One of the biggest problems for the beginner marketer is where to find traffic. Certainly in the early days, spending vast amounts on solo ads or pay per click advertising is not always an option, especially if you pick the wrong provider or don’t make the right choices, you could spend a lot of money for very little return, thus causing despondency and calling the whole thing a scam. If some returns can be gained using low or no-cost traffic, it is much easier to keep personal morale up and making success a bit more likely.
So what free traffic sources are there?
Let’s start here – using Article Marketing.
Article marketing is not for everyone. Having a good command of written English is pretty much essential, as is the desire to write. It’s also not a short-term thing. You need to have plenty of patience for your articles to be discovered and one of the best ways to be discovered is to write a large number of articles, preferably around the same or similar subjects. The link to your lead capture is best put into your resource box at the bottom of the article and bear in mind, that some article repository sites are fussy about the sort of links you use. On the plus side, your links will be there forever or at least as long as the repository remains in business.
Link exchanging
This is an idea that works but can take a bit of trust. You find people with similar offers to yours, put your link on their download page in exchange for having their link on yours. The downside is that it needs a certain amount of traffic to start with. If no-one is visiting their site then no-one will be seeing yours either. The trust issue is that they won’t remove your link (or you won’t remove theirs) as soon as your back is turned and also that you are both sending equal amounts of traffic to each other.
Video Marketing
This one depends on a certain amount of skill, much as article marketing does. Doing careful research on viable topics to find what is popular, then making videos, in whatever style (talking head, cartoon, presentation) is the biggest essential here, and the research will probably take more time than the video (or article) creation.
Everything to do with any advertising is going to take time and/or money. If you can put both in, in large measures you are pretty much, guaranteed success. If you don’t have much money then you will need to put in time and lots of it. This is probably the biggest downfall of the newbie marketer – forgetting that, like any other business, online marketing will take research, and that always takes some time to do properly.
The observant will notice that I haven’t mentioned Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as a free traffic method. That is because although some of that is within your control, a lot of it is not and depends on search engines liking what you do (at least this week). If they change their minds about what is likeable, then your work could be wasted.
Stick with stuff that is more within your control
