Secrets of Free Traffic Generation

Several methods of free traffic generation are available on the Internet; these include people who are professional and bloggers giving invaluable advices to those who seek free and paid network traffic to their sites.

Why traffic? Well, the underlying reason is simply money. If you have the technical know-how, a huge traffic that is driven to your site can be transformed into revenue. While this is not what everyone has, I will try to provide some advices of my own here.

(get more traffic for free...)

Introduction
The way to make money online is only by having people to visit your site that you are promoting. However, that is not always practical, and advertising can be rather expensive and risky. More than often, you are not guaranteed a profitable return on your investment. Other methods include paying for traffic. However, that can be quite expensive and the audience driven to your site may not be your intended target.

In this article, the aim is to introduce various methods of generating free traffic. Though it can be a cheap alternative, but of course that means you need to work a little harder. If the result is a success, then you are gearing towards a much exciting return than you would expect.

Effective Advertisement Writing
According to some undisclosed sources, it is important to bear in mind the following four key factors when writing an advertisement:

1. Action - get readers to perform some action, e.g. click on the link below. With interactivity, readers tend to be driven by action.
2. Attention - provide a captivating headline, make sure you choose something that interests the reader.
3. Desire - arouse the readers' desire by telling them certain promotion is limited offer, e.g. whilst stock last, or closing deadline is approaching. This will generate some desire in the readers not to lose out in these special offers.
4. Interest - inform the readers about what the site or promotion is about. This gives readers the knowledge.

There is often a question about whether should one create a unique ad, or should it be something that is popular, and thus common. My answer is, there is a trade-off in between. Popular ads tend to receive much more interest from readers, but it also means much more supply by other advertisers.

Ads Tracking
Despite following the given guideline, it may not always be effective. Thus, it is vital to provide Ads Tracking to check if your ads is performing well; that is, if it is driving traffic to your site. This also helps to monitor the effectiveness of your ads, and allows you to fine-tune your ads for better traffic.

Classified Ads and Directories
Both have different functionalities, but I tend to classify "Classified Ads" and "Free Directories Submission" together. The goal of listing your site on these directories is to ensure your ads get click, and brings the readers to your site. Another benefit is to improve inbound links (some directories have "nofollow" tag, so that may not work).

Listing your site on multiple directories and sites can be tedious, but it is probably one of the cheapest methods to get free traffic.

Traffic Exchanges with Other Sites
You may feel by adding an external link in your site may bring your ranking of your site down. But naturally, if you do it well, it will probably be more beneficial than at a disadvantage.

By exchanging traffic, inserting each other links on your blog site can help two blogs, particularly if they are of the same genre, to generate more traffic. Readers who tend to visit a site, will find another site that is also of similar interest and will also be driven to the other site, and vice versa.

However, because of certain reasons, Google has penalised some sites that have one-to-one link exchange. To avoid that, some webmasters have introduced 3-way link exchange; that is, Site A will link to Site B, owner by Owner B. Then, Owner B who has another site, Site C, which he will use to link to Site A.

Building Networks
There are several ways to build up a site's network. I will list some of the few key ones. For instance,

1. Forums - Some forum networks, e.g. V7N and DigitalPoint have a large pool of members. These forums allow members to include their signatures, which can be used are links to your site. By having these, while you communicate in the forum with every post made, you also generate links to your site.
2. Blogs - Leave genuine and useful comments on blog sites also help to increase inbound link. However, it is important not to input too many links, as it may be thought as spam, and thus deleted.

Of course, there are other ways, which including building up your own forum to increase networking. This may be quite difficult, as you need to know where to find these members. Furthermore, not anyone will just simply come and join your forums, if there is no incentive to it. For example, Hostmatrix Forums provide its members with free web hosting facility. Because of this, the members are always there.

Profit Blogging
There are basically two kinds of bloggers, or rather blogging sites - one is a personal blog, generally not interested in making money, the other is a professional blog, which is normally aimed at generating money. One such example is Coolest Gadgets, a simple blogging site, but generates a huge amount of return, as disclosed in SelfMadeMinds. Since this is about revenue-generation, I shall focus on those that are blogging for profit.

Blog are not static sites that will always give you traffic even when the content doesn't change. In fact, blog sites can be quite successful, if you know how to handle it well. In terms of traffic, with eventually affects the revenue, a blog site has be constantly updated with new fresh content. Only then, will it gain a foothold in the search engine, as well as attracting readers.

There are already other made-ready blog sites, e.g. Blogger.com and Blogspot.com. But, it is better to get a new site that you have control over, e.g. a web-hosting server, and a domain name. Generally, by committing about 3 to 5 (unique and interesting) articles a day is sufficient to keep you going. Of course, the side job that you need to take care of, is to spread the news about the new site.

Forum Marketing
Believe it or not, but forum marketing is one of the most effective and efficient method of advertising. In fact, it is low-cost and usually free. By spending a couple of hours a day in multiple forums, you will have higher chances of capturing incoming links and traffic.

Below are some quick approaches to successful forum marketing:

1. Answer questions posed by other members.
2. Ask questions so as to be answered by other experts in the forum.
3. Request for a review or a critique of your site, article, post or blog. It is a good way to ask for opinion.
4. Offer to write an article. This usually attracts a lot of members' interest.
5. Get opinion from members. For instance, what to wear for the day, or what to do when your wife ask you a certain question, you can find out how other members handle the situation and probable offer you a good piece of advice.

Though this may be a simple, concise form of how you can tap on the Internet to generate free traffic, hopefully it has provided you some source of idea to help you kick start your free advertising campaign and start generating traffic and hence, revenue.

Good luck!