You know what’s shocking? Let me tell you. Imagine you get asked by someone who just started their online business to take a look at their Google Analytics stats. Like the nice person that you are, ready to help, willing to coach, you take a look. Boom! Your jaw is on the floor. Just picture this – someone with little experience and little money spent on traffic shows you some stats that can only be described as… beautiful. When you were just starting out you would have dreamt of those numbers but you wouldn’t have actually believed they were achievable.

So, how did this kid pull off something like that? Well, it’s all about being creative. The people in your niche who achieve more with the same resources as you’ve got aren’t magicians, they’ve just discovered some effective hacks to drive traffic to their websites, and I think it’s only fair to have some of them out in the open, so more people could use them.

These following traffic hacks are easy and quick and painless, and I hope you’ll share them with whoever you want to help increase their traffic.

#1 Quote and tag influencers in your content 

We all love reading how smart and funny we are, and so do the influencers in your niche or those your target audience is following. So why not quote them when it fits your agenda and then tag them when you’re sharing your content on social media? This can get you those retweets and shares that will give you access to their massive audience for free.

#2 Use Meetup.com to target niche audiences

Don’t “bu-bu-but” me! You haven’t even read this entire paragraph. Listen, I know you’re not in the events business and you just want to drive more quality traffic to your website. I know, but you also need to know that platforms can be used for more things then their intended purpose. Meetup.com can drive traffic to your website, raise brand awareness, get your company’s and your name into Meetup.com users’ inboxes.

When you sign up for an organiser account and create your Meetup group, people get emailed. When you set the date for a new meetup, people get emailed. You can also directly email the people who join your group. These are all great things, but you can still get traffic even when you don’t plan on actually hosting a meetup. Simply by creating a group, tagging it with relevant keywords and including your website link in the description of the group and that of your profile can bring you a lot of traffic, especially if you’re targeting men interested in tech, entrepreneurship, and marketing.

#3 Find the right social networks for you

The first thing every new entrepreneur does is to create a Facebook page for their business. It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense, they just do it because it’s what everyone does. You’re smarter than that. You should want to check your sales reports and be like “damn, this was a good month” not check your Facebook page and say “damn, these 10,000 fans are useless”. Keep your eyes on the prize. Vanity metrics are crap. There, I said it. It doesn’t matter how many Facebook fans you have if you’re selling 0 products or services. You need traffic and engagement, and if they’re not coming from a specific social network, just kill it. Bigger businesses than yours did it already. Use that extra time you’re winning to double your efforts on Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr or Ello.

#4 Google+ communities & groups

Just because your posts on Google+ don’t get any traction, that doesn’t mean things aren’t lively anywhere else. In many of the Google+ communities, big things are happening. If you’re creating content specifically for a niche, you might find in Google+ a great channel for boosting your engagement rates and generating sales. If you prove to be a valuable member of the community, the other members will click on your links and offer to help you improve your content and level up your expertise.

#5 Run viral giveaways

If you know your content is amazing and people would get hooked if they’d get to see it or if you want to build your email list with the least amount of effort, you should run a viral giveaway. Steve Benn is a marketer I’ve interviewed some time ago and he has some crazy good stories about online entrepreneurs leveraging Reward Leads to get their website visitors to bring their friends to their websites.

If you already have a team of developers on your payroll, you can build the software you’ll need to run viral giveaways and sweepstakes yourself. The main idea behind this is that people can qualify for a big prize by bringing 5 or 3 or 100 of their friends to your website, and their friends can, of course, enter the contest themselves, bringing in even more traffic. This way the task of generating traffic isn’t yours, but theirs. They’ll share your website like crazy using their unique URL that allows the tracking of the relationships between new visitors (who brought who).

Rewarding them to come back over and over again and share your content too!

#6 Test out Taboola & Outbrain

If you’re not familiar with the names, you should know they’re two popular native advertising platforms. The ads you can run through them seamlessly integrate into the pages of various web publications. To an untrained eye, they look like the content created by the publication. The minimum budget you’d need to run a test campaign is $10 to $100.

Your articles could be promoted on the websites of newspapers, TV stations, fashion magazines.

#7 Repurpose your content for new platforms

Your blog post can start a new life as a short video on YouTube, or as a new episode of your podcast on Stitcher, or as a new presentation on SlideShare.

By repurposing the content you’ve already invested time in by documenting and creating it, you’ll be able to drive traffic back to your website from a multitude of platforms and thus increasing the value that piece of content brings to your company.

#8 Give people a taste of your content on LinkedIn

Use paragraphs from your articles to compile enticing pieces for your LinkedIn profile and the LinkedIn groups you’re a part of; to get the full story people will have to click through the links in your piece and reach the website for the full articles.

For example, for a piece called “How to Start Working with a New Social Media Client with No Hiccups” you could include paragraphs from your “Setting Up a Facebook Business Manager Ad Account”, “Asset Sharing Using Google Drive”, and “Social Media Calendar Collaboration” articles.

#9 Join massive Pinterest boards

When people say you should use Pinterest to promote your content, they’re referring to two main things: a. make sure give people a way to pin your articles and b. get your pins pushed up somewhere the Pinterest nation could see them.

If you create an account and pin your own content, you’re not really going anywhere with it, at least, not anytime soon. If there’s no one to follow your boards, there’s no one to see your boards, so you can only rely on people searching for your used tags but there’s almost always more popular content to be displayed before yours gets a chance.

Those who drive lots of free traffic from Pinterest to their website are people who are contributors on popular boards which have thousands or millions of followers. When you pin something new in such a massive board, people actually see it.

#10 Test out Reddit Ads

Of course, you can submit the links to your content on various boards, but it’s quite time-consuming and you risk getting flagged for spam. Reddit Ads are quite cheap and you can target individual subreddits, so the exact people you want to attract to your website. You don’t have to take my word for it, $5 are enough to test it out yourself.

#11 Tweet often and reschedule your best-performing tweets

There’s something that always surprises me – how so few people understand Twitter. The smartest way to use Twitter to grow your business is, like Gary Vee also says, to search for the conversations around your product/service/niche and jump in.

The second best thing is the publish your own content. And this is where most people get it wrong – they post 1-2-3 tweets per day. People check Twitter when it’s convenient for them – it can be for 4 minutes before leaving the house in the morning, for 30 minutes at lunch, for hours on end because they keep it open in a tab on their desktop. The only guarantee you have is that only a fraction of the people who are following you saw one of your tweets, so why not share the same tweet more than once? Top marketing companies share a tweet up to 24 times per week, at different hours, editing the copy from time to time.

#12 Offer testimonials to new startups

When startups launch their products, they also need social proof. If you’re quick enough, you can have your headshot or your company’s logo on their homepage together with a link to your website.

When they’ll invest their money in driving traffic to their homepage, where they usually have the product presentation, you’ll get a part of that traffic, only you’ll get it 100% free.

To find new startups that might desperately want your testimonials, check out ProductHunt’s “Today” section and Reddit’s “Share your startup” posts.

#13 Use your website’s URL in your SourceBottle post

SourceBottle is a platform similar to HARO (Help A Reporter Out) that allows journalists and bloggers to find people willing to be quoted in various articles, videos, TV shows. Many bloggers use it to find people they could interview or feature on their blogs, and when they actually use their website’s URL instead of the name of their blog, they see a traffic boost because people want to know where the piece is going to be published. That makes it a great way to attract new website visitors, connect with them, and even include them in your content marketing strategy.

Well, these lucky 13 traffic hacks should keep you busy for at least a couple of weeks so I shouldn’t pile more on your head at this point. I hope they’ll give you that traffic boost to propel your business in the direction of bigger profits and I can’t wait to read your comments about what results they generated.

Remember: if you have any questions or if you’ve already implemented some of these traffic hacks, let me know in the comments section. I’d love to hear from you.