traffic?
Starting a blog is a lonely place; it can take some time before Google even notices you (months). In fact, you’ll think something is broken – it couldn’t take this long to get traffic. It does, and some niches will take longer than others.
Google is a slow burner; she needs to get to know you before you’ll feel the love. It can take twelve months to two years before you see real action. If you are already a trusted name in your niche, then you’ll likely short-circuit this time frame quite a bit, maybe six months or so.
After Google recognizes you as a trusted resource in your niche, your new posts may rank anywhere from a few days to a few months.
How Much Traffic Can I Get?
Traffic numbers vary by the niche and also by where we rank on the search engine page. Positions one and three differ significantly; their values are not linear.
Page position share of approximate traffic values, as per Poll The People are as follows:
Position 1 – 34% of traffic
Position 2 – 16% of traffic
Position 3 – 11% of traffic
As a rough rule of thumb, you can expect each post you write to bring in between 300 and five hundred viators per month.
How much is Traffic Worth?
Traffic is worth money; everyone knows that but how much is traffic worth? Traffic value is dependent on many factors; the main factors include:
Search intent – Someone casually searching how an Electric Vehicle works is far harder to gauge than, say, someone searching for the price of a new Tesla Model 3. The intent is important. Obviously, someone about to pull the trigger and buy a new Model 3 is far more valuable than the reader casually wanting to know how they work.
Niche – The niche is important. The more expensive the products in a niche, the better. A 1000 readers reading about property in LA will be worth more than 1000 readers wanting to know the best place to eat in LA.
Monetization – What you do with your readers. There are a ton of ways to make money from your traffic; the three most common ways include:
- Show them ads – Digital advertising. Sign up for a digital ad agency that shows ads to your traffic. You share the revenue; typically, they charge 25%, somewhere around $35 per 1000 visitors. This is 100% passive income.
- Affiliate marketing – You recommend products and get paid a 1 to 15% commission if they buy. (% determined by the seller). The seller handles all processing, shipping returns, etc. It is 100% passive income. Earn somewhere around $100 per 1000 visitors. (Product and conversion dependent)
- Sell them a subscription – Convert your readers into money by selling them a subscription to your next-level private members’ content or course. Generally, the most profitable way to monetize your traffic, but not passive. It can be 10X and some of your monthly income over the other income types above.
Of course, there are many other factors not covered here, but I think you get the point; how websites monetize differs greatly so do the results.
I’ve witnessed a website earning a modest income turn into a superstar within months with the same traffic numbers. The new owner turned the site into a subscription model from a basic display advertising model.
Sum Up
Writing a thorough article that answers web search questions is a great way to get free web traffic. Google’s search engine algorithm allocates relevant articles to page one of their search results, and the first three places are reserved for the best articles.
Tailoring and crafting your article’s answers so that they rank in the top three ensures a good portion of available free traffic.
You may like the following posts:
Start your journey today with our premade websites!