This is a thinking out loud kind of post wrtitten by a seasoned online marketer. So, let’s begin.
There is one major formula behind any free traffic you can receive:
Publish content that attracts attention on a website or app that has target audience you need.
Based on this formula it is easy to come up with infinite ways to drive free traffic. Let us do the exercise.
“Publish content”. Different types of digital content:
- text -> (short) tweet, comment, forum or chat message (medium) article, blog/guest post, press-release, (long) ebook
- image -> social media post, infographics, screenshot
- video -> interview, educational video, screencast, funny short video, infomercial, animation
- audio -> podcast
- software -> mobile app, wordpress theme, website widget, library for other developers
- professional document -> excel/googledoc spreadsheet, Photoshop/Sketch, PowerPoint, AutoCad
“Attracts attention”. What makes something catchy?
To answer to this question you should practice and learn copywriting skills. The content should stand out, be provacative and stir up user’s interest, or be highly valuable to the user. Here are some formulas for you below of types of content that grabs users attention like magnet:
- Image depecting human face, especially experiencing strong emotions
- Shocking news
- Celebrity gossips
- Infographics
- Text or video instruction that explains popular beginner questions in any space (“how to drive a car”, “how to buy bitcoin”, “how to play the guitar”)
- Useful excel template with preprogrammed formulas
“Website or app”. Now, let’s separate web entities into the groups:
| Type of Content | Examples |
| Short-size text | Twitter, Reddit, Niche-related forum (Bitcointalk), Messengers (Telegram, WeChat), Q&A platform (Quora, StackOverflow) |
| Medium-size text | News websites (BBC), Blog |
| Long-text | Wikipedia, Amazon Kindle Bookstore |
| Short text + Image | Facebook, LinkedIn, VK |
| Image | Pinterest, Instagram |
| Presentation | Slideshare |
| Short video | Vine, TikTok, Coub, Snapchat |
| Any-size video | YouTube, vimeo |
| Educational video | Udemy, Lynda, Coursera |
| Audio | iTunes podcast, online radio program, audiobook |
| Mobile app | AppStore, Google Play, Windows Store |
| Dev library | GitHub |