Putting Effort Into Pinterest for Free Traffic

Pinterest is a different kind of social networking site that can deliver free, targeted, organic traffic to many niche marketers. It doesn’t have the same engagement that other social networking sites do in terms of comments and private messages.

Instead, this site is all about making good ideas go viral. That viral concept can funnel traffic to your blog or products as well as landing pages where you can build a targeted list.

Consider Pinterest a content curation site for consumers. It’s almost like a digital vision board that contains a myriad of images and hyperlinks to products and leaders that consumers want to learn more about.

This site works better for visual niches, but it isn’t exclusive to those. For example, food, fashion, travel, and parenting are all popular niches that you will find on Pinterest. However, you can also turn a niche such as success or finances into a Pinterest-worthy niche as long as you pair good ideas and quotes with images that can be shared.

Before you open a Pinterest account, you want to manage the blog side of things first. When you go on to Pinterest, your goal will be to send people to your blog so that they can get on your list and learn more about your products and services.

Your blog posts should be highly valuable in nature so that consumers want to share it with others and bookmark it for themselves. Aside from text, you’ll want your blog post to include a good image for Pinterest.

Usually, the best images are vertical and eye-popping. The image should be embedded in your blog post so that when you pin it on the site, it shows up as the image that will represent your blog post.

You also want to include your URL in the image itself so that you get added branding capability with your social marketing efforts. Then it will be time to begin socializing on this site itself.

You’ll want to create a mix of pins on your boards that include your own blog posts as well as pins from other people. This is more ethical and organic in nature. You can pin several items per day on your account, and you want your boards nicely organized according to topic so that people can subscribe to them.

You may also want to participate in group boards. This is where you will share your own pins as well as other people’s in an effort to help all of your fellow marketers generate free traffic from the site. You can even launch your own group board for people to participate in.

Finding a Following on Facebook

When it comes to getting free traffic, social networking sites are a great place to begin. While Facebook may not appeal to millennials and the younger generation as much, it still has a healthy base for you to tap into as a niche marketer.

The first thing you may want to do after setting up your personal profile is to set up a Facebook page. This is a place where you can brand your business and share value with your audience.

After you have a page devoted to your business that details all that you have to offer, you may want to launch a group on Facebook to engage with your audience. With a group, you can make other people admins who can help you manage the group.

In a group setting, everyone can share ideas and open discussions with one another if you allow them to. This gives you great insight into the needs and personalities of your fans and followers.

You may also want to join other groups that have been started by someone else. Your goal here is not to go in and spam the group with links to your site. Instead, you should show up and contribute value to those participating in the group so that they organically seek you out online with the goal of learning more from you.

On Facebook, you want to show up to serve the people who are interested in your niche topic with helpful responses and insight. Doing this will allow you to see more organic traffic as people begin to Google your name and look for other advice from you on the Internet.

You want to utilize the various media options that Facebook allows so that you can acquire a bigger following. You are no longer restricted to text only on this social media site. You can use a variety of text, images, and video to convey your message.

In fact, it’s been proven that Facebook posts with images get more engagement and are shared more than those with text only. You can also share links to audio files or to your blog posts or landing pages on the site.

When you’re using Facebook to generate free, organic traffic, you want to build genuine friendships with others online. Don’t make it all about you. Your prospective buyers need to know that you care about them, too.

If you befriend people on your personal profile, make a concerted effort to visit other people’s profiles and engage on their posts to show that you are genuinely interested in how their own life is going.

Using Instagram to Attract an Audience

Instagram is a highly visual site where you can brand yourself as a leader in your niche. It implements a variety of images, video, and text. You can use a mixture of these, but every post will need either an image or a video to accompany the text.

This social networking site is a great way to get free traffic to your blog and offers. The best niches for Instagram are those that are visual in nature, such as food and diet, travel, and inspiration.

An image that you post doesn’t always have to be of some thing or someone. It can be of an inspirational or motivational quote or a cartoon or meme that people can relate to. While posts can’t be shared as easily as they can on Facebook, there are tools that can allow people to re-post your Instagram shares.

Therefore, you may want to brand your URL on the images themselves. Make sure when you post to Instagram, you are using hashtags to help your posts get found and shared among the population.

Hashtags are strategic keywords that people use to identify a topic, person, or place. When a consumer wants to find posts on the topic, they type in a pound sign and the keyword like this: #keyword. You’ll want to use a variety of them related to your topic in each post.

For traffic purposes, you’ll want to have a link in your bio. This is shown directly below your image on your profile page within the site. Instagram does not allow you to post links with every single post that you share. Therefore, you can change the link in your bio periodically if you wish.

One thing you may want to do is have a link in your bio to an opt in or landing page. This way, you capture the consumers’ name and email address and can contact them in the future and send them to your blog and offers.

Instagram also has another feature known as stories. Here, you can engage with others on a different level. Using the story, you can share images or videos as well as stream live from within the site.

Regular images and videos will be shared for 24 hours with your audience. But when you go live, you get to choose whether or not you want the video to stay up for 24 hours. Make sure you are branding your domains at this time so that you can reap the rewards of the free traffic potential of the site.

Tapping Into YouTube Search Traffic

If you’re looking for free, organic traffic, you’ll want to rank high in the search engines. But one thing many marketers overlook is the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Next to Google, it’s one of the best ways to generate traffic that won’t cost you a penny. People love watching videos - sometimes more than they love getting information from text.

You can find videos on YouTube in just about every niche online. This is a great place for you to generate a following and send traffic to your blog and product offers. When it comes to video creation, many people are intimidated at the thought of putting themselves out there.

But you don’t have to record yourself on screen unless you want to. You can use a simple screen capture tool such as Camtasia or Camstudio to capture the screen and record a PowerPoint presentation or other items as you talk in the background.

When you make your videos, they don’t have to be long, drawn out presentations. Most consumers prefer bite sized information instead. That means keeping your videos between 3 to 5 minutes in length.

You may have too much to say in that short of a time span. If this is the case, then you can create a series of bite-size videos that cover the span of one larger topic. Make sure you brand your videos with a URL that links back to your site.

In addition to the wording on the screen, you also want to verbally invite your viewers back to your website by mentioning the domain name. Instead of just telling someone to visit your website, you can encourage them to go to the site for a free download offer.

Send them to your landing page and get them on your list so that later, you can funnel them to your products, affiliate offers, and blog posts. YouTube videos come in handy because they don’t simply stay on that site.

You can embed them into your blog post and allow others to do the same. Many of your competitors will grab your video to embed into their own blog posts, giving you free traffic.

You can also share the links on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. When people watch and enjoy your content, and their friends and family members see it on their accounts, they can then share it with others and the video you produced will go viral. 

Leveraging Forums and Blogs for Free Traffic

Your desire for free traffic comes at a cost where you have to put in the time and effort to make it happen. Very few people will send you traffic without anything in exchange, such as money.

However, if you share good information with an audience, you can see a spike in the number of visitors to your site. Forums are where people group as a community to discuss issues that are important to them and find help from others who are like-minded.

You can participate among these men and women and contribute to the conversation in order to generate traffic to your site. You may want to find forums that allow a signature file.

This is a block of text or image that is hyperlinked back to your site. Every time you make a helpful comment or post, this signature file is shown to the audience directly below your comment.

That way, if someone finds your contribution beneficial, they can follow the link to your site to learn more about you. You can also start your own forum to attract consumers in your niche.

This is time-consuming and requires moderation, but it does allow you to capture the name and email addresses and present your links to a wide audience. You can even assign members to moderate the forum for you if they want to.

Blogs are your own digital real estate. They assist you in branding your business, positioning you as a leader in your niche, and presenting offers to your visitors. The best thing about a blog is that because it’s your site, it’s your rules.

That means there are no restrictions on what you can say or present to your audience. Of course, you never want to spam your visitors with low quality content or hype. You want your blog to become known as the go to place to get information in your niche.

When you launch a blog, it will pull traffic into your site from search engines. It will also be linked to from outside sources such as competitors and consumers. But first, you have to create valuable content. If the content is thin, not only will consumers ignore it, but search engines will as well.

Always practice good search engine optimization, including research and utilization of strategic keywords that will help your blog get found in searches. When you pull traffic into your blog, make sure you are building a list of those visitors. Have an attractive opt in offer that will allow you to communicate with them time after time.