7 Advanced Ways to Get Free Traffic That Converts | Neil Patel

- You're just starting out. You can't afford paid advertising. SEO takes too long.

What should you do? Hey, everyone. I'm Neil Patel, and today I'm going to share with you seven advanced tactics that will get you free traffic that converts.

(gentle music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel, and if you're on YouTube, also click on the alert notification. That way, when I go live and release more content, you'll get notified. The first strategy I have for you is to post on Medium.

You're probably wondering, Medium, how is this advanced strategy? Well, let me break down a few things. First of all, Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content.

So whatever you post on your site, you can post on other sites as well. But what I want you to do is not just take your whole article and post it on Medium, I want you to post the first four, five paragraphs on Medium, have them, then Click to continue reading link, and that link goes back over to your site, and then when they land on your site, I want you to have a popup or a content upgrade which collects their email address. That way, when you release more new content, you can send out a email to those people.

They'll continually keep coming back to your site and that'll help build up your free traffic. But the key isn't just to post the whole article on Medium. It's to post the first few paragraphs and get them to keep coming back to your site.

Without that, what you'll find is you won't get those email addresses, which then will make it hard to then get people back to your site or continue to get traffic. Now Medium, on the other hand, the reason I want you to post on Medium is even if you don't have a big following posting on Medium, it spreads throughout the whole Medium community so you can pick up visitors from their site, and because you have a Click to continue, assuming your article is amazing, you'll get a lot of traffic to your site, and because you're also collecting emails, you'll notice that you can keep getting traffic back as you publish more and more content. The second strategy I have for you is post full articles on LinkedIn.

And, again, you're probably thinking, Hey, posting full articles on LinkedIn? What's the purpose of that? Well, we found that on LinkedIn, if you only post a few paragraphs, kind of like the strategy that I told you on Medium, and tell people to go back to your site, it's not as effective.

It used to be years ago, but now people want to stay on LinkedIn and all these social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn. They want to keep people on their own social platforms. So what we tend to do now, and this works extremely well on LinkedIn, you post the whole article on LinkedIn, and then you create a cheat sheet.

So the cheat sheet could be seven ways to do x, y, and z, or here's a, I don't know, a cheat sheet that breaks down these tactics in a visual way. Think of whatever you can do in a visual way that makes it easier for people to understand the content that you just published on LinkedIn and tell people at the end of the article that Hey, if you want the cheat sheet or if you want a step-by-step instructions on leveraging this, click here, and each of those tactics tips will go back to your article. But we found that it only works extremely well if you post visual content.

So, if you're giving tips in your article on LinkedIn like seven ways to boost your traffic, and you end up breaking on tactic one, here's how to use Pinterest search. If you then have a visual infographic and you're linking to that and it's back on your site, it's a great way to get people back to your site because you can let them know on LinkedIn, and people will click too for that because they love visual ways that give them step-by-step instructions versus having to read just plain text. But, again, if you just use LinkedIn and post a few paragraphs to get them to go back to your site, it's not as effective as it is with Medium because LinkedIn wants more people to stay on their site.

Medium may change out in the future, but for now, with Medium you can do just a handful of paragraphs and then get people to go back to your site. The third tactic I have for you to get free traffic is to be a guest on other people's podcast. Now, you probably are like Hey, I'm a nobody, no one is going to have me on their podcast.

That's wrong. You are someone. You know something that other people don't.

You're skilled at at least one thing. If you don't believe me, ask one of your closest friends. They'll tell you what your best skillset is.

But I don't want you to just hit people up and say Can I be a guest on your podcast? That doesn't work too well. What I want you to do is hit people up and just get a quick quote for them, and this quote would be for article that you're writing, a blog post.

Let's say you're writing a blog post on dog food and this expert knows all about nutrition for animals. Getting a quote saying Hey, can I quote you in an article? I'll link out to you.

People will be like Yeah, sure. I want you to start doing that with people who are not only experts but are experts that have podcasts. When you do that, you'll notice that when you get a handful of experts, they'll notice on your site they'll be featured with other experts, and then when you email them being like Hey, so and so, just featured you on this article, you know, I put the quote that you just gave me, feel free and share, a lot of them will end up sharing your content.

And then what I want you to do is go back to some of those people a month or two later and ask them if you can be featured on their podcast where you want to share something that's insightful. Someone will say no, someone will say yes, and that's okay. Or another simple thing you can do is you can just ask them to talk about your content on their podcast.

So if you have some interesting data, if you have some interesting stats, that's another way to get on their podcast. They can reference it. They will send you more traffic for free.

The other thing that I like doing too is when I'm leveraging all these influencers quoting on one of my articles, even if I don't get featured on their podcast, I'll end up hitting other people up who have podcast in the space and be like Yeah, I worked with so and so, look, they're featured on my site here, I love what you're doing, love to talk about certain things that we've been doing in the industry and discuss it on your podcast. And people would be much more receptive because they'll see the other influencers are on your site and they're also sharing your content. The fourth strategy I have for you, and it's a little bit similar to the last one but it has a bit of a different twist, it's expert roundups.

I used to get so many of these back in the day and I used to do it to other people as well, and then people started doing it to me. And the cool part about expert roundups is it doesn't matter if you have one visitor or a thousand visitors, when you do an expert roundup and you end up asking people for input on one tactic, let's say I did the expert roundup with all these other marketers and I say share your number one Instagram hack. And they all list them out.

They're all willing to share the content after, they're all willing to push it, they're all willing to publish it, they're all willing to link to it, maybe not all, but a portion, and you'll find that your traffic just skyrockets. But here's what's interesting. Another twist to expert roundups is after you start doing a few expert roundups, what I love doing is creating ultimate list, the top 100 nutrition blogs, the top 100 marketing blogs, whatever is in your space, and then create badges.

You can go to Fiverr, pay someone to create a badge like top 100 marketing blog by x, y, and z. And you'll also find that people will start showcasing these on their site and they'll leave a link to you. This is much more effective when you do the expert roundups first because when you do the expert roundups first, you're already building rapport with some of these influential people who have popular blogs.

So then when you do a list of all the top blogs, you already have a relationship with them. They're much more likely to share the articles, put a badge on their site, drive traffic from their site back to yours on a consistent basis. The fifth strategy I like using is leveraging contests or giveaways.

But the key isn't just to do a giveaway and be like Hey, I'm giving away these items, click here to apply, share it on the social web. That doesn't work as much versus when you get people to do certain things. For example, in contests and giveaways, you can do a point based system.

So you can do you get five points for sharing this on Twitter, another five for sharing this on Facebook, another five entries or points for sharing this on Instagram, you get 20 points though if you blog about it, and people can get all these points by doing these things. You can even give them referral links and be like for every person that signs up to your referral link, you'll also get five extra entries or points. So by making it viral, that's when contests and giveaways work.

If you just do simple stuff like Like and Share This and Comment, doesn't work as well. You need a point based system in which the more they do, the more people they refer, the more entries they get, and it's just ever expanding. And then whoever randomly, right, you can do it with five people, 10 people, whatever it may be, just at random, whoever wins, they get x, y, and z prizes or services or whatever it may be.

But the key is if you want the most amount of free traffic, it has to be done in a way where the more they promote, the more people they get to sign up for these contests and giveaways, the more entries they receive. Another strategy I love using is OnePress Social Locker. This is a plugin.

Especially if you're on WordPress, you got to use it. What this does is you can lock certain things on your site and people have to share the content to get access to content upgrades or more content. You can make it pretty flexible.

But the thing I love about this strategy is if someone's already reading our article and they're 3/4 down and you're blocking certain things off and if they want to get that, they got to share your content, or you have a ebook, they got to share to get it. That's a great tactic. A lot of people are like Let me get a name and email.

Well, most of the time when you send out a email to people, it just goes into their Spam folder or the other inbox. But, getting them to share your content right away to get access to this bonus material, that's a great strategy to generate more traffic. And it's consistent and it's instant.

And yeah, you'll find that a lot of people that share your content don't have a lot of Twitter followers, but when you get that volume of them sharing on Twitter or Facebook, a small portion will have a good following and they'll add up and it'll create a snowball effect where more and more people continually see your content. Last but not least, I want you to repurpose your content through live video. You're probably thinking, How am I going to get traffic from live video?

When someone's watching a video, they're more engaged than any other time. So if you take your text-based content, you take your content, you're releasing on podcast, if you're not even doing any of those but you're seeing content topics that are really popular out there that you want to discuss and you create live videos, and here's the beautiful part: You can go live on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, even LinkedIn all at the same time. So when you start going live on all of these sites and you're discussing different tactics and strategies, and you tell people, Oh, if you want this, go to this url.

com or go to my site for this, or go to this site for that, people will start going over to these sites. Not only can you get traffic but you can also pitch people on your products, your services, and you'll also generate sales. It's one of my favorite strategies because, again, you may not produce the highest amount of traffic from this strategy, but the people who go through, they're much more likely to convert because they're super engaged than someone who just reads it, tweet, and clicks versus somebody who's watching a seven-minute live video and then going and heading over to your site.

So, those are the strategies that I love using to get free traffic. If you need more help growing your traffic, check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital. Thank you for watching.

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