Free Traffic - is it worth the time?

Hi there,

Tonight I thought I would explain a bit about the free traffic methods I have been using to try and promote my two current projects - Can Ghosts Hurt You.com and Real Work Real Money.com.

There are a number of different methods of driving traffic to your site, product or affiliate product and basically what you choose comes down to whether you have money or time. As I am money poor and time (slightly) richer I go for the free methods. The benefits of free methods is that

1. They are free of course
2. They can be implemented as you have the time to do them
3. They can help you build an organic traffic system that is based on search engine results

The free traffic methods I have been using are article marketing, free advertising, this blog, and forum posting. Now they all have their good and bad points as you will see below.

Article Marketing is great - if you ever see those ads that tell you that you can have page one Google ranking in like 24 or 48 hours - they are talking about the power of article marketing and in particular having those article posted on article directory sites like EzineArticles.com. I have three articles on Ezine Articles on my Ghosts niche and for the search phrase "Can Ghosts Hurt you" I have four of the top ten spots on Google and of course those articles all point to my website. For the slightly shorter search phrase "Ghosts hurt you" today I have five of the top ten Google results including the top two.

Probably the only problem with article writing is that it is time consuming. As you know I worked as a writer for ten years before starting this and even I have trouble cranking out one article after the other. But Travis of Bum Marketing fame suggests that it is just as effective if you write your articles one a day and submit them to at least four of the top article directory sites. Actually there is a lot more I can talk about on this topic so I think I will make it the subject of a new post so look out for it.

For free advertising I have gone with YourEzAds.com and ListAuction.com. To use them (for free) you have to click on emails that you get from other members to earn credits towards your own advertising campaign. Now this is a good and a bad thing. It is time consuming as you have to stay on each link you click for 15-20 seconds and you get heaps of emails. But that said I have actually signed up for a few things that I have found on my enforced surfing and I am making credits towards my own adverts.

Suggestions if you want to use them - go for a free site at first like EzAds - use a new email account like a gmail one so that your other mail won't get lost in the deluge and just set aside 30 mins a day and click. Of course you can always buy credits for your ads as well if you would rather do that than click for thirty mins a day.

Wow, I have just gone over this post and it is getting a little lengthy so I will continue this tomorrow. Don't forget comments are welcome as well as links. Any questions, just ask.

Hugs Lisa :)