Getting Free Traffic is Not As Easy As we Think

I'll add an often overlooked traffic strategy:

Viral Marketing

To be honest, viral marketing should be the foremost consideration for any traffic-hungry marketer. It has the power to send bigger volumes than any other and, once you get good at it, the income generated is somewhat passive.

GRM

I don't buy traffic. Ever. I find that when I buy traffic, my traffic is useless. I don't just want *A* visitor to my website - I want one who's actually interested in what I have to offer and might actually make a purchase. Here's my take on traffic generation:

1. SEO: To be honest, I don't like search traffic. It makes up about 25% of my traffic for one of my sites, but search engine traffic can be notoriously fickle, and it's all but useless for local brick-and-mortar businesses unless you're talking about something like local search. BUT, SEO has the advantage of being fairly hands-off once you get it going.
2. Social media: This makes up 25-30% of my traffic, but my social media visitors are the most engaged, the most likely to buy, and the most interested in what I have to offer. That being said, social is VERY labor-intensive! I schedule posts and post a range of graphics, infographics, blog posts from other people, and a little bit of my own stuff. I also spend probably an hour or more every day doing nothing but engaging with my social media people. And I'm not in a traditionally high-traffic niche, but it doesn't really matter.
3. Email Marketing: I have a list, but I tend to neglect it a bit. My email visitors can get me up to 25%, but only if I've sent something out recently; otherwise it's closer to 2%!
4. Direct visitors: this makes up about 25-30% of my traffic. My site is fairly easy to remember, but most of my direct visitors are repeat visitors, so that helps.
5. Social bookmarking: I find this to actually be quite effective personally. But I blog regularly and post lots of different content (images, video, audio, and written). There's always something new and interesting, so I get a good bit of sharing. New posts will get me about 20-30% depending on how good it turned out.

Skypreet, I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds here, but I can see a few areas where you're not getting good traffic because you're not doing it right.

The biggest thing is it looks like you're not using social to its full advantage. I use Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ on every single one of my accounts, and then they get either Pinterest (if the target demographic is older and female) or Tumblr (if the target demographic is young). I post about 8 times a day to Twitter: Of every 10 posts, 1 is self-promotional (usually a link to a previous or current blog post or page), 3 are community-related ("Thanks for the follow!" or "#FF" type posts), 4 are links to blogs or cool stuff I found that my audience might like, and the remaining 2 are for re-tweets or mentions.

I post about 3 times a day to my Facebook & Google+ pages. Of every 10, 1 is self-promotional, 6 are to other blog posts or cool stuff, and 3 are to community stuff. Tumblr posts as frequently and with the same material as Twitter. Pinterest posts two times a week (Friday evening & Saturday morning), but with three or four things each time.

I actively seek out new followers on Twitter & Tumblr & G+. I post to LinkedIn when it fits my target market. I direct message and private message probably 20-50 people a day on various networks to build rapport and form relationships.

Truthfully, I love social. And I hate it! I love the fact that social is the single most predictable way to drive traffic. But it's a LOT of work. All those "gurus" saying you can build a strong social media following in 5 minutes a day? They're full of crap. Social is a LOT of work, a LOT of engagement, a LOT of interaction with people. But done right, it has the power to boost traffic faster than any other technique out there.

hollyda31, Thanks for such valuable information about social media impact for website traffic. However getting a mass fan following is not easy task. We need targeted fans that really convert and are interested in our niche or product we are selling. If we just have fans, we are not going to get anything from them. I believe you have much experience in social media traffic.

Get Rich Methods, I like your idea of Viral Marketing. But unless you have something to sell something which is extremely well, will it go Viral? May be or may be not. May be a controversial post go viral. But for a post to go viral, can you please suggest any ideas?

free traffic is always fake dont buy it

I personally love paid traffic. I paid £4.55 for Facebook ads yesterday and had a £105 job booked in as a result. We use Facebook ads to build our business and it's very effective.

On the free traffic front, you could create your own product and then have affiliates sell it for you, thereby building you a list of buying leads and then you can email market to that list.

Rob Harris

Why don't do slow but steady way..?

Yes, getting free traffic from scratch is not easy.... you need to be persistent in generating free traffic and focus 1 - 2 methods. Little by little become a lot. Don't forget to build your own list.

I don't think any traffic is free. If your not paying in money your paying in more time and effort. It all comes down to which do you wanr to spend more of.

hey john hocking,

tell me something about facebook ads coz i recently reached 1000 likes on my FB fanpage.

The only free traffic I use, not really free because I bought the app is Facebook auto posts to groups. I get 40 to 100 visitors from it every day. Today I got a $300 client from this and $597 client about 2 days ago.

But when I buy banner ads, etc, I get very many visitors and zero sales sometimes

Video marketing. Youtube is great for get free targeted traffic.
Only use low comp. keywords.

Social media, SEO, email marketing and pay per click programs from Google and Facebook.

Yes, buying traffic (paid advertising online using PPC, Facebook Ads, Solo Ads, banner ads on related blogs and forums, or offline in newspapers, magazines, radio spots, etc.) is a "short time procedure" as you say.

But... that is the reason you should direct your paid advertising to your squeeze page to grow your subscriber list. With your list of subscribers who are eager to read your messages, you have a long term, stable source of traffic.

So, a question for you to ponder would be : if you have "a few targeted readers from Social Networks", as you wrote, then why not have several thousand targeted subscribers in your list who would be eager to read what you share with them ?

I prefer to use Social Media marketing as the best way. For one site my Target was Bangladesh instead of all over the world. At that moment Bangladesh had 50,00000 facebook users and I could engage 10,00000 users to my site through facebook. By the way, I think SMM is a part of SEO only not a full system like SEO.

Don't forget about forum marketing.

Answering others questions isn't exactly back-breaking work

Or simply adding you .02 and a smile face to go with it