When you are launching your brand-new site you usually don’t have much money or time to dedicate to driving traffic to it. Usually, you don’t have both. You’re busy doing countless other things that you need to be doing.

The article below is going to break down what you should be doing during the first 12 weeks after launching your site.

Or you can consider borrowing a tactic or two for your already established website.

An article provides a tactic for you to follow each week and, if you follow it, you’ll notice that your traffic will start going up right away.

You won’t have to spend much money if any at all. It’s also not extremely time-consuming, like writing blog posts, as you’ll also be running your business at the same time.

(As usual, check the full article for lots of details on each tactic. Link at the bottom)

Week #1: Respond to comments on other people’s blog without spamming

Commented on every blog in your industry, even your competitors. Not only comment but try to be the first commenter.

See, when you leave a comment on a blog, most ask you to put in your name, URL, and comment.

Assuming you are leaving valuable comments and nothing spammy, you’ll notice that you’ll get referral traffic in your Google Analytics.

This will be because a very small percentage of people are clicking on your name when you leave a comment.

The key with this strategy is to be one of the first commenters as that ensures your comment is at the top. The other key, of course, is that your comment must add value.

Don’t leave comments like “Nice post! Keep up the good work!”

If you are going to use this strategy during week one, try to leave at least 10 solid comments per day. Even better, try to leave 20 as it shouldn’t take you more than two hours per day… assuming you haven’t done this before.

Week #2: Be helpful on Twitter and you’ll get tweets

How to get some Twitter love? There’s a simple 3-step formula…

1. Help people
2. Help people
3. Help people

That’s it. That’s the whole formula.

Every day you should search Twitter for people talking about your competitor. When people have questions about your competitors’ products or services (or they have complaints), try and help them.

Don’t pitch them on your company, just try and help them.

What you’ll find is people will be shocked that you are helping a competitor. And if you are this kind and helpful, then what kind of service would they get if they took their business to you…

In other words, being helpful wins you goodwill and it will cause people to switch from your competitor over to you.

And if you go above and beyond, people who haven’t even used your product or service will help promote you.

Week #3: Go after small affiliates

No matter what industry you are in, there are affiliates.

Create your own affiliate offer and then find people who are promoting your competitors. Email each of those site owners asking them to include your company in the article or even write a unique article about you.

Just think of it this way, if someone is willing to be an affiliate for one company, they won’t mind throwing in a few extra competitors. All it does is give them the potential to make more money.

When leveraging this tactic, consider sending out 10 emails a day. It shouldn’t take long and people typically don’t mind adjusting their web pages to add in another link that could potentially earn them extra money.

Now compared to most tactics, this one will drive the least amount of visitors.

But the traffic will be very qualified and more likely to convert as you are going after “versus” articles. When someone types in “Company X VS Company Y” into Google, they are researching which solution is ideal for them. These posts rank well and they tend to drive sales.

Week #4: Hire guest writers

This is what KISSmetrics used to grow their blog traffic to over a million visitors a month.

They posted an ad on a job board, looking for writers.

The way they scaled up to over a million visitors a month was by publishing 5 blog posts a week. And every time a writer wrote a blog post for them, they didn’t mind promoting it to their social following as their name was on the article.

Once they got over 50,000 visitors a month, they noticed that they started to get inbound inquiries of people willing to write for them for free. So eventually they slowly transitioned to a model where people wrote for them for free and they didn’t need to hire or pay writers.

What’s great about this strategy is the more writers you get, the more people that will find out about your company as each writer has different people following them on the social web.

Week #5: Create a podcast and interview guests

You don’t have to do a weekly podcast, but I want you to interview someone in your space at least once a month.

And instead of making a separate site for your podcast, just pop it onto your main site.

Now when you publish each of these interviews, ask the guest to share it with their audience. From their social profiles to posting it on their own blog to even emailing their own list.

The key to doing this is interviewing people within your space so that way the traffic that comes to your site is relevant and over time those visitors will convert into customers.

Week #6: Become a rising star

Whatever industry you are in, whoever your ideal customers are… you can find them in a Facebook group.

Look for niche groups on Facebook related to the product or service you are selling. You want to join these groups as long as they have over 1,000 members.

You may also find groups that have over a million members. You’ll want to avoid these groups.

Focus on groups that are between 1,000 members and 17,000 members. Those groups are big enough to where you can generate traffic and small enough where you’ll be noticed.

What you’ll want to do is join a handful of groups and post 4 to 5 times in the group during your first month.

Assuming you are creating posts that are engaging in which people are responding and interacting with you, then you’ll get a rising star badge.

That means people are interacting with your posts. So then when you mention your product or service, you’ll find that not only will people see it, but they are going to head on over to your site.

The key with posting to Facebook groups is to create a high amount of comments and replies. If you just link out to your site you’ll get very few clicks and you will look like a spammer. Posting links and nothing more will get you banned from the group.

But if you link out within context or answer someone’s question with a link to your site or share something from your site that will help group members, you are much more likely to get clicks.

Week #7: Co-publish content

Even if you don’t have a huge audience, people will still love co-publishing content with you.

Why you may ask?

Well, they may have the audience, but they may be too busy to continually create new content.

You can co-publish blog posts together, record a webinar together, create a white paper, or anything else that you feel could be a good fit.

If you are going to try and co-publish content with others, make sure you are willing to do the majority of the work.

Hit up other sites within your space and make your offer. Let them know how they won’t have to do much work and, of course, mention what they’ll get out of it.

When you co-publish content, you can’t just talk about your company, you also have to talk about theirs.

Week #8: Product launches

You can launch your site on Product Hunt or on a sub-reddit relevant to your industry.

Product Hunt is super effective when it comes to traffic generation.

The key with doing well on Product Hunt is:

• Get as many votes right when you release it… ideally within the first hour (so ask your friends and co-workers to vote)
• Participate in the community before you submit your own site. Ideally, you want someone else to submit, but if you don’t know any active Product Hunt users, participate for a bit before you submit your own site.
• Make sure you respond to every single comment as this helps with engagement.
• Submit your site very early in the morning Pacific Standard Time. Product Hunt resets every night, so consider submitting it around 4 am Pacific Standard Time.

Week #9: The gram

Whether you like it or hate it, Instagram is one of the most popular social networks out there. And influencer marketing is becoming one of the most effective promotion channels.

Look for micro-influencers who have at least 10,000 followers. Find people within your vertical who aren’t too popular but whose followers would be your ideal customer.

Reach out to these influencers and offer them a bit of money to promote your product or service.

When it comes to making your offer, don’t pay them money for a post because it will be too expensive, pay them to create an Instagram story.

See, the moment someone hits 10,000 followers, Instagram enables the “swipe up” feature. This means they can tell their followers to swipe up to head over to any website. And in this case, they will be telling their followers to swipe up and head over to your website.

You’ll find that influencers will create a story for pennies on the dollar as it expires within 24 hours.

Typically, if someone has 10,000 to 20,000 followers, you should be able to pay them a few hundred bucks for 3 stories over a 2 week period.

Typically, you find that 1% to 2% of the person’s followers will swipe up and head to your site, assuming the story is good. With this strategy, you won’t get a ton of visitors, but the visitors you do get are more likely to convert into customers as they’ve already been pitched during the story.

Week #10: Wikipedia

The key with editing Wikipedia articles is to first adjust tons of pages that aren’t about your website. It’s not just about linking to your site, it’s more so about providing value to the community.

So, during this week, adjust 12 to 15 articles. Once you do that you can then adjust any relevant ones to your business and include your own company when it makes sense.

Again you won’t get a ton of traffic from this, but you can easily get a few hundred visitors.

Week #11: Speak at a virtual summit

Search Google for a virtual summit in your industry. You should be able to easily find one.

It doesn’t matter if they are charging people to attend the virtual summit or if they are giving tickets away for free. Offer yourself to speak and promote the event.

You’ll be shocked at how many people will say yes if you are willing to promote their event.

When speaking, be sure you can promote your company during your speech and you’ll notice that you’ll be able to generate some visitors and sales. But that’s not the only reason to speak at the virtual summit.

Instead, ask the host of the summit to share the attendee list with you. Assuming they have the right terms of service and privacy policies this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. You’ll also have to make sure they aren’t breaking any GDPR rules.

What you’ll find is this is a common practice with most virtual events in which the speakers will promote the event and the virtual summit will share the attendee list with the speakers.

This will give you a list of super qualified people that you can promote your blog posts to or even your product and services.

Week #12: Scripts and tools

The most important thing in SEO is backlinks. You need a lot of them.

So, what’s the best way to get more backlinks?

Well, you don’t want to buy them. And manual link building takes a long time and isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Instead, what you should do is release free tools relevant to your industry.

Building a free tool is expensive and time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be. You can buy existing tools and put them on your website for pennies on the dollar. And over time, they will naturally get backlinks without you needing to do anything more.

For example, if you have a real estate website, you can always add a mortgage calculator to your website.

There’s a site called Code Canyon where you can buy tools for almost any industry.

You can use these tools as your own and put them on your site with a few clicks of a button.

Just head over to Code Canyon and perform some searches. You’ll quickly find some tools that can work for you.

Keep in mind that these tools won’t be 100% perfect compared to building your own tool. But that’s ok, you have to start somewhere. Plus, people will still link to your tool even if it isn’t perfect.

Conclusion

Some of the tactics mentioned above won’t drive you thousands of visitors right away but they can drive you hundreds. And hundreds of visitors is a great place to start!

And when you combine them over time, it will help you get thousands of visitors. More importantly, the tactics above will drive you visitors that convert into customers and leads.

It may seem like a lot of work at first, but you’ll get faster at them as time goes on.

How to Drive Traffic to a Brand-New Site with Little to No Money

PS. If I were to choose just one tactic, I’d go with #9: Instagram. I’d perfect it and then scale the hell out of it.