Find more free targeted traffic – here are 5 things I did

My job is quite stressful. It doesn’t help when my boss Jim is always telling me to reach new targets. Anyway, I spent 4 months researching ways to drive more free targeted traffic to his website for him.

I tried lots of free advertising and lots of paid advertising mainly because I wanted to make it work for some of my own websites I was developing part time. Below are the findings of my 4 months of research, hope they serve you well.

1. Pay per click advertising. This is very targeted but is very very easy to get wrong and one slip can cost you a lot of money. Reading up on it, thousands of people have been left on burnt out embers of past efforts with no money left in their accounts because of this – works well, but can also sting you with it’s deadly bite. I tried this, but couldn’t get it profitable. Needs more work.

2. Finding ezines or newsletters who talk about what you want to promote – and then sending out a paid solo advert to their subscriber list. This works well because it is quite decently targeted. Just make sure that your headline is very strong, and draws the reader into the next bit of text. I personally either drew even or made a small profit with this.

3. Autosurfs. Personally I saw no benefit in this as most people were switching the advertising on and going out for the day or doing something else. The response rates were virtually nil or non existent. Not recommended.

4. Sending out bulk email or bulk messages to millions of email addresses or websites – do not do this unles you want to face major trouble. The people on these lists never requested to receive ads. Not recommended at all.

5. Using high quality traffic exchanges can be a great source of free targeted traffic if you are prepared to work at it for 30 minutes daily. For a start, other members actually view your website and several of these exchanges actually offer you free highly geo-targeted website traffic. Target by country or by topic – a great way to get the people you want looking at your website.

That is my 4 month investigation into online advertising. I conclude that you should take the free route first and use some great traffic exchanges first, secondly try some low cost targeted solo ad advertising in ezines, and finally learn all you can about pay per click advertising.

Don’t lose money and go off and try to reinvent things yourself. I have done the actual testing and the ideas above are my results.

Tagged with: Advertising • Business • entrepreneur • home based business • make money • search engine rankings • targeted • Traffic • website promotion • work from home

Filed under: Traffic

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