Can you skip paid traffic?

Few PPC network is good to promote the blog Like Bing, Adwords, Adcenter ... it will return more than your investment...



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There is a fast track and a slow track, both can work. It just depends on your mindset.

If your content is stellar you can use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to attract targeted people to your site.

This will encourage repeat traffic and your visitors are already warmed up. I have had the best results with guest posting.

Guest posting is very targeted and the visitors will already be interested in your content. You already have a funnel in place so that is good.

The only problem is that blogs are getting more and more strict with the publishing guidelines for guest posts. They get so much garbage on a daily basis that you really need to shine here and be unique.

If you can write great and follow their instructions, nine times out of ten you will get accepted.

It's just a matter of finding out where your target audience hangs and out and stand in front of them.

For quick results though, nothing beats paid traffic.

here is my answer, can I answer you with a QUESTION....

ok, sounds weird but here we go.....

1) Do 6 figure marketers do free traffic? you think?

2) do you think you build a big ass list, fast with just a blog post here or there, 1 video a week, and an article?

I will let you answer these questions, but I was educating you first! ** winks **

Is possible but the results would be slow compared to using paid traffic. Personally I use both cause you can't put all your eggs in one basket that I've learnt from experience. So I diversify to siphon traffic from both side as this helps gives me steady traffic and sales for my business.

Hope that helps

The question on whether you use paid traffic is how quick you need the traffic. If you have other costs depending on traffic then you need to invest in paid traffic if organic traffic is not sufficient.

Yes i have made most of my money from SEO and Social Sharing, Paid Ads can really drain your pocket if you do not know what you are doing!

Thanks for this post, I am wondering the same thing in our e-commerce company...
I hear that one must not rely on PPC advertising however must not forget it either, would you guys say its true?

Sure, why not

al

Hey there!


When a successful funnel is in place then you can really see large and awesome growth with paid traffic.


However, free traffic is much easier to master, with paid traffic you need to put in a lot more time and learning however the results are greater!


It's also a lot quicker to see results as you already probably know?


I started one of my funnels with free youtube traffic and then when I saw it was converting well I added paid traffic and BAM scaled it up from $100 a day to over $500 a day


Have fun!

Paid ads gets you faster results. Plus, what if you are ranking high and everything is fantastic. Then one day you lose all your ranking and your income drops to $0.

If you are relying on ONE traffic source or one free traffic source, you will get hit hard one day.

There's long-term and then there's short-term. There's also the question of doing digital marketing the way it was meant to be done -- all cylinders should fire.

The question is not about PPC or Organic. It's about how well you can utilize the medium at your disposal.

PPC isn't easy and I know many of my clients who lost money for no reason just because they "thought" it was easy. For some businesses, you'd also need the "buying intent" -- opening the gates for immediate or at least a possibility of upsell.

Take a look at each of these popular businesses:

Evernote, KissMetrics, Unbounce, Moz -- they all started the organic way. Excellent content, delivered systematically over the years.

Does organic marketing work? Yes, it does.
Does PPC work? Yes, it does.

What do you choose?

You can't simply drive quality traffic to your affiliate offers and expect sales to come. ShareASale and CJs are performance networks so your goal is to convert visits into either leads or sales to get paid your performance commissions.

How? Your traffic must match the offer, which means you need to understand who your target audience are. You can 'buy' your audience by taking advantage of the targeting features of your preferred ad platforms.

Your landing page must also convert well. A good way to convert a visitor into a lead is to give away a free report / ebook in exchange of their email. Then do a drip email campaign to offer your affiliate products.

Hope this helps and good luck!

It depends how impactful your content is. If you are sharing it in the right place, and it really connects to your target market. Then they will flock to your content.

Paid traffic is fast, perfect to test a funnel and see the results very fast.

another thing, you can make more money in less amount of time ( with paid traffic)

I know many people who do not use paid traffic. For me, I find it works good for me.

IMO if you skip paid traffic, be prepared to spend tons of time on free traffic.

Actually chance is 50-50. If you only want to rely on organic traffic, then you have to work hard. Also you also wait a while to get the result. PPC is a good source of getting targeted traffic. Personally, I prefer Facebook Ads to get traffic. Facebook has huge number of users and you can reach your targeted traffic quite easily through FB Ads. I think it would wiser to run both.

There are sites generating insane amounts of traffic without any paid marketing.

The best example I could give would be a site ranking organically in search for a high volume keyword. That could've been built up naturally over time and would generate massive traffic.

There's also people who have organically built huge followings on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and like too. They of course can funnel huge amounts of traffic through to their websites.

That said, there usually is a part to play for PPC / Paid Traffic alongside organic. But it's by no means essential unless you're in desperate need for fast traffic right now.

Free traffic is the slower route so if you want to move fast it is better to use paid traffic. It may sound expensive but if done properly it will yield some very good returns. Also the quality of traffic you get when you pay for it is much better.

Free traffic is rather hard to implement. Paid traffic works as soon as you hit "start campaign", but you have to have your funnel set up, and you need a list with a compelling freebie/cheapie to get their email otherwise that traffic is going right down the drain.

You can start for just $50, and go from there. You're going to need to see results, whether it's at a snail's pace with free traffic, or 60 mph with paid traffic. Paid traffic gets you to your goals sooner....and therefore better.

You can skip paid traffic, but it will probably take you forever to get a decent income out of it unless you are very good at free traffic sources. Paid traffic doesn't really cost you anything if you make a profit.

I started an online business ( Niche website ) 15 days ago, and all I got is 300 unique visitors with free traffic and social media. It's like the real world you can't be rich by investing just 10 bucks for domain and hosting plan.

[ BUSINESS or AMATEUR?]

FREE traffic can be good as the beginning. When you have to start building your list,
test if the opt in converts.... or maybe dont have money enough.


But in a second instance you have to pay.

WHY?

Cause you have to calculate the ROI if you have a business.
It means that you have to be aware that:

you spend 2 and you get back 3 or 4 or more.

With free traffic you cannot. Cause you invest time, and even if you give some
arbitrage value to your time... you really are not in business. You're amateur.

It's ok being amateur, but for having an asset to feed your family, to pay the bills
to live the life you want... it's a bit unpredictable....

So start with Facebook Ads, or to Solo Ads, ask some solo vendor to check your email swipe
and optimize it for paid traffic.

Build your List in a predictable way: you pay X, you gain Y

So good for beginning, some Seo is good, but dont rely on this: Google can penalize your site, even if you checked all the things...

..Facebook can ban your page, or people can start not sharing your posts...

Go to Paid Ads: you pay, you gain, everyone is happy. Of course you have to invest some budget.
Of course you'll fail sometimes.

But people who dont have enough money to test marketing strategies, or who dont want, are people not in business.


Business belong to money, not to free..[

Free buy genuine traffic are OK (Genuine in the sense receiving spammy traffic from various spam sites which shows time to time in Google Analytic having either 0% or 100% bounce rate).

Nothing is wrong with it, and skipping adwords budget will be little worried, but you can cut some budget from Adword and put it on content, that will be great.

Sure, if you gain enough attraction and have something valuable to offer. Friends of current users will be automatically drawn.

Organic traffic is nice and free but if you want to scale up you can easily just buy ads. (You will create revenue anyways)

I think you could yes. If I only had $500 to spend, I'd rather spend it all setting up a decent branded Youtube channel than 500-1k clicks.

At least I know that the channel will always be there giving me clicks consistently day in day out, and that is something that can be slowly built on over time.

LUke

Done everyday for years. But not always prudent particularly with Search. We all know that can dry up overnight.

But diversify in a number of Niches and that will help in that regard. imo


- Robert Andrew

With popular social platforms such as facebook, pinterest, etc a competent social marketer has the ability to draw a rather large following assuming the content they are putting out there is of value to enough people. So assuming you are cranking out killer content and you know how to properly use some of these social channels, there is no reason why you couldn't make a great living from just this traffic depending on how you are monetizing your blog.

Now the traffic paradigm shift........
People tend to view paid traffic as something like an unnecessary luxury item, viewing it as an EXPENSE and not an asset. If you have a proper list and funnel in place, then paid traffic becomes an obvious asset in the growth of your business.

People freak-out when they hear companies spending millions per year on advertising. But it is very very relative to their bottom line because the return on investment is greater than the expense of the advertising, and in a round about, overly simplistic view of things it's FREE when done properly.

Good marketers often times use paid traffic for their list building with the intention of breaking even. Example: When the lead subscribes, before being sent to the thank you or download page they are presented with a "special deal" that is highly congruent or complementary of the freebie you just gave them. If you are doing everything to a satisfactory degree, you will find that a pretty predictable percentage of these new leads will make a purchase, and these upfront purchases will pay for the paid traffic used to collect these leads and when you gather some data and fine tune things there is no reason why you are unable to make a profit which you roll back into paid ads and this will provide exponential growth to your list and ultimately you bank account.

People who are uncomfortable or lack the time can outsource any type of advertising you can imagine. And because of the effectiveness of a professional creating, placing, and optimizing your ads, you are free to focus on the rest of your business and assuming your monetization strategy and systems are in place, you will end up with the same result which is breaking even to making profit at the time the lead is captured. Then it is up to you to maximize these leads and at some point you will be able to determine all of the important metrics including the lifetime value of your leads and customers, customer acquisition costs, cost per lead etc. Then you are left with an very accurate dollar amount that you can spend on the cost of each lead.

I have nothing against free traffic, in fact free is my favorite amount to spend on things. My personal view on this matter is anyone getting into this business should be dealing in dollar amounts that can support paid advertising meaning I wouldn't screw around trying to peddle $2.00 items, although if you look at successful CPA marketers, they are able to make a great living sending paid traffic to offers that make them $1.00 - $5.00 per conversion.

Wow ! Didn't mean for this to get so wordy.

I hope this mess of words is helpful to you and I wish you the best of luck in your business.

Originally Posted by allancaeg Say you have an internet property with a marketing funnel that successfully scaled, can you rely purely on organic traffic? Is it possible to grow your funnel while relying solely on social, search, blogging, etc? For example, instead of paying for PPC, you redirect all that budget to producing and publishing more content on your site and other platforms.

Yes, you can do so.

But free traffic takes time as you need to build relationships and trust with people especially through social media.

Same goes for blogging.

In social media like Facebook, you can create your own groups and participate in other groups as well based on your niche or interest.

Then began by introducing yourself and provide valuable information as in what members need and want to know.

You can also go to offline events like networking events, seminars and workshops to really meet and interact with real people.

But like I said, these takes time.

Paid traffic on the other side is much faster.

Especially Facebook ads which I learn and tested a lot this year.

What really stands out is the fact that Facebook allows you to target people with same interest as you and whom you know are likely to click and buy from your sites than just targeting randomly through say Adwords or Bing Ads.

Sure, you can skip paid traffic, but, you will have to work for it.

Gone are the days of writing one article or blog post--and having bring in huge traffic.

That is not to say it cannot be done, because it can.

But, you need to formulate a plan and stick to it.

Like writing one high quality article or blog post per week and then making sure you are syndicating that post on as many platforms as you can.

If you do this and do it consistently--the traffic will come in--not right away, but, it will come.

if you have a funnel that is successfully scaled and set up well.. even at a break even then really Paid Traffic is the best way to go.

If your funnel is even set up for a 0 net funnel.. in other words builds a list and you make all your advertising cost back on the front end, then why would you not just keep dumping money into it and break even. Then make your profit on the back end.

The problem with any free traffic these days is that it may work for a while and then not. It is always a good idea to have both paid and free techniques running for you at the same time.