What MISTAKES people make when getting FREE traffic??

Hey guys, please share your thoughts.. I need some ideas for my new students

One of the mistakes that i see is the belief that if the marketing technique is simple it doesn't work! Which is ridiculous!

there is no such thing as genuinely FREE traffic...

The main difference between paid and "free" traffic is the former requires your money... the other generally requires a lot of your TIME... you need to churn out article after article (if you go via the article marketing route) before you see any significant results... same for commenting on blogs/bookmarking etc... you need time to submit the sites... read other blogs and post meaningful comments

getting traffic with free methods is a slow and steady process, you wont get huge traffic overnight.

I think there are 2 main mistakes I see:

# 1: Trying to use some form of trick or latest tool to "trick" the search engines and get traffic.

Black hat SEO like this can work for a short time but sooner or later (usually sooner) the search engines like google will change their algorithm and all that work you've put in will be lost as your sites disappear from the rankings.

Worse still if the SEO method is deemed bad enough you can be sandboxed by google meaning you may never get ranked on google again or you may have to jump through some serious hoops to do it.


# 2: Not taking enough serious action to get results.


# 3: Not keeping track of results so you can do more of what's working.

There are so many things you can do to improve search engine rankings and get traffic.

Some are going to work a whole lot better than others so if you keep track of which strategies are working for you and which aren't you can spend your effort more wisely over time.



When it comes to search engine optimization I would also add that there are only 2 basic overriding guidelines if you want good rankings:

# 1: Create high quality highly targeted content to put online.

# 2: Get backlinks from related sites the search engines trust back to that high quality content.


The people who've followed those 2 basic guidelines over the years have got themselves good rankings, good traffic and they don't have to worry about the lastest "google slap".

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

I've found that people don't use the time they invest effectively. Sure, they write 400 word articles and get them submitted to every popular directory. They also find related blogs to comment and backlink from. They might even create some videos to grab some youtube traffic. But they do it all poorly! The articles suck, the blog comments get deleted because they're just hit-and-run comments, and the videos border on being unwatchable.

Internet marketing is insanely profitable but in some ways it is polluting the internet. Providing the answer to a need or problem is the essence of making sales, some people just go about it very sloppily. If they'd create higher quality content they'd benefit from better, more targetted traffic.

Not providing valuable enough free content with the traffic generation methods that require this - article marketing, forum posting, blog commenting and video marketing. If you are going to spend the time it takes to drive traffic effectively using free methods then do it properly - give quality information and a lead into your own site where the reader/visitor is going to find exactly what they are looking for - there is no harm in selling to people but get them to perceive you as an expert or someone to be trusted first.

Best wishes
Lisa

On Article marketing...definitely quality of content. So many people rave about article submitters, posting PLR, and posting poorly-written articles one after the next. One needs to take into consideration if one of your well-written article gets picked up by a credible site, you can make a lottttt of $ very fast.

Another problem I see with traffic...is that when people start getting it, they lose out on sales by NOT initially list-building to hit viewers up on the backend.

Thirdly...tracking. If you're not tracking your efforts, you're losing out on gaining even more traffic. Tracking your efforts, you can see which articles are performing over others, and you can make choices such as:

1) Concentrating efforts on a niche that performs
2) Pinning down a successful writing style w/ your articles that will help your writing improve over multiple niches.
3) Adding more "link-juice" to already performing articles & capitalizing on your efforts.