Generating traffic to your website is becoming more and more difficult. Digital advertising channels are becoming more expensive and competitive. Traditional channels like email and SEO require a lot more time and work for it to be effective. If you have a small budget, it may seem like you don’t have many options for bringing in traffic. However, there are still many ways to generate traffic organically. Here are a couple of strategies that many marketers are using to great success.

  1. Start a Blog

Setting up a blog and using it to connect with your audience is one of the best ways to create organic traffic to your site. Blogging on a regular basis can help you get the word out about your business and brand. The best part is that it’s easy to get started. Many bloggers use WordPress with a solid theme to manage their blog due to its simplicity. However, setting up your blog can be confusing if you’re not going to be using WordPress. Seek out service providers that can offer Drupal hosting or Joomla support if you’re planning on using either of the CMS platforms.

  1. Maximize Social Media

Social media continues to be one of the most economical ways to build an audience and increase your traffic. You can start building a following through your blog and continue by sharing content on your social media accounts to attract more followers. While there are many social media platforms, it’s best to focus on the ones that are more geared towards your target audience. For example, B2B businesses will get more out of LinkedIn than Facebook. Make sure you spend your time wisely with social media as it’s easy to get lost engaging in unproductive tasks.

  1. Target Long-Tail Keywords for SEO Campaigns

SEO has become challenging due to the vast number of competitors and the ever-changing algorithms. But one of the best ways you can still benefit from SEO without investing much time or money is to target long-tail keywords. These are basically long keywords that are very specific, have low search volumes and have fewer websites competing for top rankings than common keywords. You want to do some onpage optimization for these keywords and get some links pointing back to your optimized pages. While the traffic from long-tail keywords can be small, they often convert well and can help you build momentum for building your campaign out to more competitive keywords.

  1. Seek Out Joint Venture Partners

Joint ventures are basically partnerships where businesses set up a win-win deal for both parties. This can be something as simple as an affiliate deal where the approached business gets compensated better than regular affiliates. Joint ventures can be anything as simple as cross promoting each other’s email newsletters to more complex deals where partners are paid for leads and percentage of gross sales. Get creative about how you can use joint ventures to generate more traffic and start looking for partners to work with.

  1. Start Guest Blogging

Believe it or not, there are many blogs and large sites that are in need of quality content. They are looking for guest bloggers that can add value to their audience. In many cases, great guest bloggers get asked back on a regular basis. Look for industry or niche specific websites you can guest blog for. Focus on writing to their audience and on delivering great content. These sites will often allow you a link back to your site and a good number of readers often end up visiting your site if they liked the content.

  1. Get Serious About Content Marketing

Content marketing has proven to be one of the most cost effective ways to generate traffic. It doesn’t take a lot to get started. With some practice, you can learn to create quality content in a short amount of time. The important part is putting in enough time to research the right content topics and putting in enough effort into marketing your content. While it takes some time to start building traction, it’s an incredibly effective marketing strategy due to the fact that it works hand in hand with SEO, blogging and social media.

  1. Create a Community

If you want long-term success, you have to build an audience and customer base that keeps coming back to your sites. One of the best ways to support that is to build a community for your followers and customers. Set up an online forum, allow comments on your blogs and set up exclusive content for your social media followers. By giving your audience and customers a platform to interact with you and each other, you’ll be able to foster a community and leverage the community to increase your site’s traffic.

All of the mentioned strategies can be used to build targeted traffic to your site. However, make sure that you have the fundamentals set up. Pick a CMS (content management system) platform that suits you best. Find a reliable WordPress or Drupal hosting provider that can handle the technicalities of installing plugins and scripts. Finally, stay committed to blogging regularly and growing your audience.