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How Small Businesses Can Generate Traffic Without Spending Money on Ads
by Neil Patel
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November 7, 2023
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Content Marketing for Small Businesses

There’s a saying in the marketing world… content is king. This is true, just look at Netflix or Disney Plus. It really is a content game. 

The beautiful part about creating content online is that people crave it, and because they crave it, they will share it on the social web, link to it from their own sites and blogs, and search for it on Google. All of this drives traffic, which in turn drives revenue. So how do you write content that gets viewed and shared?

It all starts with the data

The best part about the web is there is so much data. This data tells you what you should be doing. Think of it this way, there are currently over 1 billion blogs on the web. That’s roughly 1 blog for every 7 people in this world. There is so much content out on the web that already exists and you can use that data to determine what types of content you should create. But how?

There are actually a lot of tools that can help you do this… some paid and some free… that will give you a better understanding of how to do keyword research.

For this example, let’s start off with the free tool that helps you generate content ideas. Once you head over there type in a keyword related to your space and hit “search”. Let’s say you have a website related to the finance industry so you might type in a keyword like “credit cards” into the search bar.

screenshot of seo platform

You’ll then see a list of articles from around the web that are related to that topic. This report will break down how many visitors that article gets from Google as well as how many social shares it has on Facebook and Pinterest.

By going through the list of recommended topics that the tool provides, you will then have ideas about what you can create that people want to read.

This way you are only creating content around topics that are interesting and relevant to folks most likely to read your articles, share them on the social web, and even link to them, which will help you generate more traffic and sales.

Is creating content enough?

Even if you create amazing content that has a good chance of becoming popular, it usually won’t become popular on its own… you need to give it a kick start. In other words, you have to do some marketing to get it going.

If you go back to that same report from before, you can click on the “links” drop-down button next to the topics you like. This will show you all of the websites that linked out to similar articles to the ones you are writing.

screenshot of seo platform

You can reach out to each of those sites and ask if they would link to your article or even share it on social media to their followers.

From the emails you send out, you should aim for 10 to 15% of them to take action and share your content. If you are unable to get that high of a percentage to share your content, it usually means that the email you sent them isn’t customized enough. You need to make sure that you are not just copying and pasting something that doesn’t resonate with the people you are contacting. It needs to be personal and show them that you are reaching out to them and not just blasting emails to everyone. 

What’s next?

There are many things you can do to start getting more traffic, but start off with this one tactic I mentioned above. 


Start with writing one article per month and see what happens after six months. If you have more time, I recommend writing at least one article per week and eventually ramping up to a few a week. But don’t overwhelm yourself… it’s not a “quantity” game, it’s a quality game.

Remember how there are over 1 billion blogs on the web? Well, most topics have been beaten to death. So the goal isn’t to write tons of look-at-me content. You need to write content that stands out and is better than the competition. 

That’s why you should use the tool that I mentioned above. It will help you find good topic ideas and from there you can go above and beyond by writing better, more detailed, and fresher content than your competition.

 

That’s just one way for you to get traffic without spending money on ads.

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About the author
Neil Patel Headshot
Neil Patel
A leading expert in all things digital marketing, Neil Patel is the CMO and co-Founder of NP Digital, a digital marketing agency serving publicly traded companies, as well as small businesses and start-ups.
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