10 Free Traffic Sources for your Startup

In this article, we show you 10 sources to get traffic for your startup without breaking the bank.

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#1 Product Hunt

When starting out, you want to have free traffic, and Product Hunt is definitely a place to go for that. It is a huge community with millions of users. You can list your product there for free and get feedback from the community. But also if you are doing a successful launch: You can get thousands of users to your website on the first day of the launch, but also over time. In addition, it is also an amazing place to be because you get a ton of backlinks and trust from the community.

#2 Landing Page Sites

If you have a great design, make sure to submit your website to a bunch of landing page inspiration sites. These are websites that create well-designed landing pages. Additionally, in the end, people are browsing through the inspirations. If they find your Startup Idea interesting, they come over to your website and maybe try out your tool or even become a customer.

Popular landing page collections are:

#3 Quora

Quora is a forum where people ask questions about literally everything. If you answer questions in the area that your business is in, you can link out to your own product, but also through your profile. Quora is very valuable because a lot of the Quora postings are ranked high in the search engines. This drives traffic over time, and people visit your website on a weekly, monthly, or even daily basis because the articles are clicked.

#4 Directories

There are millions of directories out there starting out with directories for specific areas. For example, our own project VC stack where we curate all software vendors in the VC space. Further, there are directories like G2 or Capterra where you can list your software, but even directories like best startups in Berlin. Reach out to these websites or sign up, and list your business for free. In a lot of cases, this will not only give you a backlink, but also drive people to your website.

Popular directories are:

#5 Podcasts

Number five: I can only encourage you to get invited to a ton of podcasts out there, not only because it is fantastic to share your story, but also for most podcasts, there will be some show notes. In the show notes, most of the hosts will link out to your website or your LinkedIn profile. These show notes will be listed on a bunch of different platforms like Apple Podcast, but also Spotify. This drives traffic to your website for free because people find these podcasts and end up on your website. So make sure to get you some episodes of podcasts that you are featured in.

#6 YouTube channel

Over the last year, I was working a little bit on my YouTube channel, and one thing that struck me that is cool with YouTube is you are creating content once, and it will grow over time. So, for example, a video I created over a year ago still shows up on people's YouTube search results daily. If they like your video, the chances are that they will also go to your website and check out what you are doing.

#7 Community Resources

Number seven doesn't work for any business, but I am sure you fill find something in your industry. We, for example, created a free resource for the Figma community: a pitch deck template which we released on the community marketplace. Until now, it was used by 12,000 people and liked by 380. It drives hundreds of users over to our website every month.

Behance, for example, is a website mainly for designers to get inspiration. People go there to see the best designs and are also typing in "pitch deck". We try to show up there with work we have done in the past and bring them to our website. By the way - listing your work, there is free.

#9 Resource Pages

Resource pages are something really cool. We already used them a lot and had very positive experiences using them. There are tons of resource pages out there. For example, Founder Resources. We collected over 500 resources from different people we are linking to. Maybe you have built something exciting or written an interesting blog article. So make sure to reach out to these kinds of pages and ask them if they want to list your article. You should take this opportunity to generate traffic on your website.

#10 Guest Articles

I do these quite a lot. It is easy to do and helps drive traffic because they are always linking back to your website.

If you want to learn more about how to build a startup from zero to one, and you want to get some practical tips, take a look at my YouTube Channel "MaxFleit".

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