How To Promote Your Website For FREE!

Tips to Promote Your Website Without Paying!

In today’s article, I am addressing a question that I get a lot, and that is how to promote your website for free without any hidden costs.

There are definitely inexpensive ways to promote your website online. If you want to see real business results, however, it is important to understand that to some extent it takes money to make money. Also, what you don’t pay for with money, you will likely pay for with your time to build enough momentum to get your business going. It is important when adopting free methods to promote your website that you have a ‘stick to it’ mentality because it will take some elbow grease on your side to truly promote your website effectively.

Free Email marketing 

Email marketing is something I speak about a lot because it is one of the easiest ways to promote your website for free. If you use an email marketing software like Aweber, they actually allow you to set up your first email list for free! This means you can start building your database of potential clients before you have even spent a penny. Let’s look at the steps to making your email list work for you and drive sales to your business.

Step one – Lead magnet or product discount

Most people when they come across your website will not want to sign up for your email newsletter. They are already bombarded with emails every single day. Why would they also want to receive yours? Well, the answer to this lies within your ability to offer something valuable that you give away for free in return for a name and an email address. In marketing, we call this a ‘lead magnet’.

Start to think about what it is you sell and who your target customers are. What would entice your target customers to leave their name and email address and can you give that away for free? Let’s say, for example, you sell expensive watches on your website. You might have a popup on your website which says something along the lines of ‘get 20% off all watches sent to your email’. This now gives your website visitors an incentive to enter their information to receive the discount that you promised them.

Step two – Creating your opt-in form

So once you have thought about what you are giving away for free, you need a way for your website visitors to sign up for it and join your email list. There are a lot of fancy tools you can use to help with this including LeadPages and Click Funnels. However, if you are on a shoestring budget and trying to promote your website for free, Aweber offers a simple solution that can allow you to create opt-in forms easily.

That being said, the free Optin forms that Aweber provides are not usually the best-looking forms. However, the age-old saying ‘you get what you pay for’ or in this case what you don’t pay for seen as it is free. Once you start gathering leads for your business and making some sales, you can always reinvest the money and upgrade your Aweber account to gain access to some of their better landing page templates or even better still, sign up for a landing page builder.

Step 3 – Driving traffic to your opt-in form

Once your opt-in form has been created, whether you have used Aweber or an alternative email marketing tool, you then need to start driving visitors to this page. There are so many different ways to drive free traffic to your website and to your opt-in form, and we will discuss some of these options in this article.

Step 4 – Email your list often

The reason why doing email marketing is so important is that not everyone who comes across your website for the very first time is going to be in the ‘ready to buy’ mindset. It may take them a while before they make that purchase, and you want to ensure that when they are ready, you are the person that they buy from.

Imagine spending all of the energy and effort that we know it takes to drive free visitors to your website only for 90% of them not to buy and lose all of those website visitors, and the vast majority of them will never return again and not remember your website. That is a waste of a lot of energy, and you can avoid this, simply by collecting the emails of interested website visitors and staying in touch so that they remember who you are.

Even those who do come across your website as a result of your free traffic generation methods that you learn in this article. If you do not do email marketing, they might buy one time and never return again. I like to use Amazon as an example because I love how they do their marketing. Most people who buy from Amazon do so more than just once. They might buy multiple times throughout the year, and this increases Amazon’s profits. Email marketing allows you the opportunity to stay in contact with the customers who buy your product.

You can connect your products to Aweber or whatever email marketing software you decide to use. This means that when customers do buy from your website, they can automatically be added to your email list and you can send them reminders of any additional offers they may wish to buy. You can also tag your past customers so you can send targeted messages to people who have already bought specific products. I go into more detail about how Aweber works in my tutorial on YouTube. It is important to note that a lot of these advanced features in Aweber come with the premium subscription but it is important to know what is possible so that when you start seeing sales come in, you can reinvest and upgrade your subscription.

So let’s take a look at some methods you can use to drive traffic for free to your website and your email opt-in form or landing page.

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation or SEO is the art of ranking your website in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. It is a great way to drive passive and free traffic to your website simply by optimising your website allowing it to show up when your target audience performs specific searches on Google.

SEO can be quite technical but the basics include

1) Having a keyword strategy
People use very specific words and phrases when they use Google. You want to use the Google Keyword planner tool and Answerthepublic.com to find out what keywords people in your niche are typing into Google. Use these keywords in important places on your website such as The URL, Heading tags and your title and meta descriptions.

2) Creating a user-friendly website
The major search engines want to recommend websites that are actually user-friendly. Make sure your website loads as quickly as possible, the text on your website is easy to read and the pages on your website are easy to navigate through. You also want to ensure that your website is organised well and it is obvious where potential visitors can find key information, products, or services. This all helps with your SEO.

3) Blogging regularly
Once you have done your keyword research, you are likely to find common questions that your target audience has. Use this as an opportunity to create blog content around those topics. The more you blog, the more likely you are to rank in Google.

Social media marketing for free traffic

Social media marketing is also a fantastic way to send free visitors to your website and opt-in page. Think about where your target audience spends the majority of their time online whether that be Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn or any other social media platform. It is easier to grow on social media when you are consistently putting out educational, entertaining, inspirational or informative content that appeases your target audience. Think about what content will bring value to your ideal customer and create that content as consistently as possible to help build your following on social media.

Let’s say for example you are a dentist and you would like to promote your services on social media. You might give tips and advise to help people keep their teeth healthy. People who are conscious about healthy teeth will want to follow you because you are a trusted source of advice and you produce that content regularly. You can then promote your website and opt-in page to your followers and grow your website visitors for free using social media.

Free video marketing with YouTube

YouTube happens to be the second largest search engine in the world. To me, YouTube is a cross between social media and blogging. When you do some keyword research for your website, you can also create content on YouTube on those topics, making sure that you use your keywords in your video title, description and tags so that you increase your chances of ranking both in YouTube and in Google search results. This can help you to drive consistent traffic to your YouTube videos organically without spending any money and you can promote your website and the opt-in page to join your email list throughout the video and in the description of your videos.

You will need to upload consistently to see success on YouTube and you will need to put some thought into your branding so things such as your YouTube banner art, your thumbnails and your editing style all can help you to increase views and subscribers to your channel.

Free Business directories

Business directories such as Yell and Google my business can be great ways to get indexed and found by your ideal customers. A lot of business directories allow you to promote your business for free and then also offer a paid option when you are ready to upgrade. With some directories, you don’t even need a website, only your phone number so that customers can contact you.

Promoting your website can take a lot of time and energy and if you have never done something like it before it can seem overwhelming at times. I strongly recommend downloading my FREE eBook ‘The Formula’ to discover even more valuable techniques that you can adopt to promote your website more effectively.