The Clueless Newbie’s Guide To Free Website Traffic

Get 10,000 Visitors (New Website, No Followers, Low Budget)

I have visited several Facebook groups and there are two things that people are dying to know about: traffic and money.

And they are completely clueless about it… Even though getting traffic is not that difficult at all.

The problem most people run into is that they set up a beautiful site, it is indexed in Google… and nothing happens.

You have put in all this work: a really nice business Facebook page, Twitter account, Pinterest, Google+.

Your welcome email series is ready to fire for those who sign up for your mailing list…but only a few people sign up. It’s like a building that is absolutely beautiful, but is empty.

The traffic generation strategies you have read about are either not fully explained, unpredictable and/or work with such a long time horizon that they are not very useful for a new site.

(This post contains affiliate links.)

Does Your Site Deserve Traffic?

This is a point that many bloggers are completely oblivious about.

Who Is Your Reader?

You are competing with 1.05 billion other websites.

Your blog needs to provide a reason why it is worth visiting more than all those other blogs…

In order to do that, you need to know who your reader is.

People come to your website because

1. You are selling something valuable (product or service)
2. You have awesome content that solves a problem or satisfies a need.

Do you know why your reader comes to your blog?

Do you now what kind of help he needs?

Do you give the answer they need?

If you don’t answer these types of questions, you will have a hard time getting traffic.

This is really just another way of asking, “What is your niche?’

What Are You Writing About?

Avoid boring content. Nobody needs another random post that just wastes their time.

Are you writing about stuff that you feel like writing about or are you picking subjects that your readers really care about?

This may hurt a little bit, but does anyone care why you “didn’t go to the movies to see Star Wars yesterday”, or why you “didn’t go to Prom when you were 17”?

In this super-competitive environment you need to focus on subjects that people WANT to read about and WANT to share.

Write about something that HELPS your reader. (Did your last post help your readers?)

This way you will get more results with less effort. Be more intentional about what you publish.

Always Go Deep

Your blog post must go beyond the surface to address deeper issues.

If it doesn’t, why are you even writing it?

There are already a bunch of other blogs writing about the same stuff. Why bother to add to it?

What Are Your Visitors Going To Do On Your Site?

Look at your site with the eyes of a complete stranger.

Would you want to read it? Would you want to subscribe to it?

Do you have enough blog posts so that your visitors will get engaged and your site doesn’t look like it is still under construction?

Even better, ask other people what they think about your site.

Make sure your site is ready for traffic.

Converting Your Blog Traffic

I will show you how to get traffic, but I will ask you to take a look at it honestly:

If you got 10,000 visitors right now, what would happen?

I will tell you upfront: They would probably get wasted…

70 percent of your visitors never return and are lost forever.

And this is going to be your next big problem – converting your traffic.

In order to do that, you need a conversion-friendly site design, layout, a flow plan, and… believe me that even things like your font being too microscopic influences your conversion rate, just because people (especially older) can’t read your blog.

You also need a good lead magnet and opt-in forms strategically placed on your blog.

To resolve this, you need a conversion-optimized theme and 21st century lead generation tools… This video tells you more about it.

Check out Thrive Leads

I use Thrive, which gives me the choice from 9 conversion optimized WordPress Themes and not only a lead collection plugin as explained in the video, but also Thrive Architect to build any landing page (and also page) from pre-made templates. You just need to change the text.

Lead generation just happens in the background, I only need to concentrate on driving traffic, the opt-in forms are automatically placed on the locations I have pre-defined.

How I Create Great Content

What I do to create great content is to

1. Read everything on the subject I can find
2. Add my personal touch
3. Include stuff that induces emtions

This also means that I sign up for every possible e-mail list that I find – at least on blogs that seem high quality.

I sift through a lot of trash, but I collect the gems.

That is how I wrote this post, I didn’t just pull it out of my (brain).

Short Content Creation Example

Here is a simple example. Let’s say I am talking about free traffic and I mention “leaving a meaningful comment on blogs or community platforms is a source of referral traffic”.

This is a generic re-hashed superficial datum that you probably read in 15 different places. How do I make this into better content?

I can say the following:

I left about 10 comments on Inbound.org, and I got 28 visits from this platform in the past 4 weeks.

Additionally I have been answering questions on Quora. I answered 119 questions over the past two months and I have established myself as an authority. I got a total of 5,500 views of my answers, 28 website visitors and $19 in affiliate sales. 

Also, you can add pictures to your answers. As an example, there was a question “How I can get traffic on website?” and  I added the below image, plus I linked back to the post that you are reading right now.

This, in addition to referring visitors, also increases the SEO of the post. 

I realized that the comments or answers I submit on these platforms are similar in role to the meta description that shows up in Google search – in addition to making it meaningful, I need to devise it in such a way so that people will click through to my site.

Obviously, the 5,500 views to 28 visitors conversion rate is horrible.

Do you see how easy it is to create interesting content? The only thing is that you need to experiment with the stuff that you learn…

The Main Types Of Traffic

The first thing you need to understand about traffic is that there are 5 main sources you can to tap into:

• Search engine visitors (Google, YouTube, even Pinterest)
• Social media users (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)
• Traffic on other blogs
• Email list traffic (yours & someone else’s)
• Paid traffic

Not All Traffic Is Equal

There is good traffic and there is useless traffic. Useless traffic is where people aren’t interested in what your site has to offer.

You sell autoresponders and your visitor is looking for WordPress plugins… Slim chance for a sale.

Traffic needs to be targeted.

Even if you make the most awesome site, there will still be a percentage of traffic that is simply useless and uninterested in your site.

When you analyze your conversion percentages and your bounce rates, you tend to assume that the traffic is people who are somewhat interested in your website.

But you could also be getting non-targeted traffic, and this will destroy your bounce rate and lower the user time spent on your page.

The Basic Problem With Google Traffic

Unfortunately there is a huge problem with Google traffic and SEO, which I am going to explain to you now. Actually there is more than one problem.

The first problem is that a machine (a program) is trying to determine what is relevant for a human.

This takes us to the field of philosophy, and you may agree or disagree with me, but this is how I see it, based on personal experience:

A human person is a spiritual being, separate from matter, that is able to feel, think, perceive, has consciousness. A machine will never be able to get anywhere close, regardless of advances of artificial intelligence.

The program (Google) can only use indicators to judge, like keywords, number of backlinks, time spent on page, etc.

SEO Is a Cheat Sheet

The second problem is (and this is the direct result of the first problem) that just because your content is the best, Google is not going to rank it.

This creates an upset for the content writers and they try to correct it because they feel that they have been wronged.

The only way for them to correct the (imagined or real) wrong is by using a cheat sheet.

And thus SEO was born.

Fortunately today’s SEO has a lot more to do with user experience than it used to be, however there are always new cults rearing their ugly heads, trying to cheat the system.

And it often becomes a cult that forgets about the user.

The latest one is called “link detox” or “link disavow”. What does that have to do with user experience???

The Virtual Universe

We all need to accept that there is an entire virtual universe that has nothing to do with our physical universe, one that obeys laws that are completely different from gravity.

I remember when I first heard about backlinks, and I clearly remember my exact reaction: WTF???

Some parts of this alternate reality is just too unbelievable, and this is the point where it is very easy to make a mistake.

I have been hearing about Pinterest, I am sure you also.

First I thought it was just photos. (Important lesson: NEVER assume. ALWAYS go and check it out.)

I kept hearing about the Pinterest traffic magic, until I finally looked at some so called “pins”…

And for a very long moment I felt like this:

Some of the pins even look like they are from this rabbit hole.

I am not trying to pick on anyone, but don’t these pictures remind you of Pinterest pins?

Click image below to pin

And then you pin these onto someone else’s board and you get 100,000 visitors? Felt like voodoo to me…

Or maybe I feel like I am in the Matrix when I hear about Googlebot, Bingbot or all those malicious bots that attack my site every single day, trying to take it down or convert it over to the bot empire…

Or maybe….

“Well, the (link) Juice is what gives a SEO his power. It’s an energy field created by all websites. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the internet together.”

And then Darth PBN comes with his black side of the Juice…

With a stolen powerful expired domain…

Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?

You are in a completely different universe and you have no idea about the rules.

And now I will attempt to explain some of the rules to you from a strategic perspective.

The First Traffic Component: SEO

Interestingly, everyone is steering you towards SEO…

Affiliate marketing courses tell you to pick certain keywords, write a blog post, and they pretend that traffic will magically start flowing to your site…

The fact is that for that to happen, you need a site with DA over 30, and most beginners don’t have that.

Maybe they all want you to fail…

Well, SEO is almost dead as far as your new site is concerned…

Expecting traffic to show up at your door doesn’t work.

There appears to be an algorithm that stops new sites from ranking, they call it the “sandbox”. Therefore it takes a while for your SEO to start biting, around 4-6 months, as described by several people.

(Hint – I know this doesn’t help most people, as they already have a website, but if you decide to start a new one, you can use a recently deleted domain to shorten down this time, such domains have a history with Google that goes back years and already has some link juice in place.)

At this point we don’t want to rely on Google at all. Google doesn’t care about your site, just like it doesn’t care about the other tens of thousands of sites that get launched every day.

At the same time you need to write your posts with correct SEO and long-tail keywords, otherwise you will have traffic problems down the line.

Look, this site of mine is 7 months old and I implemented my long-tail keyword strategy 3 month ago – wrote 4 posts with long-tail keywords that have 10-100 monthly searches per the Google keyword tool.

The following is the monthly organic traffic result – this is all traffic on autopilot, I don’t need to touch anything to get it, and the site is also getting additional referral and direct traffic.

As you need to write blog posts anyways, just make sure they are based on the correct long-tail keywords.

It only takes you an extra five minutes and messing this up will cost you free traffic and you will wish down the road that you had done it correctly.

300 organic clicks a month from four posts?

I know, many other sources tell you about long-tail keywords with 2-3,000 searches with low competition…

Probably in other niches, not mine.

I need to mention that this traffic is without any link building whatsoever, except for linking back from my Quora answers to the relevant posts.

Now imagine having 20 or 30 posts like this on your blog (you would write that many anyways) – and you have some of your traffic secured.

You can also add several similar long tail phrases into the same post, which increases your traffic.

Not all of your long-tail posts will bring this kind of traffic, as Google is the final judge, however it’s worth the try.

And yes, long-form posts like this one, over 2,000 words perform better, as they provide a one-stop resource on the subject, people stay on the post long, they bookmark it, return to it, comment on it and share it.

How To Check Keyword Competition (Example)

Now I am going to show you an actual example of how to check keyword competition manually.

The keyword I picked is “caffeinated tea”, 1-10,000 searches per month.

Notes:

1. I haven’t verified the profitability of this keyword.
2. I observed many times that whenever you enter a “product” keyword like this, Google will give you e-commerce (shopping) results, which makes it impossible to rank with a review.  Usually it is better to pick a “review” keyword like “how to select caffeinated tea”, as those kinds of keywords are easier to rank for. As I am doing this solely for the sake of the example, I am not going to worry about this.
3. Search results can be slightly different depending on location, a person’s search history, browser used.

Here are the first 5 search results:

(I invite you to follow along and check in another browser window.)

#1. Republic of Tea is an online tea store. I mentioned this in the note.

#2. Mayo Clinic – This is an authoritative site, but the article is only 300 words.

#3. Zest Tea – Another online store.

#4. Huffington Post – This is an authoritative site, but the article is only 450 words.

#5. Tea Tulia – article 450 words.

You can look through the remaining results.

If you really know a lot about tea, you could beat them easily.

The New SEO For 2018

In the subject of SEO, keywords are not everything.

First of all, keywords are not literal any more, they are based on search intent. Entire keyword group may have the same search intent and they count as the same in the eyes of Google.

E. g. “find domains with traffic” and “buy domains with traffic”, even though they have a different keyword, carry a very similar searcher intent and you wouldn’t write a different post for each.

Rather, you would write one post, elect one to be in the title, then make sure that both versions, plus another 10-15 similar keywords are all naturally included in your post.

User Experience And SEO

The new SEO, in addition to keywords, is based on user experience.

You need to see what posts exist on the subject and you need to write one that puts them all to dust.

This task has different difficulty level in different niches. In internet marketing it is pretty difficult.

Describe not only the subject of your keyword, but also anticipate any other questions that your reader may have and cover those also.

Provide a complete tutorial with all details, pros and cons, screenshots.

Things like your page’s loading time seems like a completely unrelated subject, however it is absolutely vital for your SEO.

One second increase will result in 7 percent more of your visitors clicking on the Exit or Back button showing up as 0 time spent on your page, increasing your bounce rate and making your SEO worse.

The object is to make your user so happy that they don’t go back to the search results to click on another post. That is one of the indicators Google tracks, the other one is average time spent on page, the third one is bounce rate.

So what do you do in the meantime? How do you get traffic?

Backing Up Your SEO With Other Forms Of Traffic

Most people don’t realize that driving traffic to your site from other sources, such as social media, if done correctly, can back up your SEO.

If you have engaged social media visitors that spent a log time on your post, they leave comments and share your content, your post’s SEO ranking will increase – Google can track every heartbeat of your site through Google Analytics.

You will be surprised, but the #1 ranking factor for your site is none of these well-known factors.

It is actually direct traffic, which is either typing in your URL directly or using a bookmark, an e-book link, etc. Look at the below graph to see what I mean.

And in case you wonder, what I described above also works for a brand new site, the above screenshot was made when FunnelXpert was 1 month old and I only did very little social media promotion.

How To Get Traffic To Your Website In The Meantime?

So HOW do you get traffic to your new website in the meantime?

I am not trying to be smart, but there is a really simple answer – so simple that if I don’t explain it in more details, you will not get the the point at all and it will be useless to you. The simple answer is this:

You need to get traffic from someone who already has traffic and is willing to give it to you.

Just think about it, isn’t that too simple?

Stop wasting your time, the secret is to find the places where there is TONS of traffic and get some.

This may take some kind of a bribe, extra work, therefore you will have to figure out how another website’s owner will benefit from giving you traffic. It may also take some communication skills.

Starting from zero is the worst. Don’t try to do it all by yourself and invent how to create traffic.

You don’t have the resources, the technology. You have no email list, no social media followers.

I am sorry to say, you are a nobody at this point, and you need to piggy-back on someone who isn’t.

Jump Starting Your New Site

When you start a new site, you have no authority, no leverage, therefore the standard “easy” traffic techniques won’t work for you yet.

You write the most epic content, but it will do nothing for you without a special approach, because you don’t have leverage yet.

It’s like trying to start your car in third gear, not first. You need the correct way to promote your content, in first gear.

You need someone (in your niche or a related niche) to give you a jump start.

This is why you need to focus on building personal connections and getting out of your shell.

Starting a new site and writing all the content tends to introvert you.

This is the key in this phase: Find the blogs, forums, Facebook groups where your target audience hangs out and get traffic from there! It doesn’t matter how! That’s the only way you will get traffic other than buying it.

Do not waste your time with anything else.

Don’t build links at this stage. If you are posting on forums or commenting on blogs, your objective is NOT link building. Do it to get targeted traffic.

Don’t worry too much about your autoresponder and email series. Just set them up with an opt-in box and a short email series and you can tweak it later when you know exactly who your visitors are.

The traffic you get this way, if your content is good enough, will help you get good visitor on-page times and thereby better rankings.

How To Get Your First Blog Visitors

Unless you are in a highly specific niche like me, you have a very powerful resource to get your traffic started:

Ask your family and friends to give you feedback on your new site.

Most of you have at least 100 Facebook friends… Just ask them.

They will support you because YOU are asking them to.

If you have a generic niche, like travel, lifestyle, chances are that they will find it cool that you are doing this.

Social Media

Social media is a great source of traffic.

You are losing out big time if you are not using social media, as it is your alternative to Google and SEO.

Later on you will be able to put your promotion more on autopilot, as Google will start kicking in.

I recommend you watch this free webinar on a Pinterest strategy that drove 100,000 visitors to Melyssa’s website in a year…

Facebook drives about 25 percent of all website traffic.

You should have a Twitter account and a Pinterest account as a bare minimum.

The key to social media is value and volume.

Sign up for multiple Facebook groups. 2-3 groups are not going to make a huge difference.

Sign up for 10 groups at a time, even up to 100 groups in a period of time, see which ones work for you and keep those.

[thrive_testimonial name=”Tiny LoveBug” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tiny-Lovebug.jpg” color=”dark”]Since posting “How I went from ~ 1K to ~ 10K page views in my second month of blogging” a couple of weeks ago, our traffic has continued to grow exponentially. We’re now in our third month of blogging averaging 1800 page views a day. Our Pinterest monthly views have also gone up to over 114K.

We have not changed much except for more engagement on Facebook groups…

Tiny LoveBug[/thrive_testimonial]

Be active on your social media platforms, several times a day, engage within your groups.

The point of being active on social media is the following:

1. Drive instant traffic
2. Increase the authority of your accounts in terms of views, likes, follows, karma, upvotes, whatever they are called on the specific platform.

Just as your website has authority, so does your social media accounts. When you increase this authority, your ability to share things will become better.

Most platforms have some kind of a suggestion mechanism and this helps promote your account and your content. Having an authoritative account will increase this factor.

Getting Your Blog Posts Shared

If you start doing the above, you will soon realize that this is a lot of work and a lot of time spent, but this is how you start out. This is first gear.

If you want to work less, you will need to get other people to share your content.

You need to put your work in front of people who have authority and get them to share it.

A great strategy that requires a lot of work is seeking out influencers with a lot of followers and reaching out to them with your content.

The mistake you can make on this front is contacting 2-3 people and becoming upset that they don’t even answer you.

The right way that works includes contacting 100 influencers and you will probably get a 10-20 percent response rate, and that 10 percent will result in your post’s increased exposure.

You also have to figure out the best way you can get your own visitors to share your content. Click-to-tweet quotes is one way. Putting share buttons not only on your blog posts, but also into e-books, emails can go a long way.

Featuring Other Sites Or Products

Just begging others to share your content can be a pain.

It works better if you give them value upfront.

Write a detailed review about someone’s product or website and let them know about it.

They will share it and it opens the door to other ways of working together.

This works best for smaller companies and bloggers. It’s not going to work for big name blogs, big sites, as you would need to get through employees first, or simply the owner is just too tied up, or just get too many requests like that every day and they don’t give a dam about sharing your posts.

Having trouble figuring out what you send to your email subscribers? Send out someone else’s awesome article and let them know that you did. You kill two birds with one stone.

What Gets Shared Most?

Make your content epic so that people NEED to share it.

The problem is, however, that it’s not necessarily the best or most useful content that gets shared most.

List posts get shared a lot. (When I wrote this post, I originally considered putting together a mega list of all traffic strategies.)

The reason is that usually several people give ideas for a list post and when it is published, they all share it with their followers. It’s a form of cheat.

I think I even have a list of 134 ways to get traffic.

The problem? I never read it.

Would you read it? Would you use them all?

It only creates an overwhelm of information and distracts you.

It’s like any collector’s item, gets a lot of publicity.

What you need is 3-4 simple strategies that are the most effective and follow those.

I must add, however, that there is a strategy where you ask several people for collaboration in putting together a post that contains multiple tips. When it gets published, they will naturally share it, just because their work is included.

Using Viral Content Bee To Get Shares

Viral Content Bee is an awesome platform where you can share others’ content and earn credits.

Then you can use these credits to get your content shared by others.

The only catch is that it needs to be very high quality content and you need to have a lot of followers either on Twitter or Facebook to qualify.

Duplicate Content And Republishing

There is an idea that duplicate content is always bad.

This is not true. In fact, Matt Cutts, Google’s former Head of Web Spam said so here.

This opens the door to the ability to republish your content, while keeping certain guidelines.

This resolves a huge problem: A new site has few visitors, therefore publishing your content on your new site is like giving a lecture to your family in your living room.

[thrive_testimonial name=”SmartBlogger” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Smartblogger.jpg” color=”dark”]It’s an opportunity to get the content you’ve worked so hard to create in front of a new and appreciative audience. And if they love it, you have a good chance they’ll want to visit your blog for more of the good stuff, too.

SmartBlogger[/thrive_testimonial]

You can make a lot more out of your content that you spent so much creating by having your articles republished and syndicated on sites with high traffic (E.g. Medium.com). That is more like giving your lecture in the stadium during Super Bowl.

I hope that clarifying this will help you a lot…

Upgrading Old Content

If you have a website, I highly recommend you go back to update and optimize your old content.

My organic Google traffic has been increasing quite rapidly over the past few weeks.

My process has been fairly simple, but effective:

I update older blog posts to make them longer. I also do  keyword research and add additional versions of the keywords I am already using.

I make sure my meta descriptions are proper and encourage click-through.

I also optimize the the first few sentences to ensure they contain no fluff and they encourage the reader to continue.

Re-publish the new content with a recent date (last 30 days).

I add new internal links to that updated article (I’ve been adding about 3-5 new internal links pointing to that updated article).

Leveraging Someone Else’s Promotion

Writing a guest post can help you because the hosting site’s owner already has a promotion strategy in place.

They will promote your new post to their email list, they share it on Twitter, Facebook and other social channels that is already established for them.

Finding such opportunities requires networking and the ability to write superior content.

Solo emails is also a form of promotion. You simply find someone that has an email list and you pay them to send out your newsletter to their audience.

Joint Ventures (JV) is another way. If you have your own product and you pay a handsome commission to our affiliates, then people with existing email lists will find it profitable to share your product to their email list and you will both profit.

You need to get creative and come up with ideas. Team up with the people whose email lists you have signed up to. Theoretically you could even make a deal with your web hosting company and have them put your offer onto their cPanel and get a commission from you…

Community Forums, Q&A Sites, Etc

The point about these is that these sites have certain procedures to distribute content into users’ feeds.

You to find out the exact mechanism and leverage it.

This is also true of sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Quora.

Writing answers on Quora and linking back to your content also helps both with links and visitors. Quora has its own promotion machine to tell people about stuff they follow. One thing I do to cheat is to add relevant topics to the question that are being followed by a lot of people, thereby making it more likely to show up in their feed.

Quora also gives you a chance to tweet out your answers and share it on Facebook and you can link back to your content to get traffic and link juice.

There are two more great things about Quora that you need to know.

1. You don’t need to write 2,000-word answers to get a result (you can add pictures, e. g. screenshots)
2. Quora allows you to place affiliate links into your answers, allowing you to make commissions directly

After just 50 answers I am now an expert in the field of expired domains. I literally get 2-3 direct requests from people to answer their questions and I also get upvotes to my answers.

On my expired domain website I have a deeply researched answer to all the questions that people usually ask and I refer them to these answers to get more traffic.

Other people answer just to promote their business or affiliate programs, and I can see that my answers are so much better. People that ask questions usually don’t realize all the ins and outs, and I utilize this big time. Here is an example:

Q: What is the best deal for .com transfers for a really cheap price?

A: It depends… My personal opinion is that NameSilo is the best price, as you pay $8.99 for the transfer and you get lifetime domain privacy, and the renewal price will stay the same year after year. Normally you may pay over $10 for domain privacy with other registrars. There are no other hidden fees, the ICANN fee is already included. The price also includes 1 year renewal. See here why domain privacy is important: Should I Buy WhoIs Domain Privacy?

Even if you pay $1.99 for a domain with GoDaddy, you will end up paying an additional $7.99 for domain privacy, plus a 19 cent ICANN fee. Then the next year your domain will cost $15 to renew.

Do you see how I give value by anticipating all possible angles that the person would never think of?

Leveraging Someone Else’s Content

Everyone reads posts on other blogs.

Tweeting such posts out will inspire other people to retweet it, to follow you, give you likes and thereby increasing the authority of your Twitter profile.

The simple action of leaving a thought-inspiring comment on each valuable post you read will generate some traffic back to your site.

I am going to tell you a secret about blog commenting that I recently realized:

Blog owners are forced to read your comments, because they need to either approve them or spam them. This is very powerful, you will get a better response rate than by emailing.

The way I got my first guest post is by leaving a thoughtful comment on a blog and suggesting how I could write an awesome guest post to respond to counter it. I got an answer back from the owner saying that she loved my idea and I wrote several guest posts to this blog since.

If you make these two simple actions part of your life, you will build traffic as part of your routine activities.

Paid Traffic

Buying and selling traffic is one of the biggest markets in online business. You can get from extremely cheap “synthetic” traffic to highly targeted, extremely expensive but mega effective human traffic, nearly everything you want.

Paid traffic can be a very dirty and dishonest subject.

On Fiverr, people sell tens of thousands of visitors for $5. The following post explains such traffic fully. It’s most probably useless, otherwise everyone would already be a millionaire and no one would do Facebook advertising.

I don’t recommend paid traffic at this stage.

Ideally paid traffic should be targeted and it should be traffic that converts.

Many times there is no guarantee to this effect.

Traffic is a commodity. You can buy it.

Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter are selling it.

It only costs $5 to buy traffic from Facebook, but it is becoming more expensive.

But don’t buy it when you start out.

Only buy traffic later on when you have learned how to identify it and convert it.

Otherwise you are flushing your money down the toilet and ruining your bounce rate ans average page view times.

If you really don’t believe me, buy traffic for $5 and try it out, then you will understand why I am saying this.

Build Your Readership

Getting followers, building your e-mail list will greatly help you out in the long run to get traffic.

By building your readership, you are in fact recycling your visitors.

I am not telling your start building your e-mail list from day one, as first you need to write content and learn to get traffic.

But as soon as you got those under control, start it.

Conclusion

Jumpstarting traffic for your new site is a lot of work and can be very disheartening.

The idea is that if you keep pumping the traffic with these methods, your site will eventually come to life and will start to drive traffic on its own.

It’s like pushing a motorbike to start it or applying chest compression to restart someone’s heart.

Just do shotgun promotion at the beginning.

If you keep at it, you will succeed.

Getting Your Blog To 10,000 Visitors In 30 Days

This is a new section I added to this post.

Here’s the deal. All the strategies described above work.

However, if you have a full-time job and your blog is also a full-time job, they will take too much time.

Especially if you have family.

I am also trying to get out of doing this full time…

Therefore my next target is to set up traffic generation in such a way, that you (and I) get maximum exposure from a minimum amount of work.

Sitting in Facebook groups all day sharing your content and commenting on other people’s stuff in exchange is very time consuming.

You should do it at the beginning, but then a switch needs to be made to a higher gear.

This section is about this higher gear.

Also, in order to make sales and money on your blog, you need a lot traffic. And who wants to take long in achieving it???

I was actually thinking over the above and started to Google it as usual, when I ran into a set of articles on the subject Sumo.com.

They were on the subject of getting a brand new blog from zero to 10,000 visitors in 30 days.

Three of their masterminds each have written a post on the same subject…

They each chose a different route.

And this inspired me to add this section.

Growing a Site from 0 to 10k Visitors a Month: Sarah Peterson Edition

Sara’s method is with content marketing and outreach.

How To Grow Blog Traffic From 0 to 10k Visitors: Nat Eliason Edition

Nat’s method is with a few high search keywords, high quality articles and guest posts.

Growing a Site from 0 to 10k Visitors in a Month: Noah Kagan Edition

Noah has grown several sites to 10k visitors.

To make it fair, it was an apprentice of Noah who followed the directions and did it…

Mentioning Other Websites/Bloggers In Your Blog Post

This is a power strategy.

But you need to have more than epic content. You need to have the the best content on the internet on the subject.

Whenever you can, link to other blogs that have link-worthy material.

Take a step further, and also mention them favorably.

First of all, linking to other (authoritative) sites increases your relevancy and will get you higher rankings.

Wikipedia is a great example of linking. Check out this article on Website traffic. There are cross links in almost every single line. This helps Wikipedia to rank well in the search engines.

Linking to other blogs that has a great resource or post will also benefit your readers.

Make a list of all the blogs that you have linked to and tell them that you have.

Don’t ask for sharing or anything. Just tell them. If they want to (and you did a good job of praising them), they will share it anyways.

This also puts you onto their radar.

Traffic Queen 2018: Pinterest

I first didn’t believe it. I felt like Alice in Wonderland…

But it kept coming up on different blogs.

[thrive_testimonial name=”Maya Maceka” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/mayamaceka.png” color=”dark”]Pinterest is a visual search engine that brings in over 70 million users every month!

And these people are searching for every topic under the sun. So, if you want to give your blog or website more exposure, Pinterest is the place to do it.

In just over 1 month, I went from knowing nothing about Pinterest to having it become the #1 source of traffic for my blog.

… strategy that earned me over 100,000 monthly views during my very first month on Pinterest!

MayaMaceka.com/Pinterest Strategy[/thrive_testimonial]

If you click the above link and sign up for Maya’s secret library, you get, among other goodies,

• a list of 80+ Pinterest group boards for bloggers
• a list of 30+ Facebook groups for bloggers.

[thrive_testimonial name=”Stefan Alexander” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/stefan-alexander.jpg” color=”dark”]Depending on your niche you can use Pinterest to take a brand new blog up to 100 visitors per day within just a few weeks.

By Stefan Alexander.com[/thrive_testimonial]

[thrive_testimonial name=”Isabelle Paquin” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/IsabellePaquin.jpg” color=”dark”]I spend less than 30 minutes per week on marketing on Pinterest and it drives a little over 50% of my site traffic – and it’s free! Yep, you read this right. I don’t pay to generate this traffic.

Isabelle Paquin.com[/thrive_testimonial]

[thrive_testimonial name=”Chelsea” company=”Her Paperrroute” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Chelsea-herpaperroute.png” color=”dark”]I figured out some pretty excellent methods that actually sent my page views up over 10x what it had been before! I don’t use the word ‘skyrocket’ lightly, but in this case, skyrocket is exactly what happened. I managed to ‘crack’ the Pinterest algorithm and get my tush all up in the smartfeed (finally!)

Her Paperroute[/thrive_testimonial]

Chelsea also has a free course on how to start a blog the right way so that you are able to profit from your blogging efforts. Check out her free blogging course here.

[thrive_testimonial name=”Sophie Verlinden” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/sophievl.png” color=”dark”]If you’ve read any blog posts about traffic these days, you know Pinterest can be a HUGE traffic source for your online business. But you have to have a strategy in place to create a high-performing Pinterest profile.

There’s a reason why you should put keywords & hashtags in repins as well. If all your pins rank higher, your Pinterest profile will have more authority, which in turn will give your own pins a boost.

SophieVL.com[/thrive_testimonial]

[thrive_testimonial name=”Melyssa Griffin” company=”” image=”https://funnelxpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/3_Ways_to_Use_Pinterest_to_Dramatically_Grow_Your_Traffic___Email_List___Workshops_by_Melyssa_Griffin.jpg” color=”dark”]This is the same system I used to grow my monthly pageviews to 300,000+ and expand my email list to over 75,000 subscribers.

Pinterest free webinar[/thrive_testimonial]