Do you dream of 1000's of visitors everyday? Perhaps you feel frustrated and overwhelmed because your visitor numbers are low? In this post I'll run you through 4 ways to increase your web traffic, on a budget.

Before we get started, here's one thing to note.

Driving traffic organically (for free) takes time. To achieve high volumes of traffic quickly, unfortunatly need to pay for it. I call this "pay to play".

As you set ou ton your online adventure, you probably don't have a substantial marketing budget. We've all been there. So how do you attract traffic, get some sales into the bank so you can reinvest in paid marketing strategies?

My first recommendation, is to look to the search engines to help you.

Let me explain...

search engines

Increase your presence on search engines

After launching an e-commerce store, it's a good idea to start building your presence on the search engines, including Google, Pinterest (a visual search engine!), and You Tube (a video based search engine).


It's free and almost everyone uses a search engine to look for something, in other words, to find a solution to a problem. I'm sure you do. When you find the solution, you will either

  1. consume the content and / or
  2. purchase the product or service

A good experience with the seller or creator of that service / product / content, means that you might return for more.

Search engines are a quick and cheap way to attract cold audiences who are intentional about buying or consuming what you have to offer. Once your content is indexed in the search engine, it will be found time and time again.

In the first part of this article, I want to concentrate on two search engines in particular:

  • Pinterest - used to find inspirational content and product ideas
  • You Tube - used to find solutions / how to tutorials

Both are very popular. They're visual and allow the user to find and consume information quickly. Perhaps you've used them yourself?

Let's look at how each one can help you grow your traffic organically and quickly.

1. Grow Site Traffic Using Pinterest

Pinners (the people using Pinterest) are looking for inspirational ideas and solutions. When they find something that interests them, they will "pin it" to 'Boards' within Pinterest. 

These Pins link back to blog posts and other web content including recipes, how to tutorials, online stores and free content. 

If they don't visit your site there and then, the chances are they will later, because they've pinned the content to their board.

traffic driving tactics

That is the reason why I encourage all my food and drink clients to use Pinterest. It's virtually free traffic.

Your Objective

Your objective is to get seen by as many people as possible within Pinterest. Pinterest is a search engine, so the best way to get seen is to create PIns based on content that your client is searching for. 

As a content creator (e-commerce owner & blogger) I recommend creating pins for all your content (pages, products, services even landing pages). This will increase your chances of being found.

Your goals are:

  1. to get your pins found by the Pinners
  2. to attract visitors to your e-commerce store or other web content
  3. get your Pins shared by Pinners

To achieve these goals ensure your Pins:

  • are inspiring and informative
  • have powerful descriptions which are optimised for search (they contain key search words) 
  • have great imagery
  • have an attention grabbing headline
  • are duplicated - so for each piece of unique content, create 5 different pins and schedule them using Tailwind  to improve your chance of appearing in the search results

I'll say it again! Pinterest is fast becoming a popular search engine for all kinds of information and I encourage all my food and drink clients to have a presence on it with links back to their website and e-commerce store.

Tailwind App

Tailwind is a Scheduler for Pinterest and Instagram. If you're serious about using Pinterest as a traffic driving tactic, Tailwind will help you achieve fast results!

It's a time saving tool to accelerate traffic to your website. It auto schedules pins on your behalf which means you can pin in volume and enable rapid traffic flow. Without Tailwind you would be sat on Pinterest scheduling pins manually, which believe me consumes time. 

Any time saving tool like Tailwind is like gold dust to a business owner.

You can begin with the free trial, then opt to pay $120 annually or $15 a month. If you're prepared to wait, I acquired mine at a discounted price when they emailed me, with a $40 discount code. I've opted for their Plus Plan because I want to optimise the number of times I post a day, which will increase my visibility in the search results.

You can also extend your reach by joining Tribes, Scheduling and Multiple Pinning (see my free guide below).

grab my FREE guide - How To Use Pinterest & Tailwind

Get started with Pinterest

Grab the free guide & start driving traffic today!

pinterest engagement

My average monthly views increased from 4,000 to 7,286 6with tailwind Tribes

Since using Tailwind and Tailwind Tribes, my blog post views and shares have increased dramatically. The chart above shows how my monthly views to my Pins increased from 4000 to 7,286 within 2.5 weeks of joining Tailwind Tribes!* When I was active I was achieving 12,000 views a month!

* To join Tailwind Tribes you will need a monthly budget of approx. $10 / £10.

Join Pinterest Group Boards - Pinterest group boards are like regular boards, except you can invite collaborators to contribute to them. Again this helps because more eyes are on your pins. If someone follows your board, their followers also see your pins.

Be sure to  join boards that fit your niche and match your needs. Pinterest's algorithm's are becoming sophisticated and if you're using the boards as a dumping ground for pins they may penalise you. It used to be the case that the more you pin the more you get rewarded i.e. your pins appear in more newsfeeds. Pinterest has stopped this and you can be penalised for abusing this method.

There's a lot more Tailwind can do. For instance once your pins are published, they are there forever, meaning you can leave them to work passively sending you traffic, without you doing anything!

you tube traffic driving tactic

2. Youtube

Youtube is another great search engine which is free for you to play on. Used by millions of households, especially bduring the Covi-19 epidemic its launched thousands of businesses. Last year in the UK, it was reported there were 37.1m adults using the platform (source: Flint).

You can start building a presence on Youtube with your mobile phone, so it's cheap and quick.

But what has this got to do with the search engines?

When someone searches for something, google ranks Youtube video content high. This is a quick way to beat the search engines. You will need to optimise your videos for the search engines by using keywords in your title and description.

Rather than writing about your business, why not consider sharing your story on Youtube. 

You could consider producing videos containing tips, recipes and "how to" tutorials based on the products you sell.

This also provides great content for social media!

Always include a link back to your website / e-ccommerce store or blog and offer a compelling reason for people to visit you. E.g. for more tips and advice head to my blog, or to make a purchase here's a coupon code to redeem before [add closing date].

Video also helps you build personal connections quicker than a blog post. This build trust quickly. As soon as trust is established between a client and a business owner, they are more inclined to purchase.

Editing Video Content

If you want to edit your videos, choose free movie editors such as Imovie (Mac) and Filmora (Windows) or editing apps for your mobile devices, Iphone and Android.

Can this work for a high street business?

I believe there's a huge opportunity for high street businesses to capitalise on digital marketing and build a presence on Pinterest and Youtube.

Let's pretend you're a hairdresser. Why not hold a modelling day where you can teach people how to create styles they can replicate at home? Ask a friend to film you. This creates an event locally in your salon and content for a Youtube channel. 

Repurpose the content for Pinterest. Create a Pin, link it to your blog and Youtube channel and then schedule it with Tailwind. Then share it across social media

If you've scheduled this twice a month, you'd have 24 pieces of content for the year. In other words, 24 "How To Videos" and social media loves video content!

Optimising Your Content For The Search Engines

If you're new to digital marketing, then SEO maybe a term you've not heard of.

It stands for Search Engine Optimisation and means you are helping the search engines to find your content and index it.

It works across all the search engines and social media platforms.

Here's How SEO Works

Essentially, when someone enters a search term into Google, Yahoo or Bing, the search engine has to send out its little bots or spiders to crawl the web's giant database and bring home the bacon! - Read My Full Post On SEO Here

Like any good little spider, it will only bring back things that:

- are easy to find

- are relevant to the search 

- are new and recent

- are original

- are video based content (yum yum for the spiders!)

- have been listed on other websites

So, for your pages and web content to listed you need to optimise it  by ensuring it meets some or all of that criteria. You can learn more about optimising your content in my blog post on SEO  - read it here.

You Tube Content gets ranked highly on Google

other ways To increase traffic to your blog for fREE!

3. Hang out With clients

This might seem a little odd, but hanging out and making friends with clients is one of the easiest traffic driving tactics. The downside is, that it can take a little time, that's because you're building relationships, but it's free.

Social media is perfect for helping you do this.

Places such as Facebook groups, forums, Pinterest and Twitter chats are good places to go and find out what people are interested in and concerned about.

Also consider local networks and meet ups - the website Meet Up is becoming popular with locations popping up around the world. 

By participating, you can listen to what's being discussed and offer your pearls of wisdom. However, do refrain from going into  "hard sell" mode as you'll put people off.  Start to build up your reputation as a helpful contributor.

Continue to make valuable contributions for a few weeks and you'll know when the time is right to chip in with your service or product solution.

I've taken this approach and invited people to download free content and the offer has been welcomed. Email marketing and social media connections gives me the opportunity to keep the conversation going.

there's a huge opportunity for high street businesses to leverage Pinterest & You Tube


4. Create Collaborations

A popular tactic being widely used is to join forces with another brand. By getting in front of their audience you can tell them about your product. This works well on Instagram with brands in a similar niche.

You can strike up collaborations up or down your supply chain. 

Let's take the example of a hair stylist again. Here are some ideas:-

  • search for a local social media influencer and ask them to promote your salon in return for free haircuts.
  • search for a local business in a similar niche (e.g. wedding planner) and ask them to collaborate for a season, in exchange for free advertising in your salon.
  • ask a local supplier for a competition collaboration in your local area - feature it on Instagram using a local geotag.

All you have to do is select a potential collaborators and ask them.

Good luck! If you need digital marketing advice or even a 30 minute review of your social media accounts, then please get in touch.