Is Free Traffic a MYTH??

You can get free traffic in many different ways... youtube is great for free traffic, you can write articles and put a link to your website in the author resource box, you can comment on people's blogs, you can put a link to your website in your signature file on forums... the list goes on.

Publish good stuff that people want to read and the rest will take care of itself.

Paid traffic is where the money is at. It's a lot more stable and a lot more scalable. There is an abundance of paid traffic available. Definitely more than is being bought. Learn how to use paid traffic to your advantage.

Free traffic was never free anyway. It had a large cost of your time.

You should never be afraid to pay for quality traffic. If you make more money than you spend then it makes sense to do that all day long. But if you can't make any money from the traffic then you shouldn't be trying to get traffic anyway. You need your funnels in place so you know exactly how much money you can afford to spend on paid traffic.

No it isn't. Any page online that lets you post a link is POTENTIALLY a source of free traffic. However, you have to follow the site's TOS if you want your link to stay on.

The first ways I started getting traffic back in 2008 was by placing free classified ads on CL, Backpage and other sites.

I also was using Tagged.com and Myspace to get traffic by building up lots of friends on them, then promoting my links to them. Hint : It is much easier to start getting lots of friends on social sites if you create accounts in a female name with attractive photos of her.

You can also use Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr and StumbleUpon and start making lots of friends / contacts.

Make some interesting YouTube videos too and upload them to get some free traffic that way too...

95% of my business right now is free marketing. Youtube is free, and look how effective it is.

There is always an investment in traffic -- in terms of Time or Money...

Free traffic is possible, if you invest your time or money into making it possible.

I have done both, and my sites get an amazing amount of traffic -- even sites that I have not promoted in years.

Traffic is never really free. It's a matter of whether you "pay for it" with time or money. If you have more time than money, then the choice is usually simple. You look for ways to get traffic in exchange for time, at least until you have enough money to do otherwise. If you have money, most often you will find it beneficial to go with paid sources of traffic.

Insofar as the so-called free traffic methods, there are some that produce credible results. I personally use YouTube and free ad sites like Craigslist. The myth is that you can just throw anything on these sites and get substantial traffic. Each method has its own peculiarities that must be learned in order to get targeted traffic in volume. For example, on Craigslist, you must know how to create headlines that inspire curiosity and that stand out. You must know how to create ads that generate click-thrus to your web site. And that's just for starters.

For sure though, the best way to achieve success is to get started doing something. Part of everybody's education on the road to success is learning from what did not work out. Learn from others but also from your own mistakes.

Non-paid traffic does exist, and is how I'm running my sites (since I don't seem to be able to get the hang of the paid stuff.) Do video marketing, article marketing and choose keywords that don't have a ton-load of competition, and your results should come. It takes time, though. I think I got something like 80 visitors to my blog the first month it was up. Now, it's over 4K/month, and I haven't done anything except put up good content and do some (good) back linking via videos and articles. I think I have one blog comment.

If you have good content and are promoting a good product, there will definitely be a snowball effect that occurs. I've had customers talk about my stuff on forums and so on, and that definitely helps. It all starts to pile up after a while.

Free traffic isn't a myth. It can, however, be a little unreliable, especially if you're relying on Google for your traffic. A single algorithm change can destroy your entire business if that's what you rely on.

Social media can also be used to drive traffic to your site, and it's largely a free method, albeit one you can accelerate a bit by paying for advertising like Facebook ads and such.

Most of my income comes from Kindle books, but I have a few websites that rely solely on free traffic. I use a combination of Pinterest, Tumblr and Facebook to drive traffic to them and all it costs me is my time. As an interesting aside, it wasn't until I started completely ignoring Google in favor of these other sites that I started really climbing the Google ladder.

I think I could ramp things up to where I could make a full-time living just off this combination if I wasn't so busy with the Kindle stuff I'm doing. I'm getting between 600 and 800 unique visits a day to my sites, so if they continue to grow I may have no choice other than to pay them a little more attention...

Free traffic is a myth because you pay for it either in money or time. If money is a problem you can publish articles, make constructive comments on relevant forums and blogs. You can also guest post. All of these methods must have a link to your website

I’ve always relied on free traffic and nothing else, mainly through search engines. YouTube has been great also, but how much longer will you be able to rely on YouTube for traffic. Plus, why make YouTube stronger in SERP’s when you can do it to your own website.

I’d rather build a great site that follows all Googles rules and reap the rewards from search engine traffic. Then, explore other options like paid traffic. Also, you don’t always need links to get your articles on the first page of Google, sometimes its pretty easy...just learn the art of writing for search engines (mainly Google).

If you play your cards right, you can build a substantial income off of a few hundred dollars (domain + website script + monthly hosting), thats all you need.

Top marketers spend thousands of dollars in paid advertising, (Try making any money with free traffic... and you'll be waiting till the cows come home.)

I use both free and paid traffic. For free traffic I use yahoo answers for a related niche, youtube, comments, and forums. (Stay away from traffic exchanges)

As others have already said you either pay for traffic with your time or your money. There is no such thing as free traffic. Time is your greatest asset and it is a limited resource that you should value greatly.

SEO traffic is the way to go.

It takes a long time to build up though, and usually requires lots of good content.

If you're willing to spend an inordinate amount of time
you can generate traffic without spending money. No
question about that and several have made this point
in posts above.

But... seriously... why would you want to?

You can spend a week... or a month... heck, maybe even
a year, or more... to build your traffic...

or...

you can have thousands of new targeted visitors by Noon tomorrow.

Ever heard the term "opportunity cost?"

By the time you generate enough unpaid traffic to start making a
decent number of sales you could have earned thousands of dollars
of profit by buying the traffic sooner. You could then scale up the
operation or invest the profits into some other profit generating venture.

Lol any traffic you buy it is free for the one who sells it. Maybe he also is buying it for a lower price, but there aslways exist some one for whom the traffic is free.

NOT A MYTH! I prove it myself. But you have to provide value to your visitor, in exchange for money in regular paid traffic. right now, I am using Tumblr to drive 1000 unique visitor a day to my product review blog. The main idea is to drive people to your Tumblr main page, and add a cross-link that connect to your another blog. it took me one year to make this idea work. maybe some day I will share it to you guys.

The best way to get traffic is Google and you don't need to be an expert for this. Today, the blogs which get to first page of google have a lot of backlinks. So, you need to get back links from relevant blogs and you would be good to get atleast 200 visits a day in a month or two if you build 5 high pr back links everyday.

In answer to your question - is free traffic a myth? Yes, you pay either with time or with cash.

There are many ways to get free traffic, but they're mostly not places that will start the flood immediately, and you really need that to be able to react well to product launches and the like.

You can absolutely do SEO, and get ranked on page one of Google for competitive words, but you're going to have to put a lot of your time in, to do so.

There are still blogs you can comment on and will pass on link juice, but you'd better we writing something useful rather than an obvious link ploy...

You can buy high PR links, but that by itself won't really help you with rankings, not unless you get some social proof to go with it.

This kind of thinking is a little bit stuck into a narrow view of SEO, or more specifically how it use to be. There are tons of way to get free traffic, but you shouldn't focus on getting your links posted everywhere yourself. Super SEO optimization is not that necessary, important or effective anymore, so these experienced people you talk about, it's not that relevant to the core question of generating free traffic.

Creating shareable content and building a meaningful, engaging presence is central to creating free traffic. When somebody shares a page organically, that's free traffic. When a blog or news site mentions you, that's free traffic. The only way to generate those kinds of events is to create share-worthy content and have a meaningful presence that people can connect to. More than ever before the audience actually does the link building and traffic generation for you, but you have to give them reason enough to do so.

For more (and better) info look up Rand Fishkin and his talks about inbound marketing.

Use the power of Social Media site such as Facebook. Youtube also drive more traffic to your site. Regarding SEO be smart. Write quality articles related to hot trends. You don't need to pay for traffic, if you work smart and spend more time to bring up your site.

Free traffic is not a myth if it is gathered from authoritative sources. For this, you can utilize the article directories, blogging websites and forums.

Below are some free marketing traffic tactics that works thou it takes time, quality content, great title and descriptions where necessary:

Article marketing
Social bookmarking
Social network
Classified ads
SEO
List building, there are free services.
And others.

Learn from others, sometimes you won't find a someone with all the expertise, some might just specialize in article marketing like Alexa, SEO like Mike Friedman and more.

I think the average person does it by trying - one way or another - to "do SEO" and attract Google traffic.

That's part of why so many more people fail than ever succeed, in so many different types of internet marketing businesses.

However you look at it, to have any real chance of success in internet marketing, it's clearly essential to avoid being the "average person".

I get tons of traffic from YouTube.. Simply because I know how to rank YOuTube videos easily...

That's my main focus...

If you count time, it's really not free unless you're outsourcing your work but YouTube is about the best free traffic I've ever seen

Dennis
The Marketing Menace

If you are ready to spend more time, you will get a result from it. You can get free traffic from social media network. It will be rough at the first time, but as I state before, it takes time to build it. Start from your own friend, family, and co worker, and neighbor. Also remember to advertise the social network in your list (if you have any). And keep nurturing it with valuable post in each update. You are good to go.

There are TONS of ways to get free traffic, and tons of systems that teach it. Find a way that works, then find another one, then another, and you have free ways to drive tons of targeted traffic.

To answer the question directly, there is no such thing as free traffic. Nothing in the known Universe is free (or its all free if you take out the notion of energy conversion) depends how you look at it.

SEO takes time and energy even if it doesnt cost money. So it innately costing you both time and energy and usually if you are paid in relation to time then usually this transfers into a direct cost.

Thats the first thing.

The second thing is that many sites still allow links, where ever you got that information is incorrect.

The web has actually grown and is now alloing more links then ever before.

People always forget about non-traditional web 2.0 sites like facebook. facebook, twitter, youtube etc, allow users to easily post links and its free of charge.

There are now more free website and blog builder platforms then ever before.

Back linking for SEO or direct linking for direct traffic has become easier then ever just look at sites like fiverr. However SEO best practice is becoming very big (finally!). Search engines as we all know are shooting all of the scammers and spammers out of the rankings and awarding the best practitioners the best results.

So my advice for you is provide a quality product or service or content and people will come back to your site via the best route possible... the direct route! Thats about as free as it will ever get!

A lot of people are saying that 'FREE Traffic' is not free, you pay in terms of time and labour.

But it's important to make some distinctions here:

free traffic = traffic you didn't pay money for. If some blog or news site decides to pick up your site organically: that's free traffic. When people naturally share your content, that's free traffic. You're not paying for their labour or their links.

Now here's what people mean to say when they say it isn't free: you have to spend a lot of time creating content, building reputation and engaging your audience. Which leads some people to think:

This is oversimplifying things. Why?

1) Free traffic is different from paid traffic.

2) Paid traffic can also cost a lot of time to manage well.

3) There's a difference between SPENDING and INVESTING. Huge difference.

If you're building a quality brand, pushing quality content and creating meaningful connection with a targeted audience, you are investing your time. Investments can give you ongoing future returns.

If you just run say, a PPC campaign, without doing anything else, you are probably not investing much of that capital. PPC campaign stops and so does your cashflow. If the product/service is largely reliant on paid traffic, that money is a cost of doing day to day business. You can easily pour money into paid traffic without really investing in long term assets.

Having said that, you can use paid traffic traffic and have a very well thought out investment strategy behind it (building a list is the simplest example of that). But the bottom line is that you have to think in terms of investment when deciding how to generate traffic. I dare say, any paid traffic campaign will do better when you also have a solid presence created through good content, meaningful interactions with customers and a solid reputation.

You need to publish rich content that will solve problems, attract their interests, or entertain them in some way.

I would say it's all about combining free and paid traffic methods. I.E. paying for traffic to get likes on your facebook fan page, and then generating free traffic from your facebook fans who come to your site.

Posting in forums while having the link to your website in the signature is a great way for free traffic. Personally I never understood SEO and believe building a list is one of the most effective ways to profit online and after the initial start of costs it becomes "free" highly targeted traffic.

Hell no! I love free traffic!

The only problem usually is that it takes longer to get sustainable traffic from free sources...

Other than that if you put the effort in then free traffic is still a viable source!

Thanks

Matt

It's not a myth. I have had 114,482 unique visitors this month, all of it free and almost 100% from the search engines.

I don't build links. The key is finding the right niches that either have little competition or to find trending topics that you can beat everyone else into the search engines with. Few people on WF are getting it right. It's not always about evergreen topics, people. It's a LOT EASIER to get traffic on trending items than fiercely competitive evergreen topics.

To the OP, one of your sites is makecashblogging.com. How did you come up with that domain name if you can't generate traffic through blogging? Your site about short stories to kids is quite nice, I believe you must be getting traffic through people searching for keywords and landing on your pages.

Generate your links from continually writing killer content, if you are the one doing your own articles, then start doing off-page SEO. You'll definitely see the results.

It all boils down to how you start your IM campaign. Getting the right keywords, and what you do with them. You will get targeted traffic from your USP and your target audience. Why don't you start with a distinct, well researched, narrow niche and build on it to a specific problem solving solution to an audience with a need?

Its easy to get YoutTube traffic if you target something that is obscure enough but not too obscure.

If you try and target "weight loss" keyword or "make money on-line" or "dating" then you will get no where because there's probably many millions of videos there already about those things.

It's not a myth. One of my sites receives thousands of visitors based on long tail keywords.

The myth is that it is easy to get quality targeted traffic quickly. It requires time and patience, but builds over time as long as you produce relevant content that people really want to read.

Anyone not getting much organic traffic should take another look at the type of information they have on their site. Is it boring, redundant and not unique in any way?

If so, consider rewriting the content you provide. Make it fresh, useful, interesting and highly targeted to a certain group of people.

Hi,

FREE traffic takes a lot of time to master and that time is money not being
made.

So you could say that cost of time is just as important.

It depends on your situation whether you're time rich or money
rich at the time.

Time is money so for me I like to use paid methods whenever I
can to speed up the testing process.

Gives you answers a lot faster so that you can test & measure quickly
and see what is working and what needs to be improved.

Hope this helps
Gavin

I get a lot of traffic from Google images. Pinterest is also good and I use similar services. All you need to do is create pictures with your digital camera. Then post them on your blog or web pages.

SEO for

• picture name - oxcart.gif
• caption - a red oxcart
• title - red oxcart iowa
• ALT TAG - oxcart
• Anchor text linking to your image

Talk about the picture in your body copy. Also the web page can be oxcart.html or a similar name.

If you take your time, the free option can really pay off.

Plus when you are successful you can upgrade to the paid versions, which will only mean you continue to grow

The ability to effectively drive traffic requires money (at least some budget).

TRAFFIC IS NOT FREE. PERIOD.

The answer is probably not the one you want to hear.

Work harder and use your creative energy more effectively to get more eyeballs on your site.

Thats the only way to do it "free"

Write down a daily syndication routine with a list of sites that you will post to daily, and spend ab 20 minutes a day simply looking for new places to syndicate.

Forget seo beyond basic on page and some blog commenting.

In order to really "rely" on google traffic, you have to be able to not only spend a little money, but KNOW what you are doing.

Its very easy these days to blow a lot of money on seo and get no results if you don't have the right information.

You want to know what one of the best "free" traffic strategies is in my opinion?

Work on building a youtube channel! Youtube videos WILL get at least some traffic on their own just through the youtube search engine if you tag your video correctly.....not to mention youtube videos just rank like crazy right now.

Just fight and crawl over broken glass if you have to get that initial traffic and it will begin to snowball if your content is good.

straight and simple: I get free traffic from 65 million facebook group members on autopilot and i use a simple but amazing software to rank high on google

its not hard specially if you read, listen and learn ...You might have to spend afew dollars on the right software but it is possible it's definitely NOT a myth, i am doing it


oh! and knowing the right products to sell helps as well