Free or paid traffic? (no fighting!)

Here's a snippet from one of my books - I hope it helps...

Many online marketers rely on free traffic to build their business. There's nothing wrong with free traffic - if used in conjunction with other methods.

It becomes problematic when people rely solely on free traffic.

Why?

Consider this: If you invest a small amount of money in your business, you'll get a small return. You can then re-invest the original amount plus the profits. You can keep doing this over and over, watching your investment grow like crazy.

The more money you make, the more you have to invest, and the more quickly your business grows.

Now, what happens if instead of investing money you invest time?

Do you get some of your time back?

Does your "time" grow when you invest it?

Of course not. When you spend time, you never get it back. Ever.

And it's your most-precious asset.

So, what do you get in return for your time?

You get a small return of cash. And if you keep on investing more and more of your time, you'll get more cash. But you'll never see your investment grow as rapidly as it would have if you'd invested money rather than time.

In addition, even free methods of traffic generation have their hidden costs. While you think you are only spending time - which we've already determined is your most-precious asset - in all likelihood you're spending money as well.

Case in point....

Organic Search Engine Results

One of the biggest problems with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is that you're at the whim of the search engine's engineers. You may spend weeks, even months, fine-tuning your site to send a few pages to the top of the search engines. But if the engineers change the algorithm, your site could disappear from the rankings completely.

And it happens - For example, several years ago Google's "Florida Update" sent top-ranked sites to the bottom of the search engine results. And some sites seemed to disappear altogether... along with all the time webmasters spend optimizing and tweaking to achieve those results.

Aside from that, there are other reasons you may want to think twice before spending massive amounts of time - and money - on Search Engine Optimization. Specifically, we're talking about the hidden costs of Search Engine Optimization.

Consider this...

Search Engine Optimization is NOT a "set it and forget it' method of traffic generation, especially if you're competing with other webmasters for high-traffic keywords.

In these cases, you need to be constantly tweaking your keyword-rich pages and doing link campaigns. The results - either positive or negative - might not show up for weeks or even months.

If you're not competing for the top keywords, you'll spend just as much time and perhaps money getting your results - and you might even spend more!

You see, one of the most common search engine strategies is to "pick the low-hanging fruit."

Instead of going after the most competitive keywords that get the most traffic, you instead optimize for lower-traffic keywords. In doing so you'll probably get into the top results because not many other webmasters are competing in the search engines for those words.

You can just imagine the hidden costs of this method...

First, you need how to learn how to optimize for the search engines. Either this is going to take a lot of time, or it's going to take a lot of money, or both.

You may spend hours scouring forums, reading blogs, and reading free Search Engine Optimization books.

If you have more money than time, you'll likely buy Search Engine Optimization resources such as books, videos, audio interviews with experts, packages, and membership sites.

Either way, you then need to spend a lot of time reading and studying these resources.

Next, you need to search for the free tools of the trade or buy into the better tools. Most notably, these include keyword tools that help you choose the best keywords to use. Other tools - such as those that help you do link campaigns - also come into play.

Next, you need to go through the work of researching keywords, researching the competition, and then creating content around your chosen keywords.

This means creating hundreds if not thousands of articles for all the different keywords you may be targeting on your site. You'll either spend the time to do it yourself, or you'll need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire someone else to do the research and create the content.

You've spent a lot of time and money so far and probably haven't seen any results yet - especially if your site is new and not indexed yet.

...

personally I think believing 'FREE TRAFFIC' is actually 'FREE' is what keeps so many potentially good businesses down and condemns a lot of people to little or no profit.


Simon

I agree that paying people to generate free traffic is a really good idea. Your time is worth good money, so out-task the stuff that anyone can do.