Whats your most effective form of free traffic generation?

[JoblessJake]

[Lynn Terry]

Forums, definitely forums

[JoblessJake]

Wait.

Lynn really forums? Even over article marketing? And are you saying forums just because you started this one or even without that you would still say forums?

[Lynn Terry]

Yes, and I should have clarified "not just because I own one!" lol

There are two things that I think bring in the most highly targeted and responsive traffic: search engines and discussion forums. Search engine marketing is great because you can get in front of people who are specifically searching for what you offer, when they are most interested (obviously, since they performed the search).

So prior to even launching a site, during development phase, I put much consideration into how I want to optimize the site - for which phrases, etc.

Second to that is discussion forums because its easy, because there are forums in practically any niche, and because people become genuinely interested in you and in what you offer when you have one-on-one interaction like that.

I just looked at the stats for my blog for the month of July, for example, and of the top 5 referring websites... 3 of them are forums.

Mind you, outside of this one I dont invest TONS of time in forums. But the cool thing about them is that those posts/threads get indexed in the major search engines as well. So I have one post on the V7N forum that continuously sends me traffic every month - and I posted it more than 6 months ago.

[Lynn Terry]

p.s. Plus its more fun to answer questions and get involved in discussions than it is to sit down and write articles :p

I think Article Marketing is GREAT, mind you. I do it too. But often I'll take what starts out as a forum discussion and use it to write an article. This one being a great example - I could easily take this topic and run with it, then have my VA submit it to the top article sites.

[Home_Based_Mom]

I have never had what I would call real success with any free method. Articles bring a few visitors, but mostly out of curiosity. Forums bring pretty much the same.

Traffic Swarm and the other auto-surfs are a total waste. Not only do they violate Google's TOS and risk losing you your AdSense income, there is serious doubt anyone even looks up from whatever they are reading to see your site before moving on.

Sandi

[mewcreations]

[Lynn Terry]

I really enjoy V7N And they can drive A LOT of traffic!

The Warrior Forum is another great one - very active.

[tigrs84]

[Lynn Terry]

[mewcreations]

I have recently been submitting to directories. I try to do a minimum of 5 submission per day. I'm not sure what the Page Rankings are on these, but I they were free, with no recprocals needed. addurl-free.com, zeezo,arakne-links.com, and worldsiteindex.com. Hope it's okay to share this info.

[rosesylvia1]

Hi, I need some tips on traffic generation to my site, can anyone provide me with some good guide lines to generate traffic?

[mewcreations]

[Adrianne]

I've used traffic exchanges in the past and the only time I actually received any referrals was if the biz op I promoted was free. The most effective way to use TE's is to join about 10 of them and promote all 10 of them so that you can build your own list of referrals. This takes several months to build but it does work.

If you build a relationship with your referrals, then you might be able to promote your paying business to them. I stress the word MIGHT. I've communicated with my referrals on a regular basis but they just never responded. When I joined a paid-only TE, I thought the results would be better since every member was a paying member. That didn't seem to make any difference either. Nevertheless, I stay away from TE's.

[Lynn Terry]