$400 Contest: What traffic generation method did work for you?

I made a PAD file Portable Application Description, which is basically a XML file that has all the information preformatted of my product and submitted that into as many software free or paid and shareware sites as I could find....

You can learn lots about the PAD file and how to submit it at the link above.

The results were great. Of course I had a software product to promote.

But this can also be done with any file, as long as you can turn into a .exe file

Then just submit it to the software shareware sites. I have never done that though, just did a software program which had a free trial version and a paid version was then made available afterwards.

I also had someone make a promo video and submit it for me to the top video sites. Both methods worked brought me organic traffic within a few weeks, because you have to wait for the shareware sites to go over your submission and approve it, which can take a while, because I believe its done manually on a lot of them....

MORE INFO:

Honestly I am not sure if it works with .dmg's or Adobe .air, but for sure PDF's because you can convert a PDF into a .exe file.

All my traffic is organic, well, I would say 99% of it and its targeted traffic. I have consistant downloads everyday for my product some buy some don't. Most of my downloads though are not from the software sites that the software was submitted to, its from people coming to my actual website and downloading it directly.

The credible software sites have high google PR ranks and that really helps to boost the name of my product to the front page of google, where people can click on the software link and then see a basic discription and then click the link that is embeded which redirects them to my website.

Here is list of some sites and here is a link to learn more. What you will find is that not all except your PAD file submissions or the PAD file submission gets corrupted and you have to re-submit, so you just move on to the next.....

I did not use all these, but I did use some of them.... It was my first marketing idea to promote my product and still brings traffic to this day along with the video promos of my product....

CNET's Download.com
Tucows
ZDnet Software Library
Cnet Shareware.com
Filehippo
Jumbo
Bestfreewaredownload
Coredowload
Rocket Downloads
Simtel.net
IT Pro Downloads
WinArcives.com
Winsite
Free Downloads Center
Cool Tool of the Day
Filetransit
WinPlanet (former Stroud's Consummate Winsock Apps)
Download Juction
ProgramURL Software Directory
Shareware Junkies
Paul's Picks Shareware Library
Shareware River
Nonags
Softpicks Net
Freeware Arena
Real Free Software
FreewareFiles.com
Webattack.com: Snapfiles
Global Shareware
GALT: Shareware zone
WUGNET: Windows Users Group Network
5 Star Shareware
Software Vault
32bit.com: Serverfiles
Dave Central Shareware Archive: Freshmeat
PC World: Downloads
EZ Goal
Topshareware.com
Softpile
Passtheshareware
Vnunet Downloads
The Best Soft
Freeware guide
Programfiles.com
Allen's WinApps List
Download3000.com
Sofotex Software Download
Freewareseek.com
Popular Shareware.com
Shareup
Brothersoft
Softforall.com
Soft14.com
Softpedia
Freeware32.com
Fileforum
Best Download
Only the best Freeware
SimplytheBest Software
SuperFiles.com
Download-By.Net
Software in Search
Softlookup.com Software Directory
File Depot

As for sign-ups and conversion. Well, its hit and miss, and it comes in spurts, because of the type of software. Its poker related. The main thing about the free trial is that I want them to use it, and I DO NOT want them to buy if they do not like it or have reservations, because I do not want any returns, so I make it very clear, DO NOT BUY, unless you really like this product.

I do not have the list anymore of which sites I submitted it to, but I know it was at least 20 different sites.

My web traffic is not a HUGE windfall but its consistant unique traffic monthly from all over the world.

I have between 450 and 700 unique visits per month that came from this promotion I did with the PAD files which was almost 2 years ago, and the traffic is still consistant every month, it basically follows the trends of online poker players and whats going on in the poker world.

This is about 15 to 50 per day, which does not seem like much traffic, but its not junk traffic, all the people who visit my site are buyers looking to buy if they like......

As for the video sites, I had someone do that for me, a fellow warrior, actually a woman on the forums, who submitted them to the top 5 video sites. I cant remember which ones, but I am sure someone knows what they are or they are probably pretty easy to find.

Well personally when I started my first website I had no idea how to drive traffic but 2 things helped me considerably drive very targeted traffic day after day (by no means are these new methods but they are effective):

Say for example the niche is the stock market (which it was at that time) to build traffic that would trickle in I considered targeting pretty much every low traffic keyword that related to the niche. Before I knew it I had produced a page each (purely SEO optimized), for almost 50 low traffic keywords which would bring in 3-5 visitors a day.

-Eventually, I built the list up to 100 keywords, each bringing in 5 people a day. That was 500 people a day with minimal efforts. 500 new visits a day is 15k uniques a month. For pages that took hardly 2 mins to make.

The other thing I did was set up a automatic news poster on news keywords that were low traffic but at the same time low competition.

For example, if people were searching for a particular share's news on the stock market which not many of those big sites published I would target it, this would bring in at least 2 to 3 visits a day as well. Eventually when I had news being fetched by say 5 -10 keywords, that was another additional 15-30 visits a day.


The great thing about these 2 methods is that it can be applied to pretty much every site and at the same time it's very scalable.


-Hope it helps.

SEO & Traffic Generation through Article Marketing primarily with Ezine Articles. I use my keywords in the title and sporatically in the enlightening, entertaining or educational article.

VERY IMPORTANT: In the Resource box, I don't talk about myself. I start if off saying....."Next, you'll discover the Top 3......" or a similar call to action. By starting with "Next", it naturally prompts readers to click to my website and learn more about my topic/product.

Once the article has been approved, I post it to my blog, and then ping the article with pingoat. I also post it on my Squidoo & Hubpage with a back link to my blog.

My favorite book marks are Propeller, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Stumbleupon

And lastly, I start a Fan Page on Facebook with posts that link back to my blog.

I look forward to hearing about other methods as well!

Cheers,
Terri

You see in the above screenshot I got a video result from one of the pages in my blog.

The nearby YouTube video is also mine but by clicking the first result the user lands on my site. And my site got optin boxes and adsense ads Much better than getting raw youtube views!

All you have to do is install the FLV embed plugin and upload your video in your own server and embed it in your blog's page. Then use the video sitemap feature in the FLV embed plugin to create a video sitemap like mine:

http://bikeadvice.in/videofeed.xml

Submit the video sitemap to Google webmaster tools and within a few days your videos will get indexed.



I got 8000 unique visitors to that page alone in the last 30 days. I am using the same method for a few other small niche blogs.

- Deepak Raj

Personally, I use Stumbleupon.

After submitting my site/article, I create an Ad Campaign.

Once set up I put the minimum amount of 'daily budget' in the campaign. I then start advertising. As people stumble across my site, hopefully they thumb it up. The more people that thumb it up the more people will stumble across my site. I then remove my ad campaign but because of the large amount of stumblers thumbing my site up, I still get the same amount of traffic, if not more, and it's for free.

And here is the beautiful part.

Many stumblers don't actually know that they sometimes viewing 'paid' sites, which can help to increase your conversion rates if your site is set up properly.

DETAIL ADDED AS REQUESTED:

When starting to advertise I usually $25 at the rate of $.05 per visitor which equals 500 Unique Visitors.

So I got 500 unique and targeted visitors for $25.

It was only my second campaign, so I am still trying to optimize my landing page however, I got 8 signups from the 500, at $12 per lead it netted me $96 which left me with $71 profit.

However, on top of those 500 visitors, I think I got roughly 10-15 'thumbs up' which allowed me to cancel my ad campaign. I am now recieving roughly 10-50 views a day from StumbleUpon without paying for traffic, (not sure why it varies), however, for a single $25 investment, it seems to have paid off, especailly since I hope to make my next campaign even better.

Cool... 6 submissions in just a few hours and 3 are already eligible to win one of the 19 prizes.

Keep them coming warriors!

I personally use email marketing combined with forums, and affiliate marketing

Hey Frank,

Awesome Idea man.
My most of the traffic comes from blog commenting, guest posting, forum posting and social media sites. I usually spend 30 mins a day on blog commenting and 10-20min/day on forum posting.

Now i'm focusing on article marketing... to get high rankings.

Every month i share my previous month traffic report.
Check out my june,10 traffic report > Technshare Monthly Report 4: June 2010 | Make Money Blogging


Thanks.. !!

Post youtube videos but make use of SEO, and the fact that google and other search engines just love YOUTUBE. If you do the following correctly your video and description will show up in the first page of google for your search term keyword. I have had video show up as soon as 24 - 48 hours later.

Make sure your video is named a keyword, make sure the title of your video contains the keyword. Make sure the meta tags contain the keyword and variants....but here is the important bit. Make sure in your description you use your keyword first and lastly at the end of the description use your keyword again.

Then watch the very targeted traffic come to you. Very clever way to get visitors knocking at your door.

Thanks, jamjar919, iDevesh & celente!

Please remember... share in your original post what your results have been! How long did it take? How much traffic did you get this way and was the traffic converting into signups or sales? The more details the better.

Article marketing, email marketing, social web marketing,
I think these methods are good.

thankyou

I use article marketing of course! Also blog commenting, forum posting, email campaigns, and social media. The best results I get comes from using unique article wizard.

Hi There,

I'm not sure if your still running the contest but here's a tricky method that I pulled.

1. I got a country related domain name, without a keyword in it.
2. I targeted the niche "Make Money Online", but I could not figure for the life of me how I could get traffic to it.
3. I decided to try an Angela Packet, and boom I hit the Page One of my Countries Rankings, because of the country code domain, in fact it helped my ranking. That traffic, has caused my site to get more recurring traffic, daily, then I ever thought was possible.

The traffic is about a couple hundred uniques a month that are high converting, and have made me a pile of money (I can't say how much for a reason, you can guess).

Angela Packets are Backlink Packets.

Hi there, are many ways to get traffic to your site. I will tell a very powerful one!

1. You heard about viral marketing? It is a powerful source of traffic.
Let me tell you this secret.Viral marketing method can bring you a lot of sales and traffic.
Ok, you make a report on a choosen niche. You make a product on that niche and setup a website.
On the end of the report you put a link to your sale page and tell the benefits of the product.
You give " give-away rights" to your ebook. You post the ebook on forums related to the niche. Contact some guys that have a list in that niche, that you have a cool report to offer for free. They will mail the report , so the report will go to thousands of readers, then they will email this to their friends....and so on.

This method made me a lot of money! Is very very powerful and it brings targeted traffic and sales!

Great contest Frank,

Here's my contribution...

This simple and quick traffic method resulted in

Alexa ranking from 1.5 million to 350,000

Over 80 sign ups

$165.00 in OTO

in only 2 weeks...

Here's how it was done:

Picked 2 Text Ad sites with System Mailers.
(Some of the better Text ad sites have a feature called system mailers. This is where your offer is emailed to other members of site. You click the mailer link inside the members area, write your ad, and click send. Your ad/offer is sent to members via the system mailer)

Sent my offer to 3000 and 2000 members 5 times
over the 2 weeks

That's it!

The Offer?

Try and put a $ value and and mention "FREE" in the ad title and keep it short.

Keep the ad description short and simple and with
the benefits of the offer.
(works best of you are giving away a freebie with a $ value)


You can scale this up using more than 2 of those Text Ad
sites with system mailers.

Regards
Dave

Affiliates

Ok, quick contest update...

So far we have 7 eligible submitters... one traffic generation method was posted twice with 2 votes each. That one with more votes will be eligible once we reach a total of 19 traffic generation techniques that generate results.

Ok, warriors... please keep them coming.

BTW... you don't have to be first to be eligible with a particular traffic generation technique, you just have to have more votes by the time we reach 19, so everything is still possible.

@add2it

Added to my method. Looks like I got 4 thanks.

Here's one of my favourite ones, step by step:

I recently posted this on my blog and I thought it might show some of you an unlimited abyss of traffic out there. It's relatively simple to do, not necessarily ground breaking, but it can be very affordable and targeted.

The way I generate the majority of my traffic is via Media Buying, but obviously there are some barriers of entry for most people in terms of getting into media buying, and it does carry some risks.

So today, I want to go into a bit of detail on how to do smaller site media buys, which is something that is typically cheaper per month than PPC, but can still generate good ROI.

Most of the time when people hear about Media Buying, they think of $100,000 per month costs, and large upfront minimums to mysterious ad networks.

Sure, that’s one way to go about it, but really Media Buying is just buying any type of ad space/time. Most people are referring to banner buys, and while these can typically have a high cost of entry, today I want to show you a way that anyone can get started.

In fact, I still have some buys going this way that bring in a consistent 300% ROI every month without me having to really administer them much.

First, there are a few advantages as to why you will want to go direct to a site and buy banner space:

- Rarely will you encounter restrictions

- Less competition than a lot of platforms

- Most things are negotiable in terms of price/placement/term (try negotiating with Google)

- There is an almost unlimited number of sites you can go after, just takes some digging

- Full transparency as to where your ads are showing

- Uninformed web masters (basically some have no idea what to charge for advertising, take advantage of this)

- For smaller site buys which we’re covering today, you can get most buys for under $300/month. And typically $150-200! That's less than $10/day for targeted traffic.

- For our smaller site buys, we will be buying on a flat rate. If your click through rate on your ads is good, you could be getting some really cheap traffic.

So how do we buy banner space from small sites? Well, I’ll assume that most people reading this are into affiliate marketing and CPA marketing, so here is a brief step by step (this works great for product owners as well, but I will assume most reading are doing affiliate marketing)....

Step 1: Choosing an Offer

For this post, I’m going to focus on choosing the offer first and finding sites relevant to that offer.

You’re also free to find traffic sources within a target demographic and try to monetize their traffic with multiple offers, but for our purposes today, let’s find an offer first.

I always recommend that if you’re doing CPA marketing, have a good relationship with your affiliate manager. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll give you the top offers within your vertical of choice. So our first step here is to talk to your affiliate manager and get the top 3 offers in the vertical of your choice. Check the demographics of your offer in Offervault.com. Also, cross reference if possible with Google Ad Planner and MSN Adlabs.

If you're doing Clickbank, look for the highest popularity and gravity offers that have a good amount of historical traffic. (check compete.com for traffic details)

Step 2: Finding Sites

We want to find 20 – 30 potential target sites that fit our offer demographics. Obviously you can find less but many small web masters won’t get back to you.

That is probably the #1 disadvantage of dealing with small sites. If it bothers you enough and you have the funds to do so, outsource the site finding and get someone to contact all the webmasters.

That way you will deal only with setting up the buy with those that get back to you.

We want to look for sites getting less than 20k-30k uniques per day if possible.

One of my best small buys had 2500 US uniques per day.

Here are a few of the methods I use to find smaller sites to approach:

Option 1: Google Search

- Simply go to one of the Big 3 engines, preferably Google, and search for very targeted terms to your vertical.

Take a look at the sites in the organic search results. Check traffic levels in Compete.com, Google Ad Planner, Alexa & Quantcast.com. Find a common thread when it comes to traffic levels.

If you have converting keywords from PPC campaigns, easiest method is to go after sites that rank high for those converting keywords. This goes for converting Google Content Network placements as well.

Approach them privately and cut out the middle man. Try to be as targeted as possible here.

- Look up demographics and cross reference with Google Ad Planner, MSN Adlabs, & Quantcast if available.

Option 2: Google Ad Planner & QuantCast Planner

- Go to Google Ad Planner & QuantCast Planner, and specify the exact demographics of your offer.

You’ll be given a list of sites that fit your criteria. I like to sort these sites by Composition Index, which usually gives me smaller sites that are the most targeted to my demographic.

Once you’ve found some good candidates, you can use the affinity index on Google Ad Planner and QuantCast Planner to find even more sites that are likely to be visited by your demographic.

Option 3: Forums

- A lot of times, forum owners have no idea what to charge for advertising. This can give us the opportunity to get some cheap banner space!

Go the website Big-Boards.com, and search for sites related to your niche. Big-Boards.com lists some of the busiest forums on the web for related forums.

Again, think in terms of demographics. A forum on quilting, for example, might respond well to an anti-aging product.

Step 3: Contacting Sites

Contacting small sites can be a challenge since only 10-15% of small site owners will get back to you.

First obvious step is to look at the navigation or scroll down to the bottom and see if there is an “advertise” link. If there is no advertise link, is there a “contact” link?

If there is neither of these, use your favourite “whois” look up for that domain and see if there is some contact info there.

For forums, if none of the above work and you really want to get on there, post in the forum on how to get a hold of an admin or the site owner.

I’ve had to do this before for a forum in Google Content Network that was converting great for me and I wanted to cut out Google.

So, now it’s time to e-mail the smaller site.

The way in which I contact smaller sites is a bit more casual than when I contact a larger site.

Here is a script that I use in my e-mails:

“Hi there (if there is no contact name)
I was wondering if I could get some info for banner advertising on your site __________.com

I’d like to do a test buy as soon as possible.

Thanks very much,

Chad Hamzeh”

This is a template I pretty much copy and paste since we are contacting so many sites.

Step 4: Deciding What to Pay

Like I said, the majority won’t contact you. If you like, you can e-mail them several times.

If you get a response, a lot of times it will be vague, and sometimes they will want you to name a price.

For smaller sites, I will typically then ask how many impressions my ad will see in the month. Tell them you want to buy the entire ad slot for the month, and not be rotated with other advertisers. Cross reference their impression number with the total page views number in Google Ad Planner (if available) assuming you purchased 100% impressions.

Also, keep in mind that if you are promoting CPA offers, they will only be eligible for certain countries, take this into account when measuring traffic levels. This is extremely important.

When I don’t have much data to go off, I will calculate a theoretical maximum CPM (cost per thousand impressions) based on page view data, a lower click through rate (CTR) of 0.25%, and a conversion rate from the click of 1% when using a lander, and of course my offer payout.

I can use a higher conversion rate for offers not requiring a credit card or if I have a lot of data and it's my own product.

But again this is simply giving us an estimate. Also take in mind direct linking vs. landing pages. You’re really just going to get a rough estimate here.

The way I calculate a theoretical maximum CPM is as follows:

Offer Payout x 1000 x CTR x Conversion Rate = Max CPM

So, if we had an offer which pays out $40, and our test CTR was 0.25%, and our conversion rate from the click was 1% it would look like this:

$40 x 1000 x 0.0025 x .01 = 1…. so the max we should pay here with these numbers in place would be $1 CPM

Now, all we need to do is calculate the max cost. And that is done by the following formula:

Max CPM/1000 x Impressions = Max Cost

So let’s say that we’ve estimated that we will get 100,000 impressions for our buy and the webmaster has confirmed it:

$1.00/1000 x 100000 = $100 Max Cost

So for this buy, $100 should be the max we pay. Now, we were kind of under estimating on the banner CTR and conversion rates, so if you have previous data for that campaign that can warrant higher numbers there, by all means use those numbers.

I will also use Cubestat.com to get a very rough estimate of what kind of daily revenue that site might be experiencing.

And finally, sometimes I will simply throw out a low figure for these small sites, something like $50-100 for the month and see the web masters reaction. Worst they can say is no.

As a guideline, I am usually looking to pay what would equate to under $1 CPM, ideally 50 cents or under. But of course this can vary.

At this point, it’s a matter of setting up your banners and tracking. For small direct buys if I'm doing CPA/Clickbank, I will use Prosper202, I reserve my ad server for larger buys. For my own products I will use Googles Website Optimizer and my Ad Server.

I simply setup each small site as it’s own traffic source in Prosper202.

Again, the toughest thing about this method is hearing back from the web masters and doing the initial research.

Try to be as targeted as possible here in terms of both demographics and interests, it’ll give you higher click through rates especially if you’re using banner ads that call out to that specific sites visitors.

If you begin to outsource the research and/or contacting of the sites and you get a good system going, you’ll enjoy the benefits of this method since most won’t go through the work of doing it.

I hope that helps people having a tough time generating traffic. This works in any niche including the IM niche.

I'd say my best method in getting traffic is SEO. Sounds basic and simple because it is, but it works wonders when you get good at it.

Can we expect the prizes by 2025? Or is it too early!

Who won the contest?

He never finished this...?

Last Activity: 09-29-2010 10:19 PM

Isn't that Like September 29th at 10:19PM.

That's when he last visited the site.

Caleb

Awe Traffic Generation one of my favorite topics. The method that I'm going to submit is more of a long term strategy. This is a very simply method for building a BIG list in a BIG market. Futhermore, this method will get you paid ASAP. Imagine getting paid to build a super targeted list in a big market where tons of people already buying stuff.

Here it goes...

This is a very simple method, and it can be summed up in just the title. The interview method.

Very simply, find a BIG market, with tons of product owners (Clickbank is great for this). Next you simply find there name and contact info, usually right on the sales page.

Once you have there contact info, send them an email asking to do an interview. Believe it or not, but many times people say yes to doing the interview. Too get the questions simply make them up or you can gather more ideas for questions directly from the bulletin points on the persons sales page. Next just schedule it and use a Skype and a free recording software, I use Call Graph for mine.

Once you have the interview done and recorded, you simply post this on your blog. For traffic you get the person who you just interviewed to promote the interview to there list.

Now, listen up, becuase here is were it gets good.

Most people set up a squeeze page to collect the persons opt-ins. I don't do that, what I do is called a reverse squeeze page, and offer bonuses that are similar to the persons I'm interviewing product.

What this does is increase the chances of the interviewee promoting the interview to their list, and it also acts as a filter to. This is becuase you are not only getting the most responsive people on their list, but you are also getting the action takers, the people or purchase stuff.

That way you are getting paid to build the highest quailty list you can ever have. In addition this method allows you to do ad swaps as well. Because those bonuses you are using for the interview can be re-purposed and used for ad swaps.

Lastly, what this method also helps you do is build a relationship with people in the market, which then brings in integration marketing. Sense you have already made them money, you can ask to have your lead magnet as an extra bonus on their thank you/download page.

Thus automated your lead generation efforts, and still building a list of the highest quailty, becuase your are building a list of buyers.

I hope I made some sort of sense with all that. Anyway, here is the process...

1. Big Market
2. Interview people in the market
3. Use lead magnets as bonuses for the interview (reverse squeeze page)
4. Re-purpose the lead magnets or interviews for ad swaps
5. Build relationships with gurus in the market, and put your lead magnets/interviews as bonuses on other peoples thank you or download page.

Remember the point is to build a list of buyers, that is the best long term solution.

If anybody needs better clarification just quote me, and ask, of course after you pressed the thanks button.

I don't have much to give but I would like to thank the op for doing this, my mind is going crazy right now. There is so must useful information, some can be combined to create crazy traffic.