The ad I posted had a simple photo of what I am selling and a brief description underneath, followed by a “Click here for more information” Link at the end of the description. I waited an hour to let craigslist approve my ad which they did within minutes of posting.

I also have a tool for my website where I can view my website traffic live in real time within seconds of landing on my website. I was very impressed with the results, and I could see the referral URL coming from Craigslist.newyork and craigslist.newjersey (the 2 states I posted my ads). The traffic would not stop as I would continue to check every 30 -60 minutes and I would always see 4-5 people at on my landing page from craigslist, and as people would leave my website, within 1-2 minutes I would get a couple of more people.

So I decided to take it to the next level and wondered if this could work with just 2 states, how good would it work posting in many more states within the US. The problem is, craigslist has an Anti-Spam system so you could get banned if you posted too many times with the same IP adress.

I decided to do a little research and found a nice program called CLBOT Pro, a Craigslist Auto Poster that would automatically post to everywhere I told it to with the click of a button. So I decided to purchase this software for $99, and purchased the Addons they had which were the IP Adress Rotator and the Plugin for auto captcha since posting requires you to enter a capctha before submitting your post. I basically spent almost $300  and created a few email and craigslist accounts I could use with the software.

The first day I used the software, I let it post all over the US in certain cities and states, since I did not want to over post and risk being banned by craigslist police .

The next day I checked my Google analytics and found craigslist all over under traffic sources, from all over the country. The total traffic I had received from craigslist was 588 unique visitors for the first day.

I was blown away from the results I achieved for so little time and best of all for free. If Google hadn’t suspended me, I would have never researched other ways of getting traffic, thus resulting in me finding the craigslist free posting idea.

Now, I am going to start off by listing the major players in the shopping comparison from the best to the worst that will give you some decent traffic and conversion. Remember, every niche is different, so I am speaking of my own experience selling electronics online and some computer accessories.

Shopping Comparison Websites:

1. Nextag -NexTag is a website for comparing online product prices. It started originally as a website where buyers and sellers could negotiate prices for Computers and Electronics products. The current business model with a focus on comparison shopping has existed since 2000. In June 2007, Providence Equity Partners purchased a two-thirds majority of the company. It was ranked by Time magazine as one of the fifty best websites of 2008.
2. Shopping.com - Shopping.com used to be called DealTime.com. It was founded in Israel in 1998 by Dr. Nahum Sharfman and Amir Ashkenaz, whose original idea was to create a downloadable client that would monitor changes in prices of products the user seeks to buy over time, notifying the user when the product price reached a predetermined level (hence the site’s original name, DealTime).Originally targeting American consumers, the basic concept was quickly modified from a downloadable client to a purely web-based service, a concept the company has kept ever since. The company went finally public in October 2004, and was acquired by eBay in June 2005. It is currently a semi-autonomous division within eBay and still runs the www.shopping.com website. eBay and Shopping.com functionalities are slowly being merged, for example eBay’s PayPal payment system in SDC’s offering to its advertising merchants.
3. Pricegrabber -PriceGrabber is a price comparison service. They’ve partnered with over 11,000 mechants and sellers. They also serve as the data source for numerous other shopping web sites.In addition to standard comparison shopping, PriceGrabber offers an election guide web site, allowing visitors to comparison shop the candidates, and a “green” site, helping visitors find environmentally friendly products.It was acquired by Experian in 2005 for $485 million.
4. Bizrate -Shopzilla is a price comparison service. Founded in June 1996 by Farhad Mohit and Henri Asseily as Binary Compass Enterprises, the company changed its name to BizRate.com in January 1999. The company launched the website Shopzilla in November 2004, which then became the company name too.The company’s mission is to enable shoppers to find, compare and buy anything, sold by virtually anyone, anywhere. In May 2006, Shopzilla attracted over 20 million unique visitors according to ComScore. Shopzilla also operates the BizRate.com consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews of stores and products each year.In June 2005, Shopzilla was acquired by The E. W. Scripps Company for $525 million and is now part of its interactive media division. Shopzilla operates websites serving consumers and retailers in the U.S., UK, French and German markets.

Other Smaller Shopping Comparison websites

1. Mysimon – mySimon is a comparison shopping website owned by CBS Interactive. The site offers shopping recommendations, buying advice, and side by side price comparisons for various products. The site directs users to other shopping sites such as Amazon.com when searching for products.
2. Yahoo Shopping -Yahoo! Shopping is Yahoo’s price comparison service.Yahoo uses the Kelkoo price comparison service it acquired in April 2004 to power Yahoo! Shopping in 6 countries.
3. Google Base – Google Base is an online database provided by Google into which any user can add almost any type of content, such as text, images, and structured information in formats like XML, PDF, Excel, RTF, Word Perfect. As of 2008, it is available to the public as a beta version. If Google finds it relevant it may appear on its shopping search engine, Google Maps or even the web search. The piece of content can then be labeled with attributes like the ingredients for a recipe or the camera model for stock photography. As of 2008, the user interface is available in English and German. Because information about the service was leaked before public release, it generated much interest in the information technology community prior to release.

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I’m going to show you how you can get tons of free traffic from Youtube. First note, Youtube gets at least 4,000,000,000 visitors a month, so the potential is already there for traffic.

It is very easy to setup a Youtube account , all you will need is an email address to set up your account. Now, let me point out some facts about the video giant

• YouTube is in the Top 5 most valuable web properties in the world.
• YouTube features videos from hundreds and thousands of members, and has made MANY people famous.
• And get this-more than 75,000 new videos are uploaded every, single day (you see that right.)
• Last but not least-YouTube serves up to two hundred MILLION clicks daily.

Like I said, there is a lot of opportunities when using youtube to promote your product or website, and best of all, it’s absolutely free. The idea is, lets say you are in the business of selling mp3 players , and would like to gain free traffic using youtube.All you will need is a camcorder, and a cheap software to capture your videos from your camera and be able to edit the video right on your computer.

I highly recommend using Ulead Video Studio. It can easily capture videos off your camera and you can add effects and background music to your video.  You will also need to have your own strategies on how you plan to use these videos:

Strategy #1 – Your videos should be short. These shouldn’t be long movies, as people are busy and look for instant gratification most of the times. No more than 3 to 4 minutes.

Strategy #2 – Then, you’d want your web site URL at the bottom of your videos, so people can see it.

Strategy #3 – Next,  Think of some ways to make your videos viral. See, people on YouTube are constantly on the mindset of: “If I like a video, I’ll like to pass it to my friends.”

Now that we have an understanding of this technique, let me get into a bit more detail and examples of using Youtube for sending free traffic onto your website. This video is from Youtube account “esf2005″ , linked to a company who sells mp3 and mp4 video player gadgets.

Since they mostly sell mp3 players on their website, they had setup a youtube account specifically showcasing some of their mp3 modeled players with links pointing to their website, their website url displayed on the actual video, and the title of the video shows their web address again.

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This is a good strategy they use, not only promoting their model mp4 players and showing their url, but also showing something that pictures cannot even provide, detailed play by play of the actual item they are showcasing, detail by detail. What better way to display an item for sale, buy using a detailed video, instead of static images. The actual link to this page on youtube is  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNQyKnlKHU&feature=related .

If you checkout their user page, you will see many other mp3 players they sell on their website. There is no question about getting traffic sent to this website through their videos, the only question is, how much.

Remember also, most youtube videos will also display on google’s first page results when searching for that particular item.

Now, I think you are starting to get the idea of this free traffic method to your site .  Remember, its very important for you take as much advantage of youtube for free traffic as much as you can. Take a look at a screenshot of how and where to use your website url on your video page.

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As I counted all of my net earnings for the month, I started counting my marketing cost for ppc services and found I was spending almost 40 -50% of my budget on paid traffic to my website. Even though I have made many sales by using ppc, after doing all the math I discovered that I had lost money instead of making money.

I knew ppc was very expensive, but I didn’t expect to loose money using it.  So I started researching all over the internet on ways to drive free traffic to your website. Through trial and error, I found some effective ways to drive free traffic onto your website while reducing my spending on ppc services. Here are some ways to drive free traffic onto your website without spending a fortune:

SEO - Everyone knows SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key to get your website ranked and displayed on the first page of google. If you never heard of the term organic listings, let me explain what this is.  There are 2 sections on google, paid listings (right side, and on the very top, highlighted in purple) and there is whats called organic listings (on the left side) which are the search results that show up on the left side of the page, which is where most people will start clicking.

These are absolutely free and the best out of the 2. However, you cannot just get your site ranked on the first page of google in just 1 day. You need to have alot of work done on your website, either by yourself, which I don’t recommend,  or by hiring an SEO company to do all the work for you. The typical time it will take for your website to show on the organic listings on google’s first or second page can take 3-6 months to appear. Alot of people are not willing to wait that long so they usually go with the ppc method which gets your site up within minutes on the right side of the page.

Google Base - Google lets users submit their products onto their shopping search engine for free. Most shopping cart software have the ability to export your whole website for google’s feed format. This means insead of making a file and adding your products 1 by 1 with all of its attributes to a file, a file is created through your shopping cart with all of your current products, attributes, pricing, etc.. and can easily be uploaded onto google’s shopping search engine for free.

These days google seems to be using their shopping search engine a bit more, so its very wise to take advantage of this free service. Though the traffic may not be like seo, but its free traffic and your listings may even appear on google’s main page for a particular product. Example, if you were selling ipods, and you listed your product on google base , when a user searches for ipod , or ipod nano, google’s shopping results will appear on the very first page on top.

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Youtube - You’ll be surprised on how effective youtube videos can be on a marketing perspective.  Let me show you 1 guy who uses his youtube account to direct traffic onto his website.

This is very clever, as this website specializes in selling electronics and mp3 players. As you can see from the photo above, they have their youtube account full of demo videos showing their products and its features. Now, the marketing comes within the video page itself.

He uses the website URL on the bottom of the video and also places an “http” link on the description of the video to let viewers click on the link and take them to the website. The title  is very important as well, and very effective when doing SEO on your website.

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