What Free Marketing Method Is Most Effective?

[oboi2121]

Hello my name is Omari Taylor,

There are a lot of free marketing strategies to use when marketing online but which is the most effective. If a person who is new to marketing online asks you which one or two methods to focus on most, what would you tell them and why?

Thanks For Your Input

[Candace Gill]

Social bookmarks, without a doubt in my mind.
I have tried many different marketing tactics, social bookmarks created the most traffic, backlinks in related niche categories provided the highest page rank.

[Sheryl Polomka]

I would suggest Article Marketing, that is my favourite and most effective, and I would combine it with either blog marketing or squidoo lenses - or both.

[blase40]

It depends... the best one in terms of a long term strategy is SEO, though the time involved with a solid SEO strategy makes it far from "free".

[Alex Lin]

From my record, I got the most from article marketing. Forget about Socio book marking they're a waste of time. Better pay attention on method that bring in the most traffic.

[TheInternetWorkshop]

Omari-

You're sure to get a very heated debate started with that question!

You'll find that people have had success in a variety of categories, and some people will swear the same methods don't work because they NEVER got any results. Here's my two cents for what it's worth...

IMHO, the answer to your question depends on your level of expertise in Internet Marketing and more importantly, IF you're using the free method CORRECTLY.

If you're a newbie and just beginning, then I'd agree with Shezz and Alex that article marketing is a great start. It sends you highly targeted traffic and it's something you can learn to do in about a day spending some time reading the correct way to do it.

EzineArticles.com is probably the best site to start with, and they have an excellent e-training course that will give you best practices to follow. The e-training comes in the form of daily emails for about two weeks. If you want the whole series as a .pdf file, send me a PM w/ an email address and I'd be glad to send it to you.

Candace is also correct that Social Bookmarking (a.k.a. Web 2.0) is also a very good way, but I think it requires more work and the results aren't always visitors that are willing to take the action you want. Remember, it's not about just GETTING traffic, but getting traffic that will convert to BUYERS. Unless you're doing this as a hobby, I think at some point you'd like to get paid for your efforts?

I've seen YouTube videos that get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, but there's no monetization with it. It's great that people like you're stuff, and easy to get caught up with being psyched that you've got "fans", but if you ain't making the dough it's pretty much wasted traffic.

A good example of what I mean is the "Fred" videos on YouTube. Some kid pretending to be six with a helium-induced and extremely annoying voice was getting between 5 and 10 MILLION views on EVERY one of his videos, but he didn't monetize it for the longest time. Now you can buy Fred t-shirts, hats, buttons, and a bunch of other stuff. I bet the guy made easily 3 or 4 million bucks the first two months after getting a site that sold something.

Now, if you're a little more advanced and understand the basic stuff, then blase40 (even though his signature "sucks") is right on the money. Figuring out how to get your site ranked on the first 5 or so spots on a search engine AND STAY THERE is by far the ultimate Holy Grail of IM. But - it's not easy to learn and changes so often that it can become a full time job by itself. I'd rather pay a good SEO firm to do it for me and focus on creating products and building my list.

The other way of free traffic once you get a little savvier is by developing an affiliate network or doing Joint Ventures (JVs). That way, OTHER people are spending their time sending traffic to you. Even though you have to pay a commission for their sales, it's still free for you because you didn't have to spend time/money creating the traffic upfront. It's a very sweet win-win for everyone.

There are other ways such as traffic exchanges, surf-for-credit traffic sites, but the conversion rates are very low and it's not cost effective at all. Spend your time using one of the other methods above and I think you'll get much better results.

Just as a suggestion, make sure you put Google Analytics on ALL your sites (even your squeeze pages) and you'll know exactly where the traffic is coming from. Then, spend your time increasing your efforts in that area.

Hope it helps.


The Crazy Internet Dude

[Jon Alexander]

article marketing. Without any doubt. It can bring you traffic for AGES after you release an article.

Just make sure they are unique, and relevant.

[DrC]

Posting on Forums is very powerful if you make good use of your sig.

[Alan Cheng]

Posting to Forums, article marketing, SEO your website and JV are the best free marketing methods in order of the getting traffic the quickest.

Combine all these techniques to get the most amount of traffic.

[DavidO]

Obviously you should combine methods to be most effective but if I had to choose a single one it would be articles. Articles are probably the only marketing method that can lead directly to sales.

There are many other ways to get traffic to your site but nothing is as effective at pre-selling as an article (videos come close but what is a video but an audio-visual article?). If you write your article correctly the reader is half sold or more by the time they get to your sales page. A large proportion of my sales come from article marketing.

[nicholasb]

I use to say articles, but video has been the most effective for me lately.

So I would say a combination of both.

[Melkor]

There's no such thing as free. The opportunity cost of doing any of the "free" methods is your time spent, and you ain't never gettin' that back.

If the time you spend pursuing "free" methods could have been spent more profitably building products or relationships with people who have access to your potential customers you're wasting your efforts.

Don't get me wrong, you can build up a pretty nice income doing "free" stuff but it ain't a business. If you're fine with that, go ahead - if not, get on Paul Myers TalkBiz News list and learn how it's done.

[WinsonYeung]

In my opinion, social marketing, RSS submission and article marketing is the best free marketing method

[OpenMindsEnt]

Originally Posted by crazyinternetdude

Omari-

You're sure to get a very heated debate started with that question!

You'll find that people have had success in a variety of categories, and some people will swear the same methods don't work because they NEVER got any results. Here's my two cents for what it's worth...

IMHO, the answer to your question depends on your level of expertise in Internet Marketing and more importantly, IF you're using the free method CORRECTLY.

If you're a newbie and just beginning, then I'd agree with Shezz and Alex that article marketing is a great start. It sends you highly targeted traffic and it's something you can learn to do in about a day spending some time reading the correct way to do it.

EzineArticles.com is probably the best site to start with, and they have an excellent e-training course that will give you best practices to follow. The e-training comes in the form of daily emails for about two weeks. If you want the whole series as a .pdf file, send me a PM w/ an email address and I'd be glad to send it to you.

Candace is also correct that Social Bookmarking (a.k.a. Web 2.0) is also a very good way, but I think it requires more work and the results aren't always visitors that are willing to take the action you want. Remember, it's not about just GETTING traffic, but getting traffic that will convert to BUYERS. Unless you're doing this as a hobby, I think at some point you'd like to get paid for your efforts?

I've seen YouTube videos that get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, but there's no monetization with it. It's great that people like you're stuff, and easy to get caught up with being psyched that you've got "fans", but if you ain't making the dough it's pretty much wasted traffic.

A good example of what I mean is the "Fred" videos on YouTube. Some kid pretending to be six with a helium-induced and extremely annoying voice was getting between 5 and 10 MILLION views on EVERY one of his videos, but he didn't monetize it for the longest time. Now you can buy Fred t-shirts, hats, buttons, and a bunch of other stuff. I bet the guy made easily 3 or 4 million bucks the first two months after getting a site that sold something.

Now, if you're a little more advanced and understand the basic stuff, then blase40 (even though his signature "sucks") is right on the money. Figuring out how to get your site ranked on the first 5 or so spots on a search engine AND STAY THERE is by far the ultimate Holy Grail of IM. But - it's not easy to learn and changes so often that it can become a full time job by itself. I'd rather pay a good SEO firm to do it for me and focus on creating products and building my list.

The other way of free traffic once you get a little savvier is by developing an affiliate network or doing Joint Ventures (JVs). That way, OTHER people are spending their time sending traffic to you. Even though you have to pay a commission for their sales, it's still free for you because you didn't have to spend time/money creating the traffic upfront. It's a very sweet win-win for everyone.

There are other ways such as traffic exchanges, surf-for-credit traffic sites, but the conversion rates are very low and it's not cost effective at all. Spend your time using one of the other methods above and I think you'll get much better results.

Just as a suggestion, make sure you put Google Analytics on ALL your sites (even your squeeze pages) and you'll know exactly where the traffic is coming from. Then, spend your time increasing your efforts in that area.

Hope it helps.


The Crazy Internet Dude

Incredible post.

[Kate Anderson]

Article marketing works exceptionally well but being active in forums / communities is a great way to "interact-and-attract". You can establish yourself in a completely different way, and once you do that, you'll have other people writing articles about you and your products, so you don't have to =)

Video marketing is the best method...

Video closes more sales!