29 BEST FREE TRAFFIC SOURCES (IN 2025)

You don’t need a “billion-dollar” budget to grow your brand and push your products to your audience. With enough traffic to your dropshipping and online store, you’ll never say “dropshipping is dead.” These traffic sources are free but require you to put in the effort to make the best of them.

We know you already have a dropshipping store or are creating one with our dropshipping plugin presently. But you may be worried about traffic generation. Sit back and follow this article till the end.

This article contains advanced traffic tips and not those same ideas you’ve been trying for ages.

So, brace up, let’s do this now:

1. The Reversed Guest Posting Method

It’s common with virtually every guest post, to see the author’s bio at the bottom of the post – that’s what “we all know”. But then, you can attest that you, in particular, don’t even read such bios at the bottom of posts, and this calls for the ‘reversed guest posting method.

Here are quick steps to achieve this method of generating traffic to your dropshipping store:

Create an engaging guest post
Embed helpful resources (links to about two or more helpful materials, and your AliNext dropshipping store must be inclusive).
Practically, embedding your store link as a helpful resource in the body of the article causes more traffic than having your link in the bio section at the bottom.

2. Leverage on Content Marketing

The success stories of many dropshipping stores we’ve seen in 2024 proved the power of the good content: you get more customers with top quality contents that catch their interest.

Whether it’s blog posts, videos, podcasts, or social media campaigns, create something that is in line with your niche. These contents must be relevant to your prospects and must showcase your expertise in your niche.

Publish them often to increase the engagement you get from your audience; this, in turn, increases your store’s entry point.

While you are bent on selling your products, you need to find how to engage your audience more, enlighten them and enhance their experience with your brand. You can achieve this through content creation. Tap into the interests of your audience and create contents that they’ll like and share.

3. Click To Tweet Links

If you know how much traffic you can get from this strategy, you may not want to try any of those outdated methods again.

Click To Tweet Links remains one of the best ways to harness traffic from social media. How do you achieve this method?

Find something to be tweeted in your content. It could be a strategy or statistics.
Generate a Click To Tweet Link. Login to clicktotweet.com and write your tweet. Then click to generate a unique link.

Attach the link to your content. Readers can click and share as tweets.

4. Go for List Posts

List posts are undoubtedly, a better free source of traffic. With proven tracks of list posts performing better than infographics and normal blog posts, it’s time to take that path.

When next you want to create contents, make them in a list format. You can make use of clear bullet points, ensuring each bullet explains just a point. With proper SEO and information on your content, you should have many shares, likes, comments and visits. These guarantee better conversion.

5. Increase your Visibility with SEO

You can boost your site’s traffic when you focus on its SEO and achieve it. This source of traffic isn’t new, but it is still very effective in 2025. To use it with success, though, you need to keep your eye on changing in search engine algorithms and adjust your website to them.

Improving your store’s search engine optimization to make it appear higher on search results is vital. Many search engines exist including Bing, Google, among others. If your site can be found on any of these search engines, perhaps on the first page when a prospect searches, it’s easier to gain traffic that converts.

Here’s a quick checklist:

Ensure your store is fully set up for indexing. With AliNext plugin, your site can enjoy heavy lifting regarding SEO. However, you need to put more effort with on-page and off-page optimization.
Check out for the possible words that a potential buyer would search. Your commercial-intent keywords must appear on your landing pages.
Re-optimize pages that are very far from page 1 of search engine results
Conduct proper keyword research, study and find the keywords that helped shoot your competitors to their higher positions.

You can achieve these keyword research using tools like SEMRuch, Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and other premium tools. You can also analyze your competitors’ keywords with SpyFu and similar tools.

When you successfully find the keywords you want to rank for, the next step is to incorporate them into your website contents appropriately. Your page titles, headers, images, product descriptions should have these keywords. With Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can study relevant traffic metrics about your site.

6. Update Existing Blog Posts

This method works like magic if you want to generate more traffic to your dropshipping store. Get an outdated blog post or content on your dropshipping store, make some changes and publish. What type of changes are we talking here?

You can add screenshots
Eliminate old and outdated ideas
Add new strategies, features, or tricks
Make the post live by relaunching as a brand new post.

7. Go for Influencers

Just so you know or to remind you, influencers are those with very large social media followers and audience; they charge different prices to promote products. These people are “life-savers” for many dropshipping and ecommerce stores.

Just a mention of your product by a good influencer can shoot unimaginable traffic to your site. Take your time to find good and most popular influencers in your niche, and let them do the job. It’s good to know that different influencers have various quotes. While some would just need a sample of your product to help you shout out, others would like to have a cut from your business. Know what you want, what you can afford, and go for an influencer that best suits your budget.

8. Go for Share Triggers

How much do you push people to share your dropshipping contents? Your social media posts, blog posts among others perform better when shared. Share triggers are what you include in the contents you publish to make people share it. It has been proven that share triggers make people want to share your contents, and when they do, it means better traffic to your dropshipping store.

9. Leverage on Podcasts

A good percentage of your audience listens to podcasts often. In 2024, the popularity of podcasts continues to grow. For example, in 2021, more than a half young Americans (12 – 34 years old listen to podcasts monthly), and 80 million Americans listen them weekly. This means, that with podcasts you can reach a wide audience. What’s the catch? You don’t really need to start up your podcast episodes and deliver daily or weekly, no! Go on other people’s podcasts as a guest maybe twice in a month, and have your links as backlinks.

10. Tap from the Benefits of Social Media

Did you know that a majority of your target audience is right there on social media platforms?

You just need to be everywhere and not stuck to a particular social site. However, sites with a low budget may choose one or two social media platforms to focus.

You can start with Facebook which has about 2.9 billion active users every month. Share blog posts, exclusives, special offers, promotions, and contents.

It’s a great idea to delve into YouTube too and share product discussions, advice, tutorials and other useful content. YouTube has over 122 million active users daily, who watch about 1 billion hours of content in total. Imagine a fraction of this number seeing your video.

Hone your focus on creating contents that have value and are worth sharing. Attach your social pages on your store so your site visitors can connect with you and possibly engage with your subsequent posts. Also, it would be best if you promote your contents (blog posts) on your account so people who aren’t in your list will engage with you too.

Pinterest is also on the list and Twitter. Just be versatile on social media and gain more traffic to your dropshipping store. At the end of every post, content or other things you publish on social media handles, do well to include clear Call To Action (CTA) and links to your product pages or site so readers or viewers can follow through to your website.

11. Create Contents that probably go Viral

Hey! There are no stipulated rules for creating viral contents. But Guess what? There are steps you can follow to increase the odds that your contents will go viral. Now, check these out:

Viral contents often have visuals which could be infographics, images.

Viral contents often have high utility. They’re quite helpful to a large number of people.

Long-form contents tend to go viral than short ones. Before your content goes viral, you need to push (promote) it.

12. Post on Social Media at Strategic Times

While there is no perfect time to publish your contents on social media, some periods seem to bring in better engagement to your posts, than others.

Posting on Facebook around 12 pm, 5 pm and 7 am yields better engagement. Likewise, Pinterest goes best around 2 pm, 9 pm and 2 am. On the other hand, Instagram goes around 2 am, 9 am and 5 pm. The best times for posting on TikTok depend on the day of the week, but are usually considered to be about 6 am, 10 am and 10 pm.

13. Content Transformation

This works like magic in most cases. Content transformation entails converting a good and existing content into another format. You could convert your blog post into a YouTube video, or an eBook. Create your content initially with this idea in mind, so it will be easy to create an Instagram post based on your text or convert your series of photos into a long post. This opens your content to new and more traffic.

14. Classified Ads Sites

Classified ads websites allow users to advertise for free.

These sites can help you boost your site traffic. Many countries have classified ads websites. So you have to make your advertisements work in line with their requirements. Create several ads in different categories to increase your odds of getting better results.

15. Create a YouTube Channel for Your Dropshipping Store

YouTube is indeed one of the best things to happen to our generation, and you need to tap from it. In the beginning of 2024, YouTube users were watching more than 5 billion videos per day, and you can get a fraction of their attention.

Create a YouTube channel and upload informative videos related to your drophipping niche. It may also feature viral and other informative contents. Take a look at our YouTube Channel to see what it looks like. It doesn’t matter, if the visuals aren’t technically perfect, because the information quality can generate many views and link back to your store.

16. Post Your Videos on Other Platforms

Your video contents shouldn’t just end on YouTube. There many other platforms boast of numerous viewers who are your potential buyers. Post your videos on Vimeo, Dailymotion, among others. You may also consider paid alternatives, such as Wistia or SproutVideo, that gave more features for developing business and building audience, but in most cases free options will suffice. Major social networks have enhanced their video capabilities as well, so you can add videos to your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram page. Link back to your site and watch your traffic statistics climb up.

17. Spy your Competitors

You don’t need to view your competitor’s site from their backend to see how they generate traffic to their dropshipping store.

Login to Similar Web (A free version of SimilarWeb is available, sign-up required), and do the spying. You’ll learn your competitor’s free traffic sources and paid as well. If they guest post on a particular site, and this gets them tons of traffic, you may want to guest post on such a site too. When you follow their methods closely, you’ll observe increased traffic to your dropshipping store.

18. Give Solution-rich Answers on Quora

If you’re looking to generate good traffic to your dropshipping store, you shouldn’t miss out on Quora. In 2022, it had more than 300 million active users of various ages, so you can use it to build contact with your audience.

Quora users post their questions and get answers from fellow users. This platform has various areas of interests you can choose and post or answer questions. People who ask questions on this platform are bent on getting solution-rich answers. If what you offer, by any means, creates a solution, it’s easier to drop answers and link back to your store.

19. Forums are Goldmine

A lot of internet users who look to generate traffic to their sites tend to neglect forums. Dropshippers are victims of this as well.

Medium, Quora and other niche forums are open for you to join, contribute and indirectly generate traffic to your dropshipping store. Unknowing to many, forums are more like a funnel that brings people back to your site though it takes time. Find forums related to your dropshipping niche, join and become an active member. Anticipate your audience’s possible questions or problems, create solutions with a link back to your store and have them follow through. Search internet for communities related to your niche, and you will find new traffic sources for your business.

20. Drop Comments and Encourage Comments

For SEO-savvy dropshippers, getting traffic to your dropshipping store can be achieved when you drop your comments and encourage readers to comment as well.

When you post content, tell readers to share their thoughts. This provides additional insights and the possibility of your posts showing up on search results.

Dropping comments on posts related to your store or what you offer is helpful. However, don’t drop one-word comments as they may be deleted or seen as spam. Contribute through your comments and link back to your site in some cases, this boosts traffic to your site.

21. Send Catchy Emails

Sometimes you miss potential customers or traffic because you don’t follow up.

Sending a catchy email with an engaging subject line reminds your subscribers or your addressee to have a look at your store. This can boost your site traffic.

Be creative with your emails, and make them feature different things at different times. These include sales announcements, updates on products, discounts, and many more.

Here’s basically what to do:

Build your email database by capturing emails organically with free offers and values.
Segment your lists according to customer behaviors (buyer, prospects, repeat buyers), age, job title and more.
Maintain your email list to avoid having high bounces.

Launch more campaigns to send new subscribers down the funnel more.

22. Optimization of Product Descriptions

The product description is a process you shouldn’t undermine. An informative and optimized product description increases your odds of better conversion.

Make your descriptions SEO-friendly with the right keywords (low competition and high search volumes). Random web surfers are likely to see your store and possibly, and this pulls in traffic to your dropshipping store.

23. Image Optimization

Many dropshippers import products and their details from AliExpress directly without edits. However, there’s room for improvements.

Make your picture file names to include relevant keywords, as well resize to ensure the pictures are not too big for the pages they go into. Likewise, include alt tags to optimize your images.

24. Post on Influential Platforms

Sharing value is good, but it’s best when you reach a wider audience with your value.

Influential platforms like Medium.com increase your odds of reaching a wider audience. However, you need good writing skill, so you pose your brand as an expert in the industry. Share your contents and inform your existing audience about the new posts on such platforms. Beside universally popular platforms like Medium you could use more specific ones, that are well-known in your niche.

25. Create Unique and Dedicated Social Media Account

A Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, or an Instagram page is paramount for building social proof and recognition.

Before you invite followers or grow your social media pages, do well to make all your page features available and custom to your dropshipping business. Fill out your details to get started.

Now, take a few seconds to look at our Twitter and Facebook pages to see what a good business account looks like (Please follow our pages). It’s best to set up a new account for your dropshipping business, and not to tweak your personal accounts to include your business offering.

26. Follow Similar YouTube Channels

A simple strategy here!

Go on the look for YouTube channels that offer similar things or post contents that are related to what you sell or offer.

It’s easier to attract attention to your channels if you become active in this area. Your account should appear reliable and make your offering clear. No shady profiles, and do well to link back to your store. You should focus first on building a brand, getting more traffic, and making first sales in the end. Create better brand awareness, tap into the huge benefits of SEO, and push more traffic to your sites. AliNext plugin does a significant lifting when it comes to SEO; make your brand stand out with more traffic, and you’ll be wowed at the sales you make.

27. Guest Posting

There’s something about having people visit your website through a post published for a broader audience by an authority.

If a site with a strong Domain Authority publishes your post, Google automatically picks any link on that post as a vote of confidence. When you have the link to your dropshipping store embedded in the post, it translates to more traffic.

Likewise, you get to expose your brand to a wider audience that probably didn’t know you. The best part about guest posting is that it sometimes doesn’t involve monetary exchange; just an exchange of value. You submit quality contents that align with their content marketing goals while you get brand exposure in return. You can use Google Analytics to track your progress as it tracks referral visits.

28. Direct Traffic

Google Analytics remains a popular marketing tool in 2025. With it, you can tell if the traffic you get on your store is direct or not. Here’s a simple difference; direct traffic happens when a visitor floors their bookmark or types your website URL in their browser when they want to access your store. If it’s not direct traffic, they must have gone through a referral post, link, or even search engine. Apparently, you’re still wondering how to tap into the benefits of direct traffic. Here’s what to do; ensure your domain name is easy to memorize. This will make people remember your site URL easily. You might want to peg it to your brand name. Likewise, do well to offer valuable content that people will want to visit your site often.

29. Blog Commenting

This isn’t a new way to gain traffic to websites, but it still works. Look for other brands in your niche, find their blog posts, and drop relevant comments. Your comments should link back to your dropshipping store.

If you get to comment on posts with a wider reach, you increase your chances of getting more backlinks.

Have it in mind that some authors will moderate their comments and possibly delete some of your comments with links.

Conclusion

Don’t beat up yourself if you’re on a tight dropshipping marketing budget for your dropshipping store or online store. You can pick some of the free traffic sources we discussed, put in effort and watch the results flow in. Just a quick reminder; the results might not be compared with what happens when you go for paid traffic sources.

29 BEST FREE TRAFFIC SOURCES (IN 2025) – THE COMPLETE LIST