I spent thousands of dollars a month on paid traffic from ppc services like google adwords , yahoo, and other shopping comparison website. When it was time for me to make a report on my earnings and losses, I discovered a very disturbing thing.
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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