If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you should already be familiar with a few of the obvious methods of increasing site traffic:

• Search Engine Optimization: SEO is the process of improving the rankings result of a website on organic (unpaid) Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) through a number of tactics: optimizing search keywords throughout content, link building, and staying on top of your Search Console errors and continually improving the quality and user experience of your website.

• Social Media Marketing: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn: these are all social media platforms that, if used right, to distribute and share content and build brand awareness and a brand community, can lead to significant increases in your website traffic.

• Email Marketing: Email marketing is a low-cost, relatively easy way to contact and connect with your customers. Email marketing can be used to build new relationships with new and potentially new customers, and to continue building loyalty with existing customers. 

For most readers, these three methods are not a surprise or anything new. What might be new, however, are some of the more unique ways to earn additional traffic for your site. Here are 3 of our favorites.

1. Share Content on Imgur

This method is actually fairly new to the team, as detailed in our post last week about creating shareable content on the community-based tool. But posting high-quality and relevant images or video to the public gallery, with a link to your website, is a sure way to get significant spikes to your visitor traffic. 

If you manage a blog for your business, you can even find ways to share your blog content via Imgur, by using infographics or slideshows, and publishing the content to the public gallery. This means that if your regular blog posts won’t just be found by someone visiting your site directly, but also by potentially millions of Imgur users viewing it on the Imgur homepage.

2. Email List Building

Growing your email list is another great, free way to generate more traffic to your site in general, and more repeat traffic as well. Besides just adding a “join mailing list” call-to-action button at the bottom of your blog posts, or along the sidebar, there are some cool tools available that can help you with some more unique and compelling ways for visitors to sign up to your email list. SumoMe, for example, has a List Builder app that helps to convert one-time visitors into subscribers (at a 20 – 50% increase rate!) with their List Builder lightbox, Welcome Mat or Scroll Box. 

Lightboxes: List Builder’s Smart Mode technology detects the exact moment when a visitors is about to leave. Immediately, a simply-designed lightbox pops up asking for the visitor’s email address.

Welcome Mat: Welcome Mats can be one of the highest converting list building methods you can use. It’s basically a full-screen call-to-action that displays immediately when visitors come to your site and encourages them to join your email list or read your most recent blog post.

Scroll Box: Scroll boxes can be described as the “polite way” to ask your visitors for their email address as they finish reading your latest blog post or learning about your product. You can control exactly at what point of the page Scroll Box pops up, like when your visitors scroll halfway down your page, for example.

All of these options are 100% mobile-optimized, so your visitors are getting the same experience whether they are accessing your site via their laptop or their iPhone.

Another smart idea to drive sign-ups is to add some sort of promotion on to each of your email subscription call-to-actions: “Sign up today and receive 10% off your first purchase”. These will help to further incentivize those visitors who may be ambivalent about signing up initially.

3. Share, share, share

Employ social share buttons on all of your pages, landing pages and blog posts. Again, using a tool like SumoMe can help you to configure “smart” social share buttons. Connected to over 16 social services (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and more), Share ensures your visitors can share your content on their favorite social services. The more people share your site and content, the more viral traffic goes back to your site.

In addition to encouraging social sharing on all of your content by your visitors, you should also be curating your own social feeds as well. Your visitor demographic may be located in various timezones and may therefore scroll through their social media feeds at very different times of the day. Get your content out there by re-sharing the same post multiple times over a few weeks or months. To help you establish a timeline, Buffer has posted this handy image of what they recommend for a re-posting schedule by social media platform.

Taking advantage of these potentially unused resources can help you to increase your website traffic in significant ways. If you are going to implement one of these untapped methods, please let us know what your results are, and your experience with the process. Are there any other unique and free traffic-driving hacks you use?