![How to get traffic to your website without Google [2 Alternatives]](https://www.dosplash.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/How-to-get-traffic-to-your-website-without-Google.jpg "How to get traffic to your website without Google [2 Alternatives]")
So you want to get traffic to your website? That too without Google’s help? Bravo!
In order to get traffic their websites, online businesses depend on search engines, and in particular, Google for website traffic.
Even if some businesses don’t entirely on Google for their website traffic, traffic from search engines is looked upon as God sent.
Website owners look at search engine traffic as one of the crucial traffic streams – and in fact it is a good thing to have a consistent amount of search traffic. But totally relying on search engine traffic is not a good thing.
As with anything, you should also diversify your traffic streams. Let’s assume that you already get a consistent amount of traffic from Google. Congratulations.
You might even focus more and more on improving your Google traffic, which again is a great thing to do for your business.
BUT… totally relying on Google for your website traffic is not a smart idea. You probably already know that a single Google algorithm update could make or break your business.
As I say, there is no overnight success; but overnight failure DOES exist!
So in order to avoid those overnight failures, let’s focus on getting traffic from elsewhere too, shall we?
Introducing blogging communities and social media
Blogging communities are places where bloggers, just like you, hang out. Hanging out in places where fellow bloggers hang out is a great way to help each other. And, the more you give the more you get.
Blogging communities like DoSplash are great places to discover great content by fellow bloggers in your industry. And then there is a golden opportunity for you to connect with that blogger.
You might pay a visit to his/her site, read the post, leave a comment, share it on your social circles and so on. This way you not only get on his/her radar but you also just helped that blogger get some traffic through you.
And the more you give like this, the more you get back. Other bloggers (whose content you shared) will now start to share your content for you and spread the word.
Talk about getting your content viral!
Just like blogging communities, social media platforms are a great place to discover content, and also to share other’s content.
On social media platforms you can share the content you found interesting. And when others share your content on those platforms, you can get traffic to your website from others’ shares!
The secret to getting your content shared by others (both on social media and on blogging communities) is to share others’ content. And you should not just stop with sharing, but you should continue to grow engagement.
Apart from finding and sharing others content, social media is a great place to connect with your audience, and fellow bloggers! It is a place outside of your blog where you can publish snippets of your ideas.
You can publish interesting pieces of information, snippets of ideas and even engaging questions that could build up conversations in social media.
This way you will not only share valuable information but you will also be able to understand the interests of your audience and you will be able to better serve them.
Being active and being engaged in blogging communities and social media is a great way to attract attention – and this translates to good quality traffic!
Devising a not-so-overwhelming strategy is important!
Bloggers already have too much on their plates. Having to create and publish high quality content, promote it, work on products, re-purposing content, social media, responding to comments on blog posts and tasks like this already fill the plate.
So having to visit social media platforms and blogging communities in addition to the regular blogging activities might become overwhelming over the time.
The main reason this could happen is because there are too many of them.
So there’s Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many others. Each one is different and interests a particular type of users/audience.
So you cannot just pick any one social network randomly and go with it. You need to choose one or more social media platforms where your target customers would hang out.
The same advice goes for choosing a handful of blogging communities. Not all communities are suitable for your blog! So you don’t have to overwhelm yourself by visiting all of them!
For this, you first need to clearly know who your target audience are. In other words you should have clarity.
Now, it is easy to get overwhelmed if you don’t have a strategy and if you are not clear about where your target audience hang out and what their preference are.
But if you do have clarity, choose 1-3 social media platforms that suit your kind of business should not be a big deal. You don’t have to be everywhere!
Moving on…
Assuming you have clarity and have picked up the places where you really need to be, what should you DO after you’re in one of those places? To get traffic traffic to your website, that is!
#1 Discover great content and share generously!
As I mentioned already in the beginning of the post, both social media and blogging communities are great places to discover good quality content. Once you find those great pieces of content, don’t hesitate to share the content generously!
There are lots of benefits to this; here are a few of them:
(i) You get in the radar of those bloggers whose content you share! And this helps in building relationships with them; they can also revert to you by sharing and promoting your content.
(ii) You provide good value to your followers/friends/circles when you share good quality content from others (assuming the content you share is really of good quality)!
(iii) Your friends/followers/people in your circles are not bored because you simply don’t share your own content all the time!
[clickToTweet tweet=”Don’t hesitate to share other’s content generously” quote=”Don’t hesitate to share other’s content generously”]
#2 Leave comments on great pieces of content!
Whenever you read a great piece of content don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you feel like saying something. It is always good to appreciate the authors for their amazing work.
There are lots of benefits to this; here are a few of them:
(i) You get a chance to appreciate the author
(ii) You get a chance to initiate relationship building with the author
(iii) By leaving a comment, you are voicing your opinion on the topic. It is a great way to express your expertise, or opinion on any topic – this in turn gives chance for the author and his/her community to get to know more about you.
(iv) Assuming you leave a good quality, outstanding comment, you can get lots of traffic (I always treat commenting as a minimalist form of guest blogging).
#3 Engage!
Social media and blogging communities is not about visiting and dropping links – your own links, that is. It is about engaging.
Apart from visiting the original link, you should actually engage right there in social media or the blogging community. Leave a comment right there, even if it is a short one.
Create engagement. And if there are any comments on the links you posted (either your own links or links of other bloggers), be present and interact.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Engaging is the key to social media success!” quote=”Engaging is the key to social media success!”]
Stuart gives awesome tips on how to create social engagement to get active!
There are lots of benefits to this; here are a few of them:(i) By “engaging” with your audience, you connect or bond with them. This is a priceless opportunity.
(ii) You get to know your potential readers/customers better even outside of your blog; this is great because you don’t need to wait until they visit your blog to know about them.
And this, in turn, also gives an opportunity for them to know about you and hence gives them a reason to visit your blog.
Get traffic to your website without Google: A word of caution and wrapping up!
The title of this post might sound as if I am against search engine traffic and SEO. In fact, it is just the opposite. I LOVE the traffic from search engines!
The only problem is that it takes a lot of time and a lot of work to get search engine traffic, don’t you agree?
And you also need to keep up with the constant changes and algorithm updates rolled out by search engine giants like Google.
But that doesn’t mean, in any way, that you could ignore search engine traffic. Nope, you shouldn’t and it should be part of your traffic strategy.
Having said that, this post reminds you to NOT to rely solely on search engine traffic; as in “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Relying totally on Google for traffic is not a smart idea” quote=”Relying totally on Google for traffic is not a smart idea”]
You have got blogging communities and social media platforms at your disposal. Apply the tips you learnt from this post and get good quality non-search engine traffic to your website.
You can start by joining the DoSplash community.
Let me know how it all goes! Share your thoughts/suggestions/opinion and/or appreciation in the comments below (you might start applying the tips you learned in this post by leaving a comment right at this post)! Go get traffic to your website without Google!
I think generously sharing other people’s content comes with wisdom of running an online business for more than a day, Jane.
You and I know how important it is! So important, in fact, that as soon as I see that a post is worth sharing, I hit that ‘Tweet’ button (or any other button of your choice) – just like I did with this post.
Thanks so much for the shout!
I definitely realize the importance of generously sharing other’s content Ana. We have been doing it for a while now. And I do remember being in a mastermind group during my earlier days where we helped each other 🙂
Thanks for tweeting out the post. The pleasure is all mine!
Hi Jane,
Couldn’t agree more with all that you wrote 🙂
I agree with Ana, sharing comes with wisdom and time, once you’ve been online for a while. I guess the newbies still need to learn more about it, and I don’t blame them either.
Building relationships is what I always believe in, and you are right, interacting, connecting, sharing, caring, is what makes the Blogosphere such a lovely place to be in. I just wish I had more hours in the day to reach out and connect with a lot more friends!
Blogging communities are awesome, just like yours is – as it opens the door to so many new opportunities for bloggers. I am loving my new little blog community and forum too, at my own blog now and I can see how much of time and effort goes in maintaining one, but it’s all SO worth it once it pays off through the good word and appreciation people have for it, isn’t it?
Thanks for sharing. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Certainly Harleena. It took a while for me to get that “wisdom” – I was not generous in sharing others’ content when I was a newbie. But I now realize how big that mistake is! Not just for the sake of getting other people to share my content, but I was being so selfish. And that makes me feel guilty!
Blogging communities are the places where I changed my mind about holding back in sharing others’s content. They made it easier for me to discover and share great content created by the others. And I ended up making a lot of meaningful connections.
Thanks for stopping by Harleena. Have a great week you too 🙂
Thanks for referencing my article in the #3 engage section of your article Jane.
I’m asked all the time how to generate more traffic but I always ask the same question back – “what type of traffic do you want to generate?”
Most of the time, people treat it like a numbers game, which to an extent is wrong. I would take small amounts of engaged traffic over millions of aimless hits every day of the week. Blog communities and social media are definitely sources of traffic for a lot of businesses, but not all.
Think about where your prospects and customer persona are most built up on the internet and focus on getting active in those areas. Sometimes, it’s really confined places like specialist forums, authority sites or even trade journals.
Thanks for stopping by Stuart – the pleasure is mine in mentioning your article. I found it useful and it fit well with my post.
Yup – the numbers don’t matter. If we are attracting the wrong type of traffic, we will be wasting a lot of energy in attracting and serving them without any return.
I have developed some great friendships from joining groups and sharing our content. In fact, I know those people very well now. I now need to branch out into other ponds and share awesome content that I find, like in DoSplash. I am currently reading 80/20 Marketing by Perry Marshall and have gotten some great insights from that book. Relationship building is so key.
That is a great book Amy. Thanks for stopping by and I do invite you to take advantage of the content here at DoSplash community 🙂
Hey Jane,
I definitely agree with you about the search engine traffic. I stopped worrying about it some time ago because I couldn’t ever seem to please Google. Of course I do all the onpage SEO for my posts which is what is driving the search engine traffic to them. It’s great to see it for sure and I’ll never turn it away. Those that are obsessed with it and want more, well let them have the headaches.
I’ve seen much more success with referral traffic and that comes from making the connections. You are right with your suggestions of where to find different blogs and it’s all about sharing. Sharing is caring but that’s what I LOVE about blogging.
I read SO much content and I love it. I continue to learn, I get new ideas, I meet so many amazing people and if their content is really good then I have to share it. It depends on the subject matter as to where I’ll share it and on which platforms. But I share it because I want everyone else to read it too.
I really appreciate you mentioning my post too. It’s just hard to be everywhere and I know that’s why a lot of people quit. It’s just way too overwhelming.
Great advice and suggestions Jane, thank you so much for this post and I’ll definitely be sure to share this one as well.
Enjoy your week now and thanks again.
~Adrienne
Thanks for stopping by Adrienne 🙂 And sorry for my late response! I love reading a lot of other blogs. It helps me keep in touch with what’s happening and also to keep myself educated. Also when I read a lot, my creativity is in a good form – I find it quite easy to craft a blog post, to get an inspiration for a blog post and so on.
Being everywhere – it is not yet my thing! Thanks for sharing your thoughts Adrienne. Have a great week!
I agree with you Adrienne. I have made some amazing connections and friendships from Blogging and sharing. I wasnt a commenter until a month or so back, I realised, you get what you give. If you want comments n your blogs and engagement, you better do the same. I love your blogs by the way. 🙂
I think building relationship and creating credible profile is very important. Also while sharing other content, you should make sure that it will be helpful for your audience. I totally agree with you Jane. Relying solely on Google wont going to help anymore.
You got my points Piyush! Thanks for sharing your views 🙂
Hi Jane! I’m HERE because someone cared enough to share YOUR content; it was Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe.
I read thoroughly, THEN tweeted this post. That’s because I’m wary of sharing willy-nilly with my own subscribers and followers. Sharing has to be built on the foundation of truly wanting to help others… NOT only one’s self or a fellow blogger, but the end consumers.
At the beginning of this post you mentioned that bloggers may look at traffic from Google as “GOD- sent”… which puts Google in the place of God. Whooops! But if we’re gonna do as the true God says and love our neighbor, we’ll share what’s valuable… and our valuable content will BE shared… because it’s just the right thing to do.
Appreciate what you’re doing here. I’ll report back to Ana that she sent me another winner!
Keep Stepping,
Kurt
Kurt thanks SO much for stopping by! I am deeply thankful to @MeetAna:disqus for introducing me to you (and many other readers of her blog)! And I am SO glad you like my content!
Thanks for sharing your views here, thanks for tweeting the post. Hope you’ll stick around 🙂
Tweeted and Shared and Definitely agree and I dont share just anything unless it resonates with my values. And we really have to be careful with this. So yes we must be picky who we retweet, share with our audience, lest they get confused and show us a clean pair of heels for digressing 🙂
Of course if one is great at SEO there is no reason why they cant do what they are good at. So Google page 1 is blogger’s dream. But if you produce content that has no commercial intent, haven’t created offers that your target audience likes in other words you haven’t done your research, you wont get that many sales or conversions. So It boils down to giving value, give people what they want whether on Google’s page1 or via social media syndication. Its all about the Value we offer.
Talking of value Thank You Jane for the insightful information you have been sending my way. Most appreciated.