My initial assessment of free traffic sites

Well I have been posting to free traffic sites now for more than a week and have had mixed results which I would like to share here. If you recall I initially signed up with:-

www.target-safelist.com
www.safelistpro.com
www.viraladstore.com
www.supersolosmonthly.com
www.business-mailer.com
www.yourezads.com
www.thelistauction.com

I made sure I was operating as a free list member on each of these sites and with the excpetion of thelistauction I have posted ads every day on the other sites in accordance with their ruling. The whole thing only takes about fifteen minutes in the evening; so I don't feel as though this aspect of the whole project was unduly time consuming. But the results have been poor.

Firstly the site I got the most response from on my RWRM site was thelistauction. You are only allowed to post one advert on their site once a week as a free member, but I got 60 hits to my site from that one advert in one day. However 98% of those hits only stayed on the site for the pre-requisite 20 seconds or so so that the clicker got his/her credits for visiting me.

From the all of the others sites I have had less than 5 clicks from each of them on my site over a week. This does suggest that for the most part free traffic (at least as a free member) is only useful to paid members, who have their sites visited on a regular basis. Text ads do not appear to have had any impact on my site statistics at all - note thelistauction sends out email adverts as opposed to text ones.

However my news is not all doom and gloom - I have had some positive traffic from having my web address in my signature line on forums - this would support statements made by many internet marketers that posting useful content on forums, or in the comments on blogs does bring in a certain degree of traffic. I was also pleased to see that for my RWRM site that I have positions two and three on the first page of Google results for the phrase "real work real money" - this is out of over 3,000 returns for that search term so I am quite pleased with that. Unfortunately the only two pages of mine that ranked in the top fifty returns for that keyword phrase was my website (domain) and my hubpage with the same keyword - all of the work I have done in EZ articles, Squidoo and my blog have failed to get any notice from Google at all.

A quick search on Yahoo for the same search terms shows that my domain site is still ranked as number one on Yahoo, which is good news. On the negative side the only other pages to rank within the top 50 for Yahoo were my hubpages (numbers 30, 31 and 32 out of 50) and again none of my other pages, including those from EZ and Squidoo ranked with Google at all.

Then I got curious about the stats for this blog - I installed Google Analytics on it yesterday so of course it would not be showing any traffic figures yet (I would like to know if I am talking to myself :)) but using a phrase search for "grans internet income" I did come up with 44 results including the blog itself of course. What I noticed that might be interesting to you there is that the RSS feeds I put through for the blog (through Feedage and Feedest) ranked first and second in the results, which would suggest they are good sites to lodge your blog with when you get one started. Yahoo also had the blog listed, but only 6 results with the blog itself showing as first and the two RSS feed site links showing second and third.

I am not sure what I can deduce from all this yet but I will let you know when I have come up with something profound :)

Have a great night
Lisa