Rate the most effective Free Traffic method you use?

[bertuseng]

I am busy doing research for my next project and was looking for some insight. What is your SINGLE most effective way to get free traffic to your website or blog?

How to rate it?

1. How many hits you get
2. Quality of the traffic,
3. How much time you have to put in
4. How long term the traffic is

My top way is:
Article marketing:
1. Good
2. Very good
3. Very much
4. good

Please feel free to ellaborate, thanks for all the input.

[Sodaware]

I have experimented with various free/paid methods of getting traffic over the years, and written a few articles on my blog about it.

Although I focus on selling computer games, I' hope the data will be useful to someone else:

Getting Traffic That Works
How much traffic does $19.95 get you?

Quick summary:

* Article marketing worked the best. It takes the most time and effort, but the visitors convert much better. I still get visitors from the articles I wrote nearly two years ago, and they convert the best by a considerable amount.
* StumbleUpon got me a lot of visitors, but they didn't hang around for very long. It's very hit and miss, as they're looking for something that really grabs them.
* Posting on forums/blogs got me a few visitors, but not much. Better for building a reputation really.
* I didn't use Twitter for these experiments, but from recent experience it seems to be better at driving traffic to interesting articles rather than products. I expect it to be similar to forum posts -good for building a reputation, as opposed to generating lots of leads, at least in my area of interest.

Hope that helps!

[ChrisDouthit]

Article marketing is free and probably the best free advertising system you can use. Classified websites are also very good. I would recommend freeadvertisingexchange.com for free classified ad placement.

[AffiliateTraining]

I've had a lot of success with getting simple little software applications built, or building spreadsheets and the like myself, and getting them listed in software directories. It doesn't cost much, it's less time-consuming than article writing and the results are probably 100x better. The traffic just keeps on coming with things like that too.

Might be worth thinking about.

[jayveen]

I've seen the lists of good article directories, but what are some good free software directories?

[AffiliateTraining]

There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Try Googling "submit your software" or take a look at something like this...

Software Submission Service :: Home

The software doesn't need to be particularly technical either. You can literally submit spreadsheet type apps, for anything at all, that make people's life's easier. Then you grab their emails on the way through

One I've got, an automatic poker bot, gets about 200 downloads a day and because it's gambling related I can't even get it listed on many of them. But poker is big business and as an affiliate it pays VERY well, so I only need a couple of those download people to sign up to a poker room, through the software, every day to make a decent enough living off it.

A lot of people are put off this because they maybe think they need to be a programmer, but you don't need to be at all.

Software is appealling to people too. More so than ebooks etc. I'd say.

[bertuseng]

Great info. Anyone know anything about how effective USfreeads are? Supposedly they are good?

[l23bc]

tried traffic swarm and usfreeads however have no luck with usfreeads only on cpa offers (zip submits) have made around 100 dollars but most people i think on usfreeads are only unique visitors and are just browsing the adverts,but for 10 bucks a month i cannot grumble

hope that helps

[peetred]

Article Marketing, hands down. It's highly targeted.. and the reader is already traffic is already highly engaged in the topic.

SEO Optimization and google rankings are also huge.

[admiral]

[QUOTE=AffiliateTraining;1230978]I've had a lot of success with getting simple little software applications built, or building spreadsheets and the like myself, and getting them listed in software directories. It doesn't cost much, it's less time-consuming than article writing and the results are probably 100x better. The traffic just keeps on coming with things like that too.

Might be worth thinking about.[/QUOTE


another angle to think about excellent thread.

[mattlaclear]

By far my best source of free traffic comes in from Ning site. What you do is just use the Ning system to create your own social network that is centered around your giveaway product. I received close to 112,000 unique visitors and 500,000 page views in the last 12 months from this source alone. So yeah I'd recommend it to others.

[lisag]

Originally Posted by mattlaclear

By far my best source of free traffic comes in from Ning site. What you do is just use the Ning system to create your own social network that is centered around your giveaway product. I received close to 112,000 unique visitors and 500,000 page views in the last 12 months from this source alone. So yeah I'd recommend it to others.

What percent convert to buyers and what are you offering them?

[Easy Cash]

The most important aspect of traffic is getting to your buyers. That is, the buyers that are likely to buy your product.

Imagine how much easier it is to;

sell something to someone who is looking to buy a product you sell - but has not yet quite decided what brand they want,

than it is to;

someone who has no interest in buying that product whatsoever.

Find those customers and you will sell much quicker and with less effort.

You can find those customers by doing many things in many places, but like a lot of people say - Content generates targeted traffic.

[Tony Dean]

Well written articles will always give you traffic. Some on EZA have been coming in for yours from articles I wrote 5-7 years ago!

Backlinks too from good articles have a way of staying with Google and the other search engines.

[ppaamm]

Well, what works for me the most is SEO organic traffic (mostly from Google ofcourse), and then second comes article marketing (mainly from ezine and articlesbase). Organic traffic is the best converting as well, and its the king of all traffic methods in my opinion.