Generating website traffic is almost never easy. If you’re running a world-renowned brand and have a huge budget to throw at promotion and SEO, you can brute-force results, but how many people are in that position? In all likelihood, you don’t have much to spend on boosting your traffic — and it’s traffic that you need to grow your business.

It only complicates matters when you’re operating in a difficult niche. Maybe it’s an area dominated by a brand with which you can’t realistically compete, or maybe it simply doesn’t attract that much interest overall, requiring you to corner the market to thrive. It’s obviously not ideal to work in such a niche, but what if that’s all you can currently do? How can you proceed?

In this post, we’re going to set out some tips for generating website traffic without spending a lot of money or doing anything too time-consuming. If you can earn some more business, you can start to set aside more money to spend on further promotion, making it even easier to generate traffic down the line. Let’s get started.

Build a content plan around long-tail keywords

One of the most reliable ways to attract traffic is to create content optimized for search engines. If you can have your posts appear prominently in the SERPs when prospective customers search for relevant keywords, you can get their attention at the perfect times and likely earn their custom. But this is much easier said than done.

Remember that Google has been in operation for decades now, and big brands have built up huge swathes of richly-optimized content. The truth is that you can’t compete with their bodies of work. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never usurp their top rankings. You just don’t have the resources to create or promote content at that scale.

But you don’t actually need to compete with those brands. They target the broad search terms that get the most interest (a huge shoe company might build content around “men’s leather shoes”, for instance), and in the process they overlook (or disregard) much more specific and elongated terms that are also known as long-tail keywords.

A long-tail keyword is what the name suggests: a keyword that features a long tail of additional detail. To expand on the example we just used, someone could search for “men’s leather shoes brown patterned waterproof good for hiking” — and if you were in the shoe industry, you could create content aimed at that term, knowing that you’d be facing relatively-thin competition.

So think carefully about what you offer, and look for underserved long-tail keywords that return weak results. When you find some, create content that significantly outperforms those results, and you’ll likely capture some fruitful ranking positions in due course.

Offer (and publicize) some compelling incentives

When your brand is unfamiliar, you need something extra to lure people to your website, and incentives can do just that. Since you can’t focus on their addition to your website (as it’s your website that you want more people to reach), you need to promise them elsewhere, and social media is the natural choice given its incredible reach and accessibility.

Think about what you can offer to really get eyes on your brand. Free samples? People love getting things for free, hence the existence of entire sites like Get Me FREE Samples. Prize draw entries? The appeal of having even a fractional chance of winning something (almost regardless of what that thing is) is powerful. You could offer tickets through competition websites like Play USA Lotteries or come up with your own unique prize draws for your products.

Remember that you mustn’t allow people to enter directly through social media, though. Your objective is to get them to your website, so this would defeat the purpose. Maintain the message that your website is the hub of all your deals, and if they want to know exactly what you have to offer then they must go there to see for themselves.

Join with complementary brands for cross-promotion

Some businesses turn to influencer marketing, but there’s a problem there: if the influencers have significant followings, they’re likely to be troublingly expensive. But what if you could receive promotion from a business with a relevant audience without having to spend anything at all? It may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. It’s all about finding complementary brands.

In essence, a complementary brand is one that operates vaguely in your niche but (and this is crucial) doesn’t compete with you. Suppose that you ran a business making hotdog buns, for instance. If you found a nearby business that made hotdogs, you’d have a golden opportunity. Joining with a complementary brand works very simply: you promote their business to your customers, and they promote your business to theirs.

Done correctly, this works out well for everyone. You get to provide further value to your customers in the form of a relevant recommendation, you earn more visits to your website from the other brand promoting you, and your customers all win out by finding more businesses that suit their needs and preferences. So start looking for those brands!