So you’ve launched your startup/blog. Now it’s time to learn how to drive free and targetted traffic to your startup.
You may have a great product, but the reality is, someone with a less original idea can outsmart you and drive tons of visitors if he knows digital marketing and how to reach his potential customers.
Two ways most startups look to drive traffic are through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Paid Advertising.
While you need funds to starts with paid advertising, SEO needs time, effort, and money to jump ahead of your competitors.
Not every startup has funds. Fortunately, there are 100s of websites out there where you can use them to drive targeted traffic to your startup/blog.
You could use these sites to make sales, collect emails and get the much-needed feedback to make your product-market fit.
Most start-ups with limited funds whether it’s an online business startup/ hardware startup or eCommerce startup, can’t afford a dedicated team for marketing. All they can afford is their own time or a single person dedicated to marketing. By using these traffic sources, you can drive free traffic to your startup and get your first customers without much effort.
1. YCombinator
Y Combinator is one the best and free traffic sources. Y Combinator is a seed money startup accelerator and twice a year they help startups with initial funds (Around $125,00). Started in 2005, they have launched more than 2000 companies and some big names include Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit, Twitch, etc.
The website works on the voting system, where users will upvote your submission if they find it useful and if your submission gets more upvotes, it will be moved to the top queue where you can expect good traffic. Users who have hit the top queue have commented that their blog/startup has received 20k plus visitors in a day.
Site: https://news.ycombinator.com/
2. Product Hunt
Started in 2013, Product Hunt is a website to share and discover new products. Users can submit the link to their website/blog. The website has comments and a voting system like Reddit. Popular products include Mobile Apps, Service / Saas Websites, and Technology Products.
Site: https://www.producthunt.com/
3. Reddit Communities
Reddit is a social news aggregation that allows users to submit content and take part in discussions. Reddit consists of communities called subreddits. After a short research, I have complied 28 subreddits where you can submit your startup for traffic and discussion.
4. Startup Websites :
We have gone through 300 plus startup websites that help startups by displaying their product on their website and filtered 90 plus websites that work better and have good traffic.
Few websites work like Reddit where you can create an account and submit your link, and few websites will ask you to submit your website for review. Once accepted your product will be displayed on their website and they might even send your details to their email subscribers.
Also Read: 14 Free and Best Ebooks for Startups
There are more than a million face groups. The main problem with face groups is most of them are filled with unwanted links and blatant promotion. If there are 10k members in the group and it receives 200 posts a day, it is tough to compete with them to get visibility. But there are groups with strict moderation, which allows its user to promote their blog/startup in a way that benefits their members and the startup. We have filtered 50 plus groups that would help startups get free traffic and attention.
You have got more than 170 sources here and that’s not the end. If you a source useful you could explore more to find similar sources. Visits Similarweb.com and enter the website. The site will display the statistics of the website like social traffic, search traffic, and audience analytics, check on a competitor, this will display more similar sites like your favorite website.