It’s a Friday! And before I log off for the weekend, I want to share with you 7 different types of website that you can get FREE, organic traffic from.
When you run or own an online business, blog or website of any kind, website traffic is the lifeblood that will help it to succeed.
Without visitors, you’re doomed!
So, Let’s Dive Right In
I’m going to categorize EACH type of website, explain what they are, and how you can benefit from them. As well as give you at least ONE good example website.
Search Engines
This is an obvious one. Search engines often act as a point of entry to the internet for many people. If someone is looking for something specific, they will enter their search query into the search engine, and will be presented with the most relevant results, based on their query.
The great part about search engines is they will bring a highly targeted audience to your website. People who are actually looking for your content, products or services.
The downside with regards to search engines is it can take a lot of work, and time to appear in the search results for your chosen keywords.
The biggest search engine is Google which has around 4.3 billion users, and the 2nd largest ‘traditional’ search engine is Bing which has over 1 billion visits per month.
Video Websites
This is my personal favourite type of website, and what I focus most of my efforts on these days when it comes to building an audience and driving traffic.
Being able to create videos that you can instantly publish and that reach a HUGE targeted audience is amazing when it comes to building an online business.
Although there are a number of video platforms such as DailyMotion, the biggest video website by far is of course YouTube.
YouTube is owned by Google and has over 2 billion active users. It’s also very quick and easy to start getting your video content seen by a highly targeted audience, and to start driving traffic to your websites, blogs, or offers.
Unlike some of the other types of websites that I’ll be mentioning below, you can self promote all you like with YouTube – which makes it very easy to build an email list or drive sales directly from YouTube.
It’s like having your very own soap box with a huge crowd around you, listing to what you have to say.
Social News Websites
Social news websites are great places to tap into various size groups of people based on interest. People read and share news or information on almost any topic – as well as comment and engage with other users.
The biggest social news website that I would recommend is Reddit, which has 430 million monthly active users (statistics from 2019).
For many people it’s a fast way to drive traffic, depending on your topic, niche or industry. However, every “Sub-Reddit” within the website has their own set of rules, and it is often hard to ‘self-promote’.
If you want to promote on Reddit in 2022 you have to be creative.
Social Bookmarking Websites
You may have heard the term “Social Bookmarking” and remember it from the old days of online marketing. However, the truth is, for many it is still a great way to drive traffic and sales.
Probably the best social bookmarking website in 2022 is Pinterest which allows users to visually share, and discover new interests by posting (also known as ‘pinning’) images or videos to their boards, or other users boards (for example – a collection of ‘pins,’ usually within a common theme or topic) and also browsing what other Pinterest users have pinned.
Pinterest has around 459 million monthly active users.
Question and Answer Websites
Question and Answer websites have proven to be very popular, and it’s a great way to build authority within your niche or industry.
Although you can register on these websites and ask questions, which other people will answer – You’re also able to share your expertise and knowledge by answering other users questions.
With most of these websites you’re able to include a ‘bio’ where you can tell people about yourself, and often share links to your websites and offers.
When you become an authority on these websites, the traffic can soon come flooding in!
One of the biggest question and answer websites in 2022 is Quora.
Quora has around 300 million monthly active users, and is a great place to find people who need solutions to their problems. So register today and start ‘answering questions’!
PDF Sharing Websites
This type of website has become a bit of a dying breed in recent years and they aren’t as popular as they once were. However, they can still provide a source of relevant traffic – which are warmed up by the time they land on your OWN website or offer.
PDF websites are exactly that – a site where you can upload PDF documents. The most popular being ‘eBooks’ and ‘Reports’.
If you create an ebook that is focused on a particular topic and includes high quality, useful information – You can upload it to these websites, optimize the listing and make your eBook available to the world.
By the time people read your eBook they have just found and downloaded, they’re primed to click through to your website to learn more about you, and what you have to offer.
One of the better known PDF sharing websites is SlideShare, that has around 100 million users – although I’m not 100% sure what year that statistic is from.
Social Media
Social media may be last in this list, but it’s not last in relation to audience size and traffic.
In fact, social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok have billions of users. The majority of people today have at least one social media account.
However, unless you’re using their internal ‘ad platforms’ to pay for traffic you have to manually build up your audience on these websites.
These are often referred to as ‘Friends’, ‘Followers’, or ‘Fans’.
Similar to having ‘Subscribers’ on YouTube, the more followers and fans you have on your social media accounts, the more people you can reach when you publish a message.
Social media is content driven, so the better your content is, the more it will get shared, and the more followers and fans you’ll gain.
I hope you got some value from this post, and I’d love to hear about any other websites you use to drive traffic.
Feel free to drop them in the comments section below.
On another note: I’m going to be sharing some pretty cool ‘SEO’ related stuff with you in the 2nd half of this month, so stay tuned for that – and keep an eye out for my emails.
Until then – Keep on keeping on!
Andy Black