Most of the time, businesses spend a significant portion of their budget on promotion. But there are free ways to drive traffic to your website—though they typically require more effort and consistency.

When a company invests in paid promotion, it usually outsources the work to professionals—freelancers, agencies, or in-house specialists. With free promotion, you're doing it all yourself: Learning, researching, analyzing traffic, and adjusting your strategy on the go. With this approach, you won't need to spend money, but you will need to invest your time.

Purpose: Drive traffic from social media to your website.
When to expect first results: Around 1 month (for new accounts).

Social media can be a powerful source of website traffic—especially if you use your profile to share links to your products or services. Curious readers might click through and make a purchase.

You don't have to spend money to grow your presence on social media either. If your content is interesting and engaging, the algorithm may start promoting your posts organically.

But relying solely on algorithms is risky. It can take a long time to gain traction. Luckily, there are more hands-on, reliable ways to grow without paid ads:

• Barter with similar-sized communities—feature each other's pages. This is called backlinking.
• Join relevant discussions and leave thoughtful comments from your company's account.
• Run giveaways in exchange for reposts and follows. The prize can be your product or service.
• Use built-in platform features. For example, on Telegram, you can join themed folders or collections of channels. Members of these folders usually promote each other.

Purpose: To attract users from other websites and services.
Time to see the first results: Around 3 days.

You don't have to limit your marketing efforts to social media. There are plenty of other websites where people go to search for information, read reviews, or connect with others.

These platforms show offline businesses and their locations—think Google Maps, Apple Maps (with reviews powered by Yelp or TripAdvisor), and Trustpilot.

Usually, all you need to do is create a company profile: Add a business description, contact details, and your website URL. Then, keep an eye on reviews and respond to them as quickly as possible.

These websites list businesses by category, provide details, and collect reviews—like Yelp, Trustpilot, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, or Cylex.

Unlike map services, people here search based on things like services, pricing, popularity, and ratings rather than location. That makes this a good option even for companies that operate exclusively online.

These are websites where entrepreneurs and professionals share their experiences—like Medium, Indie Hackers, or Reddit's r/SmallBusiness.

You can also look for niche platforms related to your field. While their audiences tend to be smaller, they're often more engaged. These communities usually allow you to comment or post on behalf of your company.

Marketing on professional forums takes more effort. You need to contribute consistently—publishing valuable content and engaging with other experts and potential clients. But if done right, it not only drives traffic, it helps you build a solid reputation and new connections.

To see real results, your website needs to be ready. Otherwise, search engines won't rank it well, and visitors from other platforms might bounce quickly.

Here's how to prepare your website before promotion.

There are a few key steps that can boost your website's performance in search results:

• Add meta tags (Title and Description) for every page—these are the headline and summary users will see in search results.
• Use header tags properly—H1 for main titles, H2 and H3 for subheadings where appropriate.
• Make sure your H1 tag doesn't duplicate the Title tag, and your Description doesn't just repeat visible content from the page.
• Upload a favicon, the small icon that shows up in browser tabs next to your page title.
• Add a social share badge (known as an Open Graph image). On Tilda, you can easily upload your badge, so your links look great when shared on social media.
• Write an Alt Tag for every image—this is the alternative text that appears if the image fails to load.
• Use structured data markup (schema) to control how your website appears in search results and improve visibility.

First, ensure that users can easily navigate your website and that nothing gets in their way. A simple self-test can help: Go through each page, check all the links, and see if anything breaks or looks off.

After that, it's important to identify and fix any technical issues—otherwise, your website has no chance of reaching the top of search results.

Search engines favor websites that use HTTPS—it's not just about SEO, but also about protecting user data. HTTPS encrypts the information exchanged between your website and its visitors, so even if someone intercepts it, the data remains unreadable. That's why enabling HTTPS on your website is recommended—it's good for both SEO and user security.

While some marketing and analytics tools require a subscription, there are reliable free options as well. For example, you can connect your website to Google Search Console—it tracks your website's performance in search results and provides actionable tips to improve visibility. You can also enable features like Core Web Vitals monitoring to ensure your pages load quickly and meet modern performance standards.

To make your website more search-friendly, the backend needs to be optimized so that crawlers can index your pages correctly.

Here's what you'll need to do:

• Set up robots.txt and sitemap.xml (if your website is built with Tilda, you're good—these files are automatically generated).
• Block indexing of pages with personal data or duplicate content.
• Add internal links to connect relevant pages and improve navigation.
• Set up redirects to avoid duplicate versions of the same page.
• Find and remove broken links.
• Speed up slow-loading pages by compressing images and removing heavy elements.
• Create clean, readable URLs that make it clear what the page is about.
• Add a custom 404 error page, so users get helpful information if they land on a non-existent page.