3 giveaways to drive traffic that will cost you next to nothing

Driving traffic to your website doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, which is good news for small business owners with limited marketing budgets. There are many things you could do that will cost next to nothing and, if executed properly, could bring a lot of new visitors to your website. Here we detail three giveaways that can drive traffic to your online business.

1. Free content downloads
Offering content, such as ebooks and whitepapers, for free is a great way to create awareness about your business. The goals of these are to inform and help existing customers as well as attract new customers. If the content you’re offering is truly useful, the content could go viral, and your website will receive high volumes of traffic.

There are some tactics you can adopt to increase the chances of this happening. Pay with a Tweet, for example, has functionality you can add to your landing page to put a gate around your free content. Instead of a visitor providing his email address to access the content, he has the option to send a Tweet to their followers or post a status update on Facebook. This is a great alternative because it’s easy (and free) for you and your the web visitors, and because the Tweet is populated with your company’s Twitter handle to increase awareness of your business to the wider community.

If you would like to see the functionality in action, check out the landing page for our Get Started Building Your Website ebook.

If you are a personal trainer you could offer a free 7-day exercise plan as well as healthy recipes for download. If you’re a musician, you could offer a free digital download of one of the tracks off your album. These types of free content giveaways are a great way to create some buzz about your business and attract new visitors to your website.

2. Early access
If you’re a new business just starting out or an existing business launching a new product, giving “early access” to customers is a great way to generate some buzz. For example, if you’re starting a new restaurant, you could hold an opening event with a limited number of tickets available on a “first come, first served” basis. This kind of event has the potential attract press attention as well as general buzz in the wider community, resulting in traffic to your website – even post event.

“Early access” is also a great way to gain traction if you’re launching a new website. Whilst you’re working on creating your website, you could display a landing page with a email sign up form, where visitors can register interest in your site. Once the website is ready to launch, you will have a database of leads to email, telling them your website is open for business. An email sign up form is free to implement and is easy to add to your Yola website. Also, feel free to check our website templates for resraurants here.

3. Blog contributions
Finally, contributing articles to external blogs is another great way to drive traffic to your online business. Apart from the time it takes for you to write an article, blog contributions should cost you nothing. The idea is to find non-competitive companies that operate within your niche that have a blog that accepts guest posts. This can broaden your company’s reach and help to position you as an expert within your field, allowing you to tap into wider market.

You can also include links to your website within the external articles you write. You must make sure these links are relevant and contextual, otherwise you run the risk of your content looking spammy. These types of linkwbacks from external sites to your website will also help improve your own website’s Search Engine Optimization and can send referral traffic to your website for no cost at all.

There we have it, these are three giveaways that will drive traffic to your website and will cost next to nothing to do. If you have any other suggestions to add to the list, let us know by commenting below.