21 Website Traffic Hacks That Still Work in 2025 (No Gimmicks, Just Results)

Is your website struggling to get noticed?

You’re not alone—and you’re not out of options either.

This article reveals 21 proven traffic hacks that still work in 2025. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned marketer, these strategies are timeless, practical, and effective. Best of all, most of them cost little to nothing to implement.

Pick 3–4 and take action this week—you’ll start seeing results fast.

1. Guest Posting

Guest posting is a classic traffic-building method that continues to work today. The idea is simple: you write a great piece of content and offer it to another website owner for free. In return, they publish your article and include a link back to your website in the “resource box” or author bio.

This type of collaboration helps both parties. They get fresh, relevant content, and you get exposure to their audience plus a high-quality backlink. That backlink brings traffic and boosts your SEO—win-win. The key is to offer genuinely helpful content that’s a good fit for their readers.

Start by identifying non-competing websites in your niche. If you sell kitchen gadgets, look for food blogs. If you’re in fitness, reach out to health coaches. Make a short list of 10–20 sites and craft a personalized pitch. Include a great headline idea and tease the value you’re offering.

When you submit the article, include a couple of royalty-free images and a short byline with a link to your site. If you don’t hear back within a few days, follow up politely. Persistence pays off. Once it’s published, promote the post on your own social channels—it helps both of you.

Repeat this every week or two, and you’ll build a steady stream of incoming links and targeted traffic that keeps growing over time.

2. Swap Mentions

Once you’ve guest posted or collaborated with a few sites, you’re in a great position to do a “mention swap.” This is where you promote someone else’s content, freebie, or service to your audience—and they do the same for you. It’s email list building without paid ads.

The key to this tactic is that it feels organic. You’re introducing your audience to someone helpful and relevant—not just dropping in a random promo. And in exchange, they’re doing the same with their audience, which brings new visitors to your site.

You can mention each other in an email, a blog post, or even a social post. But email swaps tend to convert the best, especially if you have a lead magnet ready (like a checklist or short guide) to capture that new traffic into subscribers.

This also helps build stronger relationships in your niche. You never know where it might lead—maybe a joint webinar, co-branded course, or future product launch. Start with a short thank-you message after someone promotes you, and then propose the idea casually. Keep it low-pressure.

Want to test this? Make a list of five people in your niche with email lists or active blogs, and propose a simple swap. You’ll be surprised how well it works.

3. In-Person Networking

As powerful as online tactics are, don’t overlook the real-world connections right in your community. Local meetups, chamber of commerce events, or niche conferences are full of potential collaborators, clients, and promoters who can help spread the word about your website.

When you attend events, your first goal should be to make meaningful connections—not to pitch. Bring business cards, listen more than you talk, and ask what others are working on. The more genuinely curious you are, the more memorable you’ll be.

Follow up the next day with a simple email. Thank them for chatting, remind them who you are, and make a small offer. For example, you might say, “If you’d like, I can give your business a quick shoutout in my next newsletter.” Most people will respond positively—and sometimes offer to do the same in return.

Not everyone will have a massive audience, but every little boost helps. These relationships often snowball into more visibility, joint ventures, and even referrals. The more you give, the more you tend to get in return.

Put one event on your calendar this month and challenge yourself to make at least three new contacts. Then follow up. That’s all it takes to turn offline conversations into real online traffic.

4. Buy Facebook Ads

If you’ve never bought ads (traffic) before or if you’ve tried it and have given up, it’s time to consider doing it some more. If you think it didn’t work, that could simply be because you didn’t give it enough of a chance or you didn’t take time to optimize your ad campaigns. Optimizing means trying different ads with slight differences to see which ads perform better with your audience.

It’s very easy to copy/duplicate and ad and then make a small change to the title. This is a form of “split testing” and the more you do it, the better your ads perform. Head over to to set up your Facebook ad campaigns. 

5. Ask People to Share

Here’s a kind of “oh, duh” hack that I’ve seen many websites omit doing, leaving all kinds of traffic sitting on the table. When you add posts to your blog, at the very end (or even in the middle) ask people to share your blog post. And then make sure you have sharing links available to make it easy for them to do so.

If you’re pumping out great content, most people won’t mind sharing it. Remember, for people to share, your article must make them look good when they share it. It’s going out to all their friends and it posts on their wall, so make sure you’re solving a real problem or providing excellent value. A good way to provide high value is to do your own research/studies.

It doesn’t have to be super scientific but put in some time and come up with something really original. There should be several “ah-ha” moments within your article so people walk away knowing you gave them something new. They’ll then be more likely to share your content in their network. Bonus hack for more traffic: in your content on your website, link to other pages on your website.

Keep people on your website as long as possible. Use calls to action at the end of articles to have them read something else you have. Here’s some help with writing great content:

6. Do Remarketing

Remarketing is where you put a tracking pixel on a page, which stores a cookie with that visitor. You can then later market to the visitor on different ad networks like Facebook, YouTube, Google Ads, and more. A good follow-up message is offering them a discount to come back. You could also offer something else like your lead magnet.

To set up remarketing, do a search for “remarketing +” the network you’re using. You’ll need to install some tracking pixels on your website. 

7. Actually Use Your “Thank You” Page

When people sign up for your newsletter, they should see a page thanking them for signing up. Instead of just having a boring message there, thanking them – make them another offer instead. You already have them “on the hook,” as they say. Since they’re interested, ask them to do something else, like: Visit your Facebook page (open in a new tab) Visit / subscribe to your YouTube page (open in a new tab) Check out some of your blog posts (list the titles and link to them) And, even try making them a special offer since they signed up.

Maybe it’s a hidden, one time only, offer. Start with a smaller item or service you offer – one you can deliver quickly and easily. But most of all… use that space for something! 

8. Actually Use Your Delivery Page

Just like the “Thank You” page, there’s another page that is often under-utilized or sometimes not even used at all. If you’re offering what we call a “lead magnet” which is a PDF report, guide, or some other incentive to sign up for your email list (which you should be doing – always… ), in the automatic email you send out where you deliver what you’ve promised, you can promote more offers.

I’ve seen many funnels where they just link to the PDF file in the email or whatever and that’s it. I’m left staring at a blank browser window while the download is happening. That’s wasted space. Instead of linking to a file, link to a hidden page where people can download the file. On that page, have other offers or information.

For example, you can even start swapping delivery page offers with other contacts you have in the industry. Going back to the first example, if you sell car stereos and have a guide, have a banner or link to the car mat people. They can then do the same for you. Or maybe you’re an for other products and you can have your affiliate links or banners on this page.

Whatever you do, have your delivery set up this way and use that space – don’t waste it (am I making this point strong enough yet?). You’re working hard to get this traffic, so once you get it, make sure you’re squeezing every drop out of it you can. That’s why I’m saying more calls to action, more links to other articles – just more… more… more!

9. Post on Reddit

Go to Reddit and you should be able to find a community related to your website. Get involved in those groups. Comment. Leave good advice. Thank people for their answers – that sort of thing. Then, in your profile, link over to your website. Don’t push your offers too strongly. Just hang out and chill with everyone. Post great things you find on the web that relate to the group.

Be a valuable part of that community and they will reward you. 

10. Use Google My Business

If you haven’t claimed your page yet, then get over there and do it. Make sure your profile is filled out as completely as possible (that’s key). Then, on a weekly basis, go make a post. It doesn’t have to be very long – even 150 words is fine. Give it a good image that’s attention-getting.

You can post lots of different things but make sure it’s useful for people searching for your business online. 

11. Focus Your Blog on Your Persona

Your persona (sometimes called an “avatar”) is your ideal customer. You should know who they are, what they like, what they do, where they hang out, etc. With everything you do (posting, advertising, etc.) you need to write it to that person – in their language, relating to things they know. Pretend it’s your friend and write to them.

If you haven’t done the process of creating your persona, make sure you do that. A good tool for getting that data is . Then, make sure everyone who does outreach and advertising and your company knows who this persona is. Tell all your employees so they can better understand who your typical customer is and what they like. They’ll better be able to make connections with people buying at your company. 

12. Improve Blog Headlines

Once you have some content on your blog, it’s time to optimize the titles/headlines to make that content better. The idea is to make that content compelling – which is basically forcing people to click. Being able to do this is VERY powerful. This dips into copywriting, which is an excellent skill to have. Check out these resources: This is an EASY way to get more traffic to your website because when Google starts seeing more people clicking on your blog posts in search results, they’ll start ranking your results higher!

Crafting good titles/headlines is the BEST way to do that. 

13. Place Free Ads Online

There are loads of websites where you can post your own ads for free. Get that list right here: Go to each one and post ads there as often as you can. Remember to track them (as mentioned before) so you know which ads and sources work the best. 

14. Go Get Some Good Backlinks

A link to your website is like a vote for it. The more votes you have, the better you rank. There… that’s SEO (search engine optimization) in a nutshell. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that but backlinks really help.

15. Buy Redirect Backlinks

Some of the best backlinks you can get (to really help boost your website rankings for loads of traffic) are redirect links from high-authority websites. Think of them like backlinks on steroids – yes, they’re THAT powerful. Getting 5-10 of these going can really help you rank higher than your competition. 

16. Do On-Site SEO

For Google to rank your website higher, it really helps if they love it. After all, they (or any other search engine) needs to deliver the best results. If your website is slow, not structured well, or just not easy to figure out, you won’t get ranked too high. This is where comes in. This is the technical side of SEO, so I have to give you a warning about this… You may be able to do some of it yourself but you may need help from a website design company to help you with some things.

Usually, some tweaks will take care of it, but there are some cases when a redesign is really what you need. Things in the website design industry change fast. Websites set up just 2 years ago are old. There’s better technology out to make them load faster and better give Google what it wants. Investing in a redesign may be needed and you usually see good return on investment.

I have a website design company that’s good at doing this if you’re interested: . With on-site SEO, that’s things within your control. You control your website’s content, structure, headings, how fast it loads, etc. It’s not Google or anyone else controlling that, it’s you. It’s something you can fix, too. You’d be a little silly to not fix whatever you have control of, so get an SEO evaluation done and start fixing things pronto.

Also, go learn how to , which Google is measuring.

17. Send Out More Emails

Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. Most people have email, so there are a number of ways to get more traffic to your website with email. First, send out more e-newsletters. Make sure you send out great information to your list and always guide them back to your website. Next, make sure the normal business emails you send have a signature with your website mentioned.

Put the whole URL in there, which means even the “https://” part. Third, for goodness’ sake, make sure you’re using your domain name for your email – not a Gmail account. This is important for branding. Nothing says “I’m not good at marketing” like using a Gmail account for your business email. Setting up is easy and affordable – you get to use your domain name (good for branding) AND you get to use Gmail.

There… you have no excuse now. As a side note, how you write emails is important. I put together a guide for you on this: You’ll also get people replying to your emails faster, which is great for business and sales. 

18. Use Solo Ads

Use… what? Guitar solo? Han Solo ads? No. Solo ads are pretty cool. There are people out there who just work on building awesome email lists – in many industries. They then rent out their list to you. You get to run an ad to their list and your ad is the only one they’ll see in the email – hence, the “solo” part.

The one I like is and you can get rates like $0.40 per click! That’s cheap! That’s a click over to your website. The best kind of solo ad to run is one to your lead magnet. You can then capture their email and do some marketing to them whenever you want. Learn more about lead magnets here: 

19. Post a Book on Amazon

This hack is a little more involved but it’s a great way to get traffic coming in virtually forever and even make a few bucks. When you write and post your own book on Amazon, you can set the price pretty cheap, which will encourage people to buy it. Your book can be something like: “10 Steps to Make ________ Easier” “3 Ways to Get Better at _______” “How to ________ Even if You’ve Never ______ Before” In the book, you can set links – much like I’m doing in this book.

Those links can go to your website. There’s a great audience on Amazon. They’re people who buy things and Amazon is essentially paying you to advertise to their customers. If your content is “evergreen” which means it’s always applicable (not just in certain seasons), then you’ll get clicks and traffic coming to your website if you give out good advice.

Yes, creating a book will take some work and it needs to be great content but this is seriously an awesome hack. 

20. Work on Your Social Media

What? I haven’t even mentioned social media yet? That’s on purpose – let me explain… You see, most advice you get online about how to increase traffic is to just post more on social media. That’s the standard answer. Although it’s true and it works, I wanted to give you other ways instead of first just telling you to use social media more.

And most people are using social media wrong anyway… Your accounts shouldn’t be all about you. Social media is like a cocktail party. You don’t just walk in and talk about yourself – instead you engage with people there. Then, if they want to know more, you hand them your business card and you get theirs. If you just talked about yourself too much, nobody would hang around you.

In this case, your business card is your website. When people find you interesting, they naturally want to know where to go to find out more and they go to your website. THAT is how you use social media for more traffic. There’s more to it than that, of course, but I find most people get a nice “ah-ha” moment with that bit of knowledge I just laid down.

Some of them even completely pivot with their accounts at that point and completely change how they do social media. It’s great advice. I didn’t come up with it but I love sharing it because it works great. Some resources:

21. Do More SEO

Optimizing your website one time does not make it rank higher forever. It’s a continual process. Doing SEO just once is like going to the gym once… it’s not going to help for very long. It must be done monthly. If you don’t know how, then hire some experts to do it for you. It’s also both on-site and off-site SEO – you need to do both.

That means maybe buying good redirect backlinks or doing continual guest posting. You need to do some regular tasks each month along with different kinds of promotion. The minute you stop doing SEO is the same minute your competition keeps on going. There are a lot of steps to SEO, for example: Optimizing page load times Optimizing content Keyword research Checking for on-site errors and fixing them Adding more content Using schema Optimizing for voice search Obtaining backlinks and redirect backlinks Doing a business listing scan and fix errors Post on website directories Fixing citations Fixing broken links Getting rid of some website content Optimizing crawl budgets ADA compliance And so on.

Final Thoughts

Don’t let this list overwhelm you. Start with just a few strategies that fit your business and go from there. Track your results, refine what works, and stay consistent. Getting more website traffic isn’t about chasing magic tricks—it’s about doing more of what works. And now, you’ve got 21 solid ideas to get started.

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