Free Traffic better than No Traffic

Posted by Kris in July 2nd 2008

Free traffic is great. When I get free traffic to my CPA offers I love it. In fact… I love it so much that I dedicate a good portion of my marketing to generating free traffic. I’m not talking about the SEO type of free traffic… I’m talking about the forum posting, yahoo question answering, youtube video ripping type of traffic. Some people may look at this as a non-business tactics… But making money online is all about how much you can profit for the amount of money you put in.

Those three tactics I mentioned can help you take your online business to a whole new level. I often ponder hiring a full time poster, answerer, and ripper. I know that if I did then they would at least pay for their position if not more.

So… I’m going to start going off on a tangent over this next week on generating free traffic to your CPA offers. This is in answer to the many questions I have received on alternatives to PPC.
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The most important thing that you can do when your building your free traffic is to come off as a professional. People need to trust you. They need to feel as if they can come to you for anything. Build your “brand” to say. When you are marketing to a forum you can’t just go in and start shooting your link to people. We all know what would happen if we did.

Don’t start out asking questions either. You need to go in right away and be the authority. If I was marketing to the dating niche, I would find several forums full of people looking for love. Then I would begin to answer their questions and interact with them on a more personal level. When I say don’t ask questions, I don’t mean not to ask personal questions to the members. Asking people individual questions via the personal message feature is an essential thing that you must do. You can also ask them personal questions in the actual threads. You’ll know the perfect time to do this when you see the opportunity. This will place them on your side when you start recommending products in the future. Don’t EVER ask them for advice though. Say something to them like “Hey I noticed your from _______ I have a cousin that lives there. Is it as boring as she says?”. Get personal and they will LOVE you.

Once you have a few dozen posts under your belt feel free to add your signature. I never add it right away. Some people will know right off the bat that you are a marketer and you will get called out. I like to have 50 posts under my name before I begin to even come close to marketing. For a lot of us this method might take a little too long for our liking. But I promise you that people will appreciate your “wisdom” and when they do… they will eat up anything you say… Even if you tell them “YOU MUST JOIN THIS DATING SITE!”. And shoot them a link

This tactic takes time. But once we build trust in these forums, we can begin to market to them for a long period of time.

Oh here’s another thing. When you do get to the point that you are to market to them. Don’t send them directly to the affiliate link. Make sure you send them to an actual URL. And if your thinking right… It will either be a URL with the rotator on it… or a poll.

Next post I’ll go into my tactics for yahoo answers.

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12 Comments

Ultra Online Marketing Said,

July 2nd, 2008 @2:06 am

Cool post, I agree with your title and I hope this would be a best site for all the marketing learners and I hope this would also make good relation between customer and business. Good post.

Nigerian Entrepreneur Said,

July 2nd, 2008 @4:15 am

That’s quite an interesting way to look for free traffic. I have been using some of the suggestion, but not as well as you explained above. I guess I will simply refine my approach for better results. I love forums. Cheers.

RyanB Said,

July 2nd, 2008 @8:37 am

Awesome, I always love hearing about new ways to think outside the box and get free traffic. I think this has been one of the strong points of cash tactics in the past, so bring on the ideas!

derrick love Said,

July 2nd, 2008 @10:34 am

Neat post but I disagree that your profits online are all about how much money is spent. The time I spend is the most important and I think your strategy may be ok for short term profits but may be best for just getting back links. Why not add more content to your site or build a content site that eventualy directs people to your landing page. This will help with serps when people search google.

Otherrwise use forums to build your list for long term relations and long term profits.

Marko Said,

July 2nd, 2008 @4:02 pm

I actually did this exact tactic but on a different niche and make about $100/month from it consistently. I had about 100 posts under my belt and my account at the time was a few months old, then I just commented on a few threads with redirected affiliate links.

b2b guy Said,

July 2nd, 2008 @9:56 pm

And when you post, make sure either you or your poster knows the proper spelling of words for the situation (add vs ad) (two vs too) (they’re vs their vs there) ;)

This post is seriously on point, though - there are so many markets online where there is a void in terms of market leadership. By leadership, I mean someone that is going to help start, organize, and continue the conversation online.

I don’t just mean popular b2c markets that everyone is going after. As an example, about 1/4 of all searches are b2b-related yet there are only slightly over 100 b2b marketing blogs while there are over 100K b2c marketing blogs. There is a goldmine if one is diligent and willing to learn as well as take a risk even if it is only with one’s time.

Even if it takes a year to cement that position, it starts paying off exponentially. Reap what you sow…

XRay Said,

July 3rd, 2008 @2:55 am

Good article Kris. My free traffic methods center around web 2.0 sites to promote affiliate products. I’ve wondered how these tactics would work with CPA offers …the forum method would work well for me since I enjoy dispensing advice :-). I’m really looking forward to reading your next post

Dagmar Said,

July 3rd, 2008 @5:00 pm

Good! I am Extremely curious How you are going to deal with the issue of the ‘free traffic’ vs. USA only CPA offers, or any other country specific for that matter.

As this is my Biggest problem with the CPA offers: with the free traffic How do you get Only the people from USA (etc) to go to your USA only CPA offer. As in the most of the PPC you can specify which country visitors you want to show to your ad only.

donsi7 Said,

July 5th, 2008 @7:50 pm

Hello
I think you can, target traficc only for usa if you have a domain .us.
I don´t know really google in USA, but in spain we can make three types of search, search all web, search in spanish, or search in spain.
If you choose search in spain, google show only .es domains.
You can redirect the traffic of your .us domain to your main domain.
I am a small domainer, i have over 200 domains , and I don´t uderstand why .us extensions is not valued. If I want to make my site to sell products offline in usa or if i want only usa traffic is better promote sites with .us than with .com
In fact i have a lot of .us
I apologize for my english
Greetings

Freddy Said,

July 6th, 2008 @10:58 am

YOU said “I often ponder hiring a full time poster, answerer, and ripper. I know that if I did then they would at least pay for their position if not more.”

Doesn’t that imply that a low hourly wage worker might pay for him or herself? Therefore, when you do it yourself, you are earning $5-$8 per hour for your own time?

Does not seem like a very lucrative business model if that is true.

Kris Said,

July 6th, 2008 @12:48 pm

They would “at least” pay for their wages. What they would generate would go above and beyond their wages. Therefore if I was to hire someone for min. wage and they generated $100-$150 a day then I would profit over $20 a day that that person was hired. Over the period of 1 year that would result in a min. of $5,220 for ME. Now you may not think that $20 a day is very good. And really if that was the only thing you were doing online then yeah… it would suck. But the key (as with investing money into stocks) is to broaden your scope. Don’t put ALL of your eggs into one basket.

Also, you can’t expect to go online and make $20,000 your first month. I literally started making money online from Yahoo answers. And when I started out it was slow. But the more I answered the more people bought. I found out that my answers were being scrapped for forums, and other question asking type of websites WITH my links still intact. Depending on your niche and product you are promoting, you can generate a GOOD chunk of money from these types of sites.

But you’re right… This is not what YOU want to do full time. Just use it as a starting ground.

Becoming a Millionaire Said,

July 14th, 2008 @6:14 pm

Generating traffic to your offers is a big thing… I often get emails and questions from people asking me how to increase traffic and it really is pretty simple depending on the competition of the niche you are targeting!.