Getting free traffic to someone’s blog posts is one of the most frequently asked questions there is among bloggers, hobbyists, content creators, or even bread-and-butter marketing specialists who are involved in any style of publishing for the web. The question is essential for each and everyone in the above groups as well as for writers and publishers in the physical book as well as software, photography, video and even real-estate or wedding-planner industries.
One of the most common pain points of bloggers and, in fact, anyone publishing for the web
This question about free traffic generation is also a very good, and an ever-changing, one (it’s also an evergreen question when it comes to writing content in general), as it addresses one of the most important pain points of bloggers everywhere and it’s pretty much at the center of what writing a blog post is all about.
It all depends on building an audience for what you’re writing about one way or another.
The most important methods of generating “free” traffic
The well-known saying “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” nicely applies to this situation too. For, in order to get “free” traffic (as in not paid-for or bought-with-ads) you would have to invest a lot of time if you’re unwilling to spend some seed money instead. Depending on how much your time is worth, the expense in time could be even larger than the monetary one. It always depends on how much your time is worth. The time-expensive solutions include
- organically gathering and nurturing an audience
“audience”, and “organic” in particular, means real human visitors that are really interested and likely to come back for more of your upcoming blog post - they need to be incentivized to having at least a closer look
- in short, this means not “bouncing” (leaving or closing the tab/window after deciding that it’s “not for them” within a few seconds
- writing sufficiently good content to achieve the above
- using good formatting: clean headlines for the subject (keywords and related terms in them), subheadings, external links to related third-party resources
- include properly post-processed/tagged photos (or even videos) along with alt info entered
- make sure to use proper tagging as well as keyword-rich page-text content & much more
- other (off-page) SEO measures (the previous bullet points gave on-page SEO techniques)
Even when done right, do not expect this to make you rich quick as, even in light of search engines having all their monstrous resources indexing at lightning speed these days, you still need to wait for human action to happen in order to continuously build an audience as the desired effect for you.
What’s a search engine, anyway?
Internet search-engine crawler scripts or “robots” navigate the world-wide web and sift through all the information they retrieve, in order to group it into indexed results they make available for search users.
Search engines cause a tremendous waste of energy in the process, with Google alone burning through the power of multiple nuclear plants alone. not to mention their video segment Youtube with an even worse environmental footprint, or all the smaller search engines on top. (But that’s a separate topic from today’s which focuses on how to use that infrastructure as has been set up anyway.)
If it’s “free” traffic, it’ll take time in more than one way
And that still takes as long as it takes, and may or may not be boosted by search engine or Fb algorithms projecting higher-than average initial click numbers into the future resulting in “preferential treatment” of your entry for some time, but can only be maintained when your blog post content is sufficiently good (on spot for your topic/your audience) to warrant continued up-ranking in the “opinion” of those algorithms.
So the better your blog post content is, and the better it matches all of the above, the higher your chances it will yield significant amounts of “free traffic” for your blog post faster.