Get Free Traffic

Archive for April, 2010

In theory, it’s all rather simple.  You join a forum.  You set up an account with a signature line linking back to your website.  You begin posting on the forum, providing high-quality information and hoping to get some attention for your site.

Then you notice that the signature that appeared within your user control panel isn’t showing up on the actual forum site.  What’s happening?

It might be a forum rule.  They’re often overlooked, hidden in stickies on the top of threads or buried.

Many forums don’t allow new members’ posts to include a signature.

Others allow the signature, but apply a “no follow” tag to the photo.

There are many variations of the limitation, all of which are designed to stop would-be forum spammers from practicing their evil deeds.

If you’ve been trying to make something happen in at forum and can’t see your signature, start checking the fine print.  You might not be eligible.  You can either run off to another forum in search of a new link fix or you can wait it out and “earn your stripes“.

How much time do you really need to spend on Twitter to use it as a traffic driving device?

The answer might surprise you.

Even if you don’t use any of those “sketchy” ways to build your follower list automatically, you can produce real results on Twitter in as little as ten minutes per day.

What’s the trick?  Limit your self-promotion.  Instead of bombarding people with your links until they’re sick of you, try sharing quality information and insight in nine quick posts per day.  Feel free to link to one of your own pages with the tenth.

You can vary the time a little day to help get your message to different people.  That might help build the follower list faster.  Don’t worry, though, you’ll get followers.  People re-tweet quality posts and notice people who are there to give instead of just taking.

If you’re doing things the right way, though, you can get your numbers up and start using Twitter as a free source of traffic with very little time consumption involved.

You don’t need to tweet all day and night to make things happen!

You’ve had it beaten into your head since your earliest days.  Nothing is free.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  There’s always a catch.

So, when people talk about free traffic, you begin looking for the hidden price tag.

And it’s not hard to find.  Free traffic isn’t free.  You just pay for it with time and effort instead of money.  Instead of pouring cash into your site’s promotion, you pour sweat equity into the venture.  You must consider the value of your time instead of thinking of it as truly “free”.  After all, your time has value, right?  Of course it does.

Free traffic isn’t really free.

But that doesn’t mean it’s overpriced.  There are several cash-free ways to drive traffic that produce results that more than justify the time expenditure involved in their implementation.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but “free” traffic generation techniques come about as close as you can get when you’re using the right ones in the right ways.

Everyone knows that video is hot right now.  It’s probably the best way around to drive traffic.  All you need is a short clip and a good distribution plan to start finding visitors to your site by utilizing a clever or fun video.

What makes the whole thing even better is the fact that video technology prices have finally slid enough that video production equipment is within everyone’s reach.  New laptops have built in cameras.  You can get a fully functional webcam from the store for $20.  Everyone has something around to make a video now.

And those who don’t can create computer based slideshows using free software and free/royalty-free images.

The excuses for staying away from video are dying.  If you’re not using video to drive traffic, you should start today.  The start-up costs are literally nonexistent and marketers in every niche are finding that a single quick video can make a great deal of difference in site traffic.

Here’s something you can count on.  At least one every two weeks or so, someone will boldly announce that article marketing is a dead art.  They’ll give it credit as one of the best free traffic driving strategies in history, but they’ll claim that it just doesn’t work anymore.

Their evidence?  It usually involves their own little tests featuring content of questionable quality or the use of strategies that deviate from best practices.  And while some will buy the naysayers’ stories hook, line and sinker, many of us will just go quietly back to generating a consistent and impressive flow of traffic via the very practice everyone else is burying.

Article marketing will last.  That’s because it’s not based on a hole in the system, an algorithmic shortcoming or a new fad that Google hasn’t caught up with.  Article marketing is based on a solid, logical model.

Which is why thousands of people can use it every day to generate free traffic.

Even though it just died for the umpteenth time!

Article marketing can conceivably drive traffic in one of two ways.

It can get you more visitors by improving your backlink totals which should, in turn, improve your search engine performance.

Article marketing can also get you a direct supply of visitors.  People who find your article via search or some other method and who then opt to check out your site after they’ve ready your content.

That decision–to click on to your page or to click away–takes place at the resource box.

It’s not just a place to stick your links..  It’s where you close the deal, creating a bridge from your syndicated content to your site.

Think about it.  Everything hinges on that resource box.

Are you giving it enough attention?

Or could it be better?

If you have room for improvement, make it.  You’re wasting the potential power of your articles by saddling them with a lousy resource box.

Put together a box that draws people to click on that link.  When you start seeing your click through rate (and your profits) soar, you’ll be glad you put for the effort.