How much should a '[newbie' spend on paid traffic?

First, there are no "Free" methods of traffic. They will all take time, expertise and money.

Even if a person knew all they needed to use organic traffic effectively, it is usually more then most can do themselves. For this reason they try outsourcing.

Whether it is by using Fiverr gigs or more traditional outsourcing, it in itself is something that must be mastered and in any case, it must be paid for.

If you have a budget of a few hundred dollars a month, you can get started with paid advertising. Facebook, Youtube, Bing are among those that you can get started with and set a daily budget of $5.00 - $25.00 a day.

If you set your daily limit to that amount, then you will not be charged more than that. In some cases if you have used low searched terms, then you may not reach your budget, but often you will.

If you go the organic route you are just as likely to spend as much money on products to learn, and on money paid to outside sources to do some of the work that you cannot... either because of time constraints or know how.

And even under the best circumstances it will take you just as long and often longer to produce results then if you use paid methods.

Many are afraid of paid methods, but if you use your head and measure your results and test, you can learn to use paid methods just as easily and effectively as organic methods.

The thing is, that once you learn paid methods of advertising you can drive instant traffic anytime you want.

Most of the most successful marketers use Paid Traffic and JV/Affiliate traffic as their main sources of traffic... and organic as a sizable, but secondary traffic source.

I am telling you this because I wish someone had told me when I first started. I was told to master organic traffic first and not to try paid traffic.

My first site got up to 800 visitors a day with-in a couple of months using organic traffic methods. But it was always an up and down struggle with rules changing and algorithms changing and other reasons. Squidoo was a site many used and then it too got hit and then sold out to hubpages. And countless other such changes.

These are the things you will deal with when doing organic traffic generation. It is worth it to learn, but there are many benefits to learning paid methods of traffic generation and no reason I know of to put it off to later.

The main thing to remember is that there are 3 kinds of traffic.

1. Traffic that is outside of your control.
2. Traffic that is with-in your control.
3 Traffic you own.

Organic traffic is outside of your control. You can learn the rules and drive lots of targeted traffic with organic methods. It is therefore imperative that you learn to drive organic traffic, but understand that as it is outside of your control, it is subject to routine changes that effect how much traffic you get and any given moment.

Paid traffic is much more under your control as you can pay for it and get immediate results. Once you understand the rules each paid source requires, then you can drive traffic on demand.

With all methods of traffic you should be leading them first to an optin page which puts them on your list and from that point you own that traffic source. So as long as they stay on your list, you can email them anytime you want.

Which ever traffic method you choose, make sure to send them first to an optin page. Then to an offer. From there regularly send them useful information and regularly promote your own and other's products.

Good Luck.

You have some great advice from Tom & Dot

A few things to think about though.

Initially you should focus on building a profitable sales funnel. Of course to "prove" profitability you need traffic. But you can make some reasonable assumptions and ensure you have at least a fighting chance of profiting from any paid traffic source.

It is unlikely that sending paid traffic to a single offer will be profitable. Certainly not initially. Therefore it makes sense to have multiple offers and the ability to send your traffic to all those offers.

You can do that by
1. Building an email list first
2. Having multiple offers to send your emails to
3. Having upsells or otos on all your offers (many offers will include these)

Once you have what you believe to be a profitable funnel then you can consider paid traffic.

With all paid traffic you should test it first with a small amount. If it seems successful then ramp up. If not move on.

Remember that if you have, say three products that you can send your traffic to (after capturing their emails) then breaking even of even a slight loss on the first product may well be profitable in the end.

And that is without split testing etc which is a whole new discussion.

Once you start to test traffic you can get an idea of conversions and make estimates on how much you can afford to spend (per click) and expect to be profitable.

At that point you start to understand what traffic sources you can use.

Traffic costs vary hugely especially across different niches so you can't really state a budget or even what you will need to pay.

So in short
1. Make sure you have a properly monetized system to send the traffic to first.
2. Capture emails and build a list, then send those subscribers to your sales funnel.
3. Test with small (ish) amounts traffic
4. Calculate ROI (money in v money out)
5. Ramp up if making a profit

Do you understand what you're asking? In a public forum where you have no assurance that the answers are coming from people who understand the subject?

NO ONE should be relied upon to advise you on such decisions for your own business. No one knows you and your skills and resources.

Learn what you're doing first. Then start on a small scale, test and track all campaigns, tweak and optimize, and only scale up when you know what is profitable.

The very best to you,

Steve

I generally spend $10 / day for a test campaign which i then realized could be increased to $25. This again depends on various factors and numerous variables. For every campaign i run, I test them for various variables to learn its optimal conversion range. You can subscribe to these results if you want.