How do you drive free traf­fic to your website?

How would Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Experts invest $100 to get free traffic?

Today I came across a fan­tas­tic blog post where 7 Inter­net Mar­ket­ing experts share how to mar­ket a web­site on just $100.

Here are the two key insights on how to get free traf­fic that I took away from read­ing this article.

Insight Num­ber 1 on How to Get Free Traffic:

“good con­tent & good links”

~Andy Hagans (worlds best link baiter)

If you are expe­ri­enced, then this will not be very new to you but here is what is so shock­ing to me.  The major­ity of new inter­net mar­keters tend to join dozens of sites or com­mu­ni­ties that promise to unleash tons of free traf­fic to their blog or their site. 

There are two huge prob­lems with these types of sites that promise to help you get free traffic.

Prob­lem 1: Trad­ing time for clicks

Trad­ing time for clicks is not an effec­tive strat­egy on how to get free traf­fic.  Why? Because it does not scale!  There is no lever­age.  Granted, you might be able to get some vis­i­tors to your site by using a ser­vice such as Blo­g­Ex­plo­sion but I would say that you are not invest­ing your time wisely. 

If you are doing it for fun just to dis­cover new blogs, then I would say use a dif­fer­ent ser­vice such as MyBlogLog because you will not dis­cover the lead­ing blogs by using a sim­ple traf­fic exchange.

Prob­lem 2: Tar­geted vs. untar­geted traffic

Many new­bies will signup and join sites such as:

• Instant­Buzz
• TrumpTraf­fic
• Traf­fic­Swarm
• Hits2u.com
• etc, etc…

How­ever, I am not even link­ing to these sites because I do not endorse them and I would not rec­om­mend them to you.  The prob­lem with these sites is that while they might get you some or even a lot of free traf­fic, it will most likely be NOT tar­geted and so while you can get free traf­fic here it will con­vert poorly.

Insight Num­ber 2 on How to Get Free Traffic:

Spend $20 to $200 on books about the topic I am inter­ested in, and I would get a few back­ground books on mar­ket­ing and the web includ­ing Pur­ple Cow, The Clue­train Man­i­festo, and Don’t Make Me Think. ~Aron Wall

Learn from the best SEO experts in town.  Read every lead­ing SEO blog and invest money into buy­ing SEO guides and books.  You need to know how to opti­mize your con­tent because only opti­mized con­tent will do great in the search engines. 

Insight Num­ber 3 on How to Get Free Traffic:

Start blogging, pay for con­tent writ­ing, and lever­age social media

Another com­mon theme that sur­faced was the impor­tance of writ­ing blog posts and sur­pris­ingly the impor­tance of hir­ing peo­ple to write con­tent for you.  This one came as a sur­prise to me but  I think this is some­thing that the lead­ing Inter­net Mar­ket­ing experts have been doing for a long time.  Writ­ing good orig­i­nal con­tent takes time and there are lots of great writ­ers out there that are offer­ing writ­ing ser­vices at a good price at eLance.

To find out what con­tent they should write and how to best lever­age social media sites con­tinue by read­ing the Inter­view of the top 7 Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Experts…

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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