Introduction: How to Drive Traffic to Shopify Store for Free

In this really exciting post, I’m going to talk about how to drive traffic to Shopify store for free. If you’ve followed the previous post and taken action, you must have set up your store by now. You’ve got some fantastic products in the store and it’s looking really great. But what of course you need is a constant source of really good, high-quality traffic coming to your store every day so you can continue to make really great sales.

The Best Traffic Strategy

Now, traffic, as you probably won’t be surprised to hear, is an enormous subject. I mean, it really is not only huge, it’s constantly shifting. It seems to me that we have a new platform popping up every six months, which could be the next and greatest traffic idea for your store. So as a result of that, this is where so many people get lost and overwhelmed.

You might have heard of one traffic source, say Facebook ads, or you might be thinking, oh, Pinterest could be good for my store, but you very quickly or potentially get very lost within all these different possibilities and get overwhelmed, give up or perhaps lose money. I don’t want any of that to happen to you.

You’re not going to be one of those many people that get lost and overwhelmed because you have this blog post and my videos. I’m going to teach you a strategy, a strategy that I use and I know works. Most importantly, it’s the strategy that you can use starting with $0. I know that a lot of people that just try to start their own businesses don’t have a huge budget. So, it’s so important to be able to organically grow your business. What do I mean by that?

Well, what I mean is that, say you start with $0 and you use perhaps a free traffic technique to get those initial sales. When those initial sales come in, you’ve got a bit of money that you can start to invest in other traffic techniques that might require a little bit of investment. Then you make more sales and then reinvest that. And you go on like that.

So, you’re organically building your business and not losing money. That is so key to success with entrepreneurship, particularly in eCommerce. That’s exactly what we’re going to do. You’re going to learn over the coming sections of this post the best free traffic methods. Yes, you’re going to learn how to drive traffic to Shopify store for free. This is what I call the easy wins.

Once we got those sorted out, we’ll move on to the best low-cost traffic methods, which I call the easy affordable wins. Then when it makes sense, which is typically when you’ve got plenty of sales coming in and plenty of money to reinvest, we can then start talking about the best paid methods.

Now, at the end of all of that, I’m going to pull all this together and show you step by step exactly what you need to do to build an incredibly profitable and sustainable source of traffic. Let me put it another way, I’m about to give you a ton of information. You might feel a little bit overwhelmed or even possibly a little bit confused with all the different methods that I’m going to introduce you to right now. But don’t worry. At the end of it, I’m going to give you a strategy, a step-by-step strategy that you can follow to build out your really profitable and sustainable traffic source.

Lastly, the other thing that’s amazing is that the stuff that I’m going to teach you here (traffic building techniques) will work with any business. Obviously, I hope that this dropshipping business is going to be an enormous success for you. Once you’ve done that, you perhaps go on and do other things. Perhaps you’ve become a serial entrepreneur. I don’t want you to get carried away, but I just love the ideas like that. That’s basically what I’ve been doing for the last 20 plus years.

So, you’ll be able to take these techniques and use them now and in the future for any other business that you might want to do. So, let’s get going in the next section with all this traffic excitement.

Traffic Analytics

Now, just before we do start getting into all these different traffic methods, there are three things that I want you to set up so that you are ready to receive the traffic, understand where it’s coming from, and what it’s doing when it actually gets on your site. That’s just to capture a little bit of information that we can use in the future. What am I talking about?

We’ve got three upcoming section. In this one, we’re going to delve a little bit into analytics so you can see where traffic is coming from. In the next section, we’re going to use a piece of software called LuckyOrange, a funny name, that will help you to see what people are actually doing on your shopify store.

Then in the section after that, I’m going to show you how you can easily capture an email address so that you can use it for all powerful email marketing later on down the road. So, don’t worry, these are all pretty straightforward to set up, but it’s really good to have it established so that you are ready for what’s about to happen.

So, let’s get going with the subject of this section, which is traggic analytics. Go watch the first video now.

So, really for analytics, that’s it. You already have everything built in to Shopify that you can use for everything you need going forward.

LuckyOrange

In this section, we’re going to install an app called LuckyOrange. It allows you to actually see what your customers are doing on your site in real time. So, just to make the distinction, analytics shows us everything that has happened so that we can analyze it. But Lucky Orange lets us see our customer behavior in what’s called heat maps. Those heat maps can be very helpful. Why?

Well, they show us where our customers are going. We can see if there are any problems. Maybe they’re having an issue with a button. Perhaps having problems at the checkout could be a number of things. With those heat maps, we can see exactly what’s going on.

Now, the way that I’m going to use this will make it become clearer. When we install the app, the way I use this is to record a few sessions once a week. I don’t record everything all of the time. That would be a complete overkill. I record a handful of sessions every week and then I look at them to see if there are indeed any issues on my site. This is something you’ll be doing periodically. So, go and watch how to actually install this.

I hope with that very simple introductory video, you get an idea of how useful LuckyOrange can be. You can use it in two main ways, or at least that’s what we do. You can be proactive. In other words, you can make a recording as I said before, say once a week. Once a week, you record everything that’s going on for about an hour. Then you go to the app and look back through, watch the videos and see what people are doing. You will see how they’re behaving on your site. It may or may not throw up any kind of problems.

Then secondly, you can be reactive. For example, it might be that somebody contacted you and said, I’m having a problem at the checkout. I don’t seem to be able to make the button work. You could then say, okay, hang on a second.

Go over to Lucky Orange, start the recording and then say, could you check it out now so that I can see exactly what you’re trying to do? Do you see how that would work? Can you see how really both of those examples can be incredibly useful?

So, this tool, in my opinion, goes very well or hand in hand, if you like, with the analytics, giving you an extremely good idea of everything that’s going on your site so that you’re really 100% ready for the traffic that is about to come.

How to Capture Emails

The last thing we want to do before driving traffic to our store is to be able to capture emails. Now, I’m not going to get into it right now, but having an email address of your potential customers is an incredibly valuable resource. Of course, I’m going to show you how to use that later on. But right now, I just want to show you what you need to do in order to get things set up so that you can capture emails. Of course, we are going to be installing an app. Here’s the video tutorial with the detail.

As time goes on, you’re going to build up an email list and you’re going to see later on that you can use that email list to drive even more sales. So, I’d really encourage you to set up a preview as explained in the video. You can see once again, no technical knowledge required. All is point and click. Have fun with it. Create yourself a great form to capture those emails on your site.

Now, having said that, what I don’t want to do at this stage is to overwhelm you. I’m always trying to give you as much information as I possibly can. Sometimes I’m in danger of just giving you, let’s say, a bit too much.

Now, if you do feel overwhelmed, please don’t worry about necessarily installing these apps at this stage. You’re going to see in the upcoming lessons that I’m going to teach you a bunch of techniques to drive free traffic to your site so that your customers will buy your products. There, of course, is the option to install these apps at the later stage.

But if you do want to install them now, so much the better. In any case, I will continue in the next lesson where I’m about to give you a ton of really, really valuable information.

Easy Free wins

Still on how to drive traffic to Shopify store, now that you’ve got everything set up on , you are ready to start receiving free traffic to your site. But before we actually get going with the various techniques, here’s a question in the screenshot below,

 

Why Free Traffic?

Why even bother with free traffic? Now the normal typical answer at this point is, of course, because it doesn’t cost anything, it’s free. Of course, that is entirely true. That’s one of the great beauties, one of the great attractions of having free traffic.

But there is, in fact, a little bit more to it than that. Free traffic is also a source of traffic that keeps on giving. It will continue forever to send traffic to your site. Why is that? Well, free traffic is essentially about creating content – content that you put onto various platforms. That content, unless you decide to delete it yourself, or the platform no longer exists, will basically stay on the Internet forever.

That means that people will find it. They’ll continue to find it forever, click on your links and visit your store. It never goes away. So, in that sense, free traffic is an amazing source of traffic.  On the other hand, in paid traffic, the moment you start paying, it comes to your site, and the moment you stop paying, it’s done. No more traffic. It’s never coming back. But with free traffic, you don’t have that issue.

The other really incredible part about free traffic, and this is something that’s typically massively overlooked and really not discussed, is that you really get to know and understand your ideal customer. Building a profitable and successful business is all about matching the ideal customer with the ideal product. Companies spend billions, literally billions of dollars trying to achieve that through their advertising campaigns and market research, you name it.

So, understanding who your ideal customer is absolutely key. It’s something that people struggle with because they think, oh, I don’t really know who might buy this product. When you start creating content for various platforms (you’ll see these platforms in the next section), you basically interact with customers. Those are your ideal customers.

You get to understand exactly what they need and want and that is unbelievably valuable. I really can’t emphasize that enough. It’s something that’s often overlooked. Once you understand that as well, when you move to paid traffic, then defining who your ideal customer is going to be is going to be far more straightforward, and your paid traffic strategies are therefore going to be far more effective.

It doesn’t cost anything in the first place. It’s a continuous source of traffic. You get the incredible advantage of getting to know and really understand who your ideal customer is.

Now having gone through those fantastic advantages of free traffic, I need to be honest with you, it does have a big disadvantage. It’s much harder to scale. Why is that? Well, free traffic is essentially dependent on creating content. The more content you create, the more traffic you will have to your site. But creating huge amounts of content is in fact a pretty hard thing to do. It becomes very time consuming and therefore hard to scale.

Where therefore does free traffic fit into our overall strategy now that we know what we know? The way to think of it is it’s the perfect place to start, especially if you have a limited budget or limited experience. And if that’s you, then don’t worry because that is so typically the case. I mean, you’ve got to start somewhere.

Your budget is likely to be zero or perhaps very small, or even if you’ve got a bit of a budget, you’re not sure really where to spend it. And it’s also likely you don’t have the experience. I mean, that’s one of the reasons you’re reading this post. You’re wondering how to generate traffic. You don’t have a lot of experience in that manner.

So, for those two reasons, it really is the perfect place to start. Yes, it does require a bit of work to get this going, but once we do get it going, we can use it then to generate the initial sales. The really nice thing about that, by the way, is you’re going to maximize your profit because you’re not spending any money at all on advertising.

So, you start to get money in the bank, which is fantastic, and you can then reinvest later on. We’ll see all this reinvest later on with more efficient methods. It enables you to grow your business organically. You’re not putting a bunch of money out there and thinking, God, I hope this works, or when I wake up tomorrow morning, I really hope I see sales. We’re not doing that.

Now, we’re going to start from scratch. We’re going to build this sensibly and organically, so that you can build a fantastic long-term business that you can be proud of, and of course, that generates a fantastic income. Okay, enough of this chat! Let’s get into the methods themselves.

Free Traffic Method 1

Welcome to this very first lesson on how to drive traffic to Shopify store for free. Now, as I said in the last lesson, free traffic is essentially about creating content, and that content needs to be useful. I say that because out there on the Internet, there’s an awful lot of content that is just rubbish. You do not want to be creating a rubbish content. It needs to have some kind of value.

So, whatever you write, whatever you contribute to, it needs to have some sort of value. Because then what happens is people will read it, and they’ll go, oh, okay, this person seems to know what they’re talking about and they will check you out further. They’re ultimately led to your website where, of course, you’re selling products that are very interesting for them and hopefully, therefore, you go ahead and make a sale.

It really is as simple as that, but it all starts with good quality content. So, in our example in the videos, I’m creating a dog jewelry store. So, what I want to be doing out there on the internet is providing interesting, good quality content around dogs.

Yeah, if I can talk about dogs, if I can provide useful information to other people who are asking questions about dogs, whatever it might be, people will value that and they’ll ask, oh, who’s this guy? Let me check him out a bit more. They end up on my fantastic deals, see some fantastic dog jewelry and go ahead and buy it. That really is the process.

What I’m going to do in the next few lessons is show you some simple methods where you can easily achieve that. The very first one is called Facebook Attraction Marketing, which is going to allow us to get high quality, targeted traffic directly from Facebook for free.

Facebook Attraction Marketing

We do this via Facebook groups. Why is it called attraction marketing? We are attracting new customers via this form of marketing, and in this way using Facebook. Now, go watch this video to learn how to do this.

You might be wondering what sort of content you could possibly post in those Facebook groups, but trust me, within a few days it starts to become really obvious what’s going on. You’re going to see trends repeating all of the time, and as I’ve already said, that’s really going to help you to further understand your ideal customer and the kinds of products that they want.

That’s the very first free traffic method. You’re going to see the next ones coming up are similar but using different platforms. I hope you can really appreciate already how powerful this technique can be.

Free Traffic Method 2

In the same way that we used attraction marketing to get free visitors from Facebook, we can do pretty much the same process, but this time using a different platform called Quora.com. Now, if you don’t know what Quora is, it builds itself essentially as a social based question and answer website so someone can go on, ask questions, and people who have the knowledge can provide answers. As simple as that.

It started about ten years ago, and its popularity has absolutely exploded. Now, watch how to drive traffic to Shopify store for free in this video.

You can just kind of wait for Quora to tell you that there’s new content, so you can either do it that way, or you can visit the site periodically to see if there’s any new content you can get involved in. So, Quora is a really great and simple way to drive those super targeted potential customers to your site for free.

Free Traffic Method 3

Next on the list on your quest to drive free traffic to your store, we have Reddit.com, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, the world’s biggest social news, aggregation and discussion site. It’s absolutely huge. Now, watch how to use Reddit for free traffic in this video.

Once again, go ahead and answer a few questions on this site, just to kind of get going and get involved, see what the site’s about, especially if you’ve never used it before. Set yourself a small schedule every day to go to Reddit and just answer a few questions, get involved with discussions, whatever it might be. All the while, as well as driving that traffic to your site of course, you are learning more and more about the ideal customer for your business.

Free Traffic Method 4

Now it’s at this point that I want to introduce the idea of starting your very own blog. Now, the good news is that within Shopify, we already have a blog completely built in for free included. So, there’s literally nothing to do there. Now, watch how to use your blog to get free traffic in this video.

I really would encourage you at this stage to start the bare bones of your blog. We’ll build on it as we go, but at the moment, just get going. Maybe just create your very first blog post, just anything. Start writing something down, see what it looks like on your site. From there we can further develop this great opportunity.

Free Traffic Method 5

It’s time to start talking about Pinterest.com, which is a fantastic free source of traffic and also a source that we can build on further throughout the book, if you so wish. Now, you’re probably aware of Pinterest, but if you’re not, it’s a huge kind of image sharing social media site. In fact, I like to think of it as a sort of image search engine in a way.

I like to think of Google as a text search engine. YouTube is a kind of video search engine, and Pinterest as an image search engine. It’s kind of like that. But more to the point, it has a huge amount of traffic. What’s really interesting is that the buyer intent on Pinterest is really high.

If you’ve not heard that term before, buyer intent basically means that people coming to Pinterest have a very high intention of actually buying. Therefore, they are very interesting to us. So, watch this video to know what you need to do to get going with Pinterest.

I hope you learned in this video how you can use Pinterest to drive an enormous amount of free traffic to your site.

This is going to be the last lesson in this post about free traffic strategies. What I’ve done in this post, I hope you can see, is that I’ve given you what I consider to be, in my experience, the most effective traffic sources.

There are, of course, other traffic sources. One can immediately think of Instagram, YouTube, or perhaps Snapchat. There are many. As I said before, they keep on popping up. I mean, traffic is such a huge subject. It’s very much a moving target.

What you might realistically expect, not in the first instance, but after a little bit of time, is perhaps 1000 visitors a month. That should be totally doable across those traffic sources. You may well get more, but let’s just focus on a thousand visitors a month.

Now, you can see in the above screenshot, I wrote warm traffic. What does that mean? Well, it means that the traffic that’s going to come to your store already kind of knows about you to a certain extent, particularly with the attraction marketing techniques I taught you, the the blog and your Pinterest pins. By the time they get to the store, they know, like and trust you a little bit. It’s warm traffic.

They’re already kind of fairly inquisitive and possibly ready to buy. That means that your conversion rates will be higher than pure cold traffic. So, for really cold traffic, we typically go for something like 1%, but for warm traffic, you can typically consider 5% as being realistic. So, if we have a thousand visitors coming to your store, it’s possible you would then get 50 sales.

Given that you’re not spending any money on traffic, you have a very high profit margin and you should be able therefore to achieve around $20 per sale.

So, 50 sales at $20 per sale is $1,000 a month just from free traffic. It could go higher. So, you could if you wanted to stop right here, at least in terms of your traffic strategy and basically use free traffic exclusively, or you might want to consider reinvesting those profits back into the store to take you to the next stage so that you can further grow the business.

One thing I would say about free traffic is it is an incredible source. It is quite difficult to scale and the reason for that is because it’s content driven. You need to spend a lot of time on Facebook, Reddit, and Quora, creating your blog, doing Pinterest pins, etc. It’s all possible.

It’s entirely possible, but it is a little more difficult to scale because it does require quite a lot of your time. So, if you want to scale further, if you want to get into multiple thousands per month, then you might want to consider reinvesting what you got from your free traffic strategy into the next stage, which is coming up, of course, in the next post on driving affordable traffic.

But the whole thing is entirely up to you. Whatever you feel most comfortable with is what you should be doing in the beginning. But you can see already that you have a fantastic opportunity, after reading this post on how to drive traffic to Shopify store, to start building an incredible business.

In the next post, I’ll discuss how to fulfil orders on your shopify store.