Having a significant amount of organic traffic is the first step to start earning real money with a blog or website. On the other hand, a lack of traffic is the number-one challenge faced by bloggers and internet business owners. If your website isn’t getting any visits, you are not generating any ad impressions… What is more, the lack of traffic makes you look unprofessional to new business partners… In this article we will show you how to increase organic traffic by getting social.

UNDERSTANDING TRAFFIC SOURCES

Building organic traffic isn’t easy, but there are many possibilities to increase visits on your blog or website and you don’t need to be a SEO expert to try them. What is more, the search engines traffic shouldn’t be more than 40% of your traffic source. Himanshu Sharma from optimizesmart.com explains why it’s important:

Your website must have a balanced portfolio of traffic sources. That means you should not depend on any one traffic and revenue source, especially search engines like Google. This is because if tomorrow your website gets banned/penalized, you will lose the majority of your traffic and revenue.

Ideally your search traffic should not be more than 40% of the total website traffic – If it is more than 50%, then it means you are over dependent on search engines which is a high risk strategy (Read More)

If you have just started your site or blog, getting traffic is even more difficult. How to get more traffic without wasting time and spending a lot of money?

We have done a little research and have prepared for you some tips and pieces of advice on how to attract more visitors to your site or blog in a fast and free way, using social media, other blogs or sites, discussion boards, etc.

BUILDING A COMMUNITY

Building a community helps you engage more visitors and make them want to visit your site again. Let people speak their minds and discuss topics they are passionate about and you will get a great opportunity to attract traffic to your website.

Forum

Starting an active forum on your website has a lot of advantages: it ranks your site for long-tail keywords which are a good way to work on SEO, it can make your site visible for the searchers, it can increase time visitors spend on your site and, at the same way, decrease your bounce rate.

Forum members can ask questions and get support, not only from you, but what is more important, from other users who actively participate in it. It’s the best way to create discussions and share thoughts about the content you share on your site as much as anything else. Besides, an active forum is a good tool to get feedback. By providing answers to your community’s questions and helping users who need help you create high-quality and useful content.

It’s important to remember that as your site grows, you may need to engage moderators to your forum. The reason to do so is that if the community grows toxic, it can have bad influence on your site’s traffic. Make sure you will be able to find people who will help you out.

Here you can read more about community management.

Creating a forum isn’t so complicated, here you can see details on creating one.

Facebook Group

You can start your own niche-specific Facebook group. Similarly to forum, group members will be able to ask questions and get support. This will be a perfect opportunity for you to drive them directly to your site. You can implement a robust commenting system, such as Facebook comments or Disqus to reinforce the effect.

Chat on site

You can also implement a chat in your site.

HINT:

Once you create a community it will be easier to ask visitors to share your site with others. Ask your recurrent visitors to forward your articles or share them via their social media profiles. This is a great opportunity for the number of views to grow.

GETTING TRAFFIC FROM OTHER FORUMS: The Intro Method

Creating your own discussion board isn’t the only method to use forums for increasing the traffic on your site. You can promote your content on other forums from your niche. The easiest way to get a lot of traffic from another forum related to your niche is The Intro Method. Its steps will be explained below. Using this method, remember about one simple rule: the more related the forum is to the content of your site, the more visits you receive and the better conversion you get.

This method is based simply on promoting your blog or site by posting information about one of your articles. However, to make it successful, follow these steps:

Pick one of your pillar content articles

The uniqueness and usefulness of the content you will promote is very important for this strategy, so you should focus on creating some pillar content. If you don’t know how to create it, please visit my earlier post where you can find all the necessary information.

If your article is interesting enough, it will open discussion on your thread. That way you will get a feedback which helps you to get even more visits: each new comment “bumps” your thread to the top of forum thread topics. This makes your thread popular and because of its popularity it gets valuable and more users will click on it. This is how even more people will visit your link!

Think of a catchy thread title

The deal is easy: with a catchy title you increase chances of making your thread interesting enough to visit and more people will click on your link.

Make your thread message simple

Follow the example of Diggy and keep your message simple, yet clear:

Post the message on popular forums

Post it on a forum you actively participate in (the good reputation helps a lot, so start with forums where you’re already a trusted member). As well, you can look for other popular discussion boards by simply searching it in “ {your_niche} forum” google results.

Posting a catchy title message in a popular forum on your niche can bring you as much result as Diggy got:

HINT:

Before you post your link on any forum, make sure it’s not against the forum rules. If you’re not sure if it’s allowed, you can start a thread with a couple of paragraphs from your article and write at the end “You can find more tips here” with your link attached. Another way is to introduce yourself to the community in the forum’s introduction section and give some information on what you’re up to.

GETTING TRAFFIC FROM OTHER BLOGS: The Search and Pull Method

This method is very easy and can bring you a lot of traffic to your site. It’s important that you’re up to date with actions of your popular niche-competitors. It sounds difficult, but all you have to do is to set a couple of Google Alerts which will show you which one of your competitors has recently published an article or content related to yours .

Once you receive a list of posts on popular blogs, visit them, read articles and make some interesting comments and add the link to your post.

Look how one of the bloggers did it in a comment to Paul Fowler’s post:

Setting the Google Alert

Setting the google alert isn’t complicated: in the ‘search query’ field type in a couple of words related to one of your best posts. Set ‘results type’ to Blogs and choose the frequency of the report in the ‘how often box’: make it once a day or even ‘as it happens’. In the ‘How many’ option choose ‘only the best results’ which gets you a list of relevant posts only from popular blogs.

Here’s an example of the adjusting:

PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA:

Post your updates on Twitter

Create a Twitter account and every time you post a new article or add some new content to download, inform your Twitter Community about it. Type in the headline and link to the content in your tweet.

Did you cite some influencer in your article? Don’t forget to @ mention them! This will help you to promote your post.

Check this cute Animated Twitter Bird for WordPress, it will help you to get followers.

Create a Facebook page

You can create a page for your site on Facebook. This will allow you to share your updates with your readers and to publish notifications they would be interested in. As well, you can promote your Facebook page in Facebook groups related to your niche – this way you can gain even more followers! Dlvr.it will help you share posts automatically.

Set up a Google+ page

It’s not as popular as Facebook is, but don’t miss its potential! It allows you to post links to your articles and connect with new followers and other bloggers and site owners in your niche.

HINT:

Don’t forget to include social sharing buttons on all your posts! That way you help your readers with sharing the content.

OTHER PRACTICES YOU MAY FIND USEFUL TO INCREASE ORGANIC TRAFFIC BY GETTING SOCIAL:

Get on YouTube

Running a YouTube channel is another possibility to attract more users to your site. By creating YouTube videos you gain a possibility to get listed in Google’s search results, which will surely help you to lead more traffic to your site. You can also use the YouTube Comment Section and promote your videos in other popular videos from your niche.

Answer Questions

Use Yahoo Answers or Quora! By answering questions which are relevant to your niche you get a possibility to attract new visitors to your site!

Include your URL in your signature

Don’t forget to put your site’s address in your signature on forum you actively participate in! That way you will promote your work in every post on forum.

Remember! You don’t have to use all strategies I’ve presented to you! It’s better to choose only a couple of them and focus the effort on methods that work most effectively for your site’s characteristic.

It’s also important to test one strategy at a time, it allows you to observe changes in your traffic increase and pick the best method!

Good luck!