Find more free targeted traffic – here are 5 things I did
April 30, 2009 by Shaun Baird
Filed under Traffic
In my never ending stressful search looking for more and more sources of really good traffic, just to keep my awful boss Jim happy, I spent many long evenings cutting down on social life, looking for some things which might just work, to make my days in the office that little bit easier.
I tried lots of free advertising and lots of paid advertising mainly because I wanted to make it work for some of my own websites I was developing part time. Below are the findings of my 4 months of research, hope they serve you well.
1. Advertising using pay per click (or PPC). I struggled to make this profitable as there is quite a lot to learn. It is recommended but not as a first try item. It is very targeted and a great source of traffic however.
2. Finding ezines or newsletters who talk about what you want to promote – and then sending out a paid solo advert to their subscriber list. This works well because it is quite decently targeted. Just make sure that your headline is very strong, and draws the reader into the next bit of text. I personally either drew even or made a small profit with this.
3. Autosurfs. Personally I saw no benefit in this as most people were switching the advertising on and going out for the day or doing something else. The response rates were virtually nil or non existent. Not recommended.
4. Sending out bulk email or bulk messages to millions of email addresses or websites – do not do this unles you want to face major trouble. The people on these lists never requested to receive ads. Not recommended at all.
5. Using high quality traffic exchanges can be a great source of free targeted traffic if you are prepared to work at it for 30 minutes daily. For a start, other members actually view your website and several of these exchanges actually offer you free highly geo-targeted website traffic. Target by country or by topic – a great way to get the people you want looking at your website.
So in summary I think that the best way to deal with this is to first get into some free traffic exchange advertising, especially the ones with geo-targeting, and then look to expand by sending out some paid solo ads to ezines or newsletters in your industry. Finally learn all you can about PPC advertising. Enjoy!
Don’t lose money and go off and try to reinvent things yourself. I have done the actual testing and the ideas above are my results.
