There is one vitally important rule in generating a consistent income from your website: You need a steady flow of targeted website traffic. If you don’t have any visitors on your site, you won’t make any money – that’s just a fact.
You have many ways to generate low cost website traffic. Don’t spend money you don’t have or use methods you can’t afford.
Here is a short overview over the most effective ways of getting visitors for free or low cost:
Joint Ventures
If you have a product that is of high quality, you should try to get list owners to promote it for you. In return, you should offer them a much higher than usual commission – even the full 100%. Your goal should be not to profit on the front end but on the backend.
In other words, you must build your list and offer your new subscribers or buyers other related products. Once they are on your list, you’ll get multiple chances of making them an offer they can’t resist.
Link Exchanges
This is a sure and proven method and has been working for years. You will seldom find a website which doesn’t have any link to another site. Most webmasters are willing to exchange links with each other so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.
A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a higher ranking in search engine results – even though it’s working better with one way links.
Startpage Exchanges
One of the best free possibilities for getting targeted traffic is the use of Startpage Exchanges. The way it works is very easy to explain: You view other people’s websites and in exchange, they are viewing the URL YOU are advertising to them.
Sure, you are not getting the same conversion rates as from an email campaign. But still, you are getting targeted visitors (you can choose target groups that you want to advertise to e.g. Internet marketers or business opportunity seekers) to the site through YOUR LINK.
Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.
Write and Submit Articles
There are many ezines and article directories on the internet which are waiting for your article submissions. Also, many freelance writers are willing to write articles for you for a small fee if you can’t write them yourself.
Write about something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Provide tips and guidelines related to the subject or niche your site is about. Include a resource box at the end of your article and link it back to your site.
Publish a Newsletter
Publishing a newsletter gives you free advertising to targeted prospects. If you think that you are not a writer or you don’t exactly how to write, you can outsource that part of your business. Hire writers on freelancer platforms like Elance.com, Scriptlance.com, Guru.com or similar websites. In your newsletter, make recommendations for products you like and which you have personally used. Then you are almost guaranteed to make sales.
Participate in Forum Discussions
This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website and build your expertise at the same time. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that are on the same subject or are in the same niche as your site by using your signature line when posting.
Start a free Blog
You can start a blog for free on a platform like Blogger.com. By adding exclusive niche content to your blog on a regular basis, you can achieve the same high positions which regular websites are getting. You just have to be careful that you are not choosing a too competitive niche. Then direct that traffic to your main site which has your salesletter to make sales.
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I would to take exception to the suggestion that traffic exchanges provide targeted exposure. In my opinion traffic exchanges attract people who have a lot of time on their hands yet don’t have two nickels to rub together to see what might happen. Such people tend to look for free programs that might provide the miracle they need, and they rarely upgrade. They are not likely to become either profitable customers or effective business builders.
thank you for your email to this entry
your article sure is helpful…
Bobby
Some good tips! Thanks! However, I will have to agree with Larry on the start exchanges. I have found them being a waste of time as those who are viewing, if they take a moment to view a page at all, are really only interested in gathering credits and pitching. These are NOT people who are in the BUY mode!
Hi Tami,
it all depends on what you are selling and which startpage exchanges you are using…
e.g. TrafficSwarm is one of the best traffic exchanges and can bring in quite some sales with the right offer. But it’s better to go for their email address anyway. You need to use traffic exchanges for getting them to opt-in. Then it also gets easier to make some sales. I agree that these systems in most cases are not designed for direct sales.
Detlev
Your suggestions on generating taffic are excellent, however you forgot to mentions S.E.O.
Search engines are FREE traffic generators. I’ve been doing it for years. Sure it may require a little more work but it is pure lazer targeted traffic.
Hi,
Top of the list should be a content rich, search engine optimized web page.
This wins every time.
Your keyword selection is obviously key.
If you optimize your webpage for 4 or 5 good search terms then you should get tons of free traffic from the search engines
All of you are correct. SEO provides free traffic as I am getting it from search engines. But it doesn’t hurt to get more traffic from Detlev’s suggestions.
Thanks, Detlev!
Melissa
Nice and useful tips, thank you!
This is a very good list of ways to get traffic. No list is perfect and we all have ways of getting traffic that we have found works for us.
Traffic exchanges have there good and bad sides just as any thing does. As was said in the comments here Traffic exchanges are for people that want traffic to their site without having to spend money to get it. When I have offered a free item along with a option to subscribe to my newsletter I have good results. When I have tried to sell something it has done worse then bad. As long as you know what works and what doesn’t Traffic exchanges are a useful tool.
As far as people on the Traffic Exchanges not upgrading I disagree with that. I have had people who signed up for my newsletter then went and joined Traffic Exchanges I recommended go join and upgraded. Again you have to know what works on Traffic Exchanges and when you do it is worth the effort.
Some good tips although the Traffic exchange is not my favorite. It does nothing for my site. I prefer SEO, it got my site to #2 in Google for $0.