Other than the big-name traffic like Google, MSN, and Yahoo!s text-ad programs, there are endless competitors for pay-per-click venues… More than you could imagine.
So many in fact, that yep, you guessed it, there are freebies here too for us to take advantage of. How much? Well, how about $1,040 in PPC money, without even showing a credit card? (With minimum bids as low as $0.005!)
These types of “Old School” PPC engines are the dinosaurs of the net. Most of these companies you’re about to see are older than Google, and even older than any kind of Search Engine Ranking! Still, this method of gathering all these free targeted visitors to your website works great. It has been forgotten about and then well hidden by the old-timer PPC fanatics until recently.
So, how does it work? Below is a chart of Pay-Per-Click search engines that are currently giving away free sign-up bonuses. They don’t even want to see your credit card, just sign up and the money will be waiting for you inside the account.
I have personally verified each and every one of these by hand in making this report. To my knowledge there has never been a listing of them all in one place like this before, at least not with the amounts listed.
Keep in mind that each of these services will only allow one sign-up bonus per person, so make sure you are promoting the right program or combination of programs before you make all of your bids active.
So here are your 100,983 Clickthrus, sorted by traffic they send, most to least:Search Post $ 550.00 $0.01 55000 End Find $ 100.00 $0.01 10000 Surf The Web $ 75.00 $0.01 7500 LinkAThon $ 50.00 $0.01 5000 Meteor Surf $ 25.00 $0.01 2500 Search Mega $ 25.00 $0.01 2500 Seek Hawk $ 25.00 $0.01 2500 Seekster $ 25.00 $0.01 2500 Sci Seek $ 24.00 $0.01 2400 E Search Zone $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Free Explore $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Jiffy Seek $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Kwick Search $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Link Assist $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Search Raider $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Spider Jump $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 The Best Find $ 10.00 $0.01 1000 Harry Knows $ 25.00 $0.05 500 Meg Peg $ 5.00 $0.01 500 Search it Fast $ 5.00 $0.01 500 Alternative Search Engine $ 10.00 $0.03 333 Leap Surf $ 5.00 $0.02 250 MegaCrawl $ 2.00 $0.01 200 Find Big $ 2.00 $0.01 200 The Dallas Explorer $ 10.00 $0.05 200 DWI Page Inc. $ 1.00 $0.005 200 Mammoth Search $ 10.00 $0.10 100 Search Pros $ 1.00 $0.01 100
$ 1,040.00 100,983As you can see there are quite a few of these dinos still running... For every one giving away a freebie like this, there are easily 2 others that don’t!
I doubt that some of those very generous listings at the top, such as SearchPost’s $550, will last forever, so at least sign up for your account and grab your bonuses before they change their policies.
It should go without saying that the faster you want your traffic to arrive, (accomplished with higher bidding) the fewer of those 100,983 visitors you will ever see. That’s just how PPC works. But don’t worry about having to pay too much for your highly competitive keywords, these guys don’t seem to compete on the same market with Google and Yahoo at all, so getting a couple of targeted clicks a day from this list should be expected even at the minimum bid!
(Well, perhaps not for gambling, porn, viagra, or life insurance niches…)The numbers in this chart were compiled by hand by on New Years Eve 2006, and updated again in June 2007, but since this is a free-floating document, I have no control over when you receive this file or when these search engines change their policies. Any updates to this chart will have to be made on the referring page of my website.
Drawbacks?
Well, you will have to put in a lot of keywords to get any steady traffic out of it. My home business niche has the very most heavily competed set of keywords there, so I opted to spend 1 cent across the board for each of 80 keywords related to Home Business. My results have been a steady trickle, as I usually come up in any search result as #2 to #4… So my website will ultimately receive 10-50 visitors a day from this source.
But that’s not using very many keywords for my niche; I just haven’t had time to go find them all. Once I do I should be able to get 10 times than many daily visitors from these free sources.
There are free places online for people to actually download MP3s on any subject. Naturally, you can also upload them for free.
Many people are audio-centric and prefer to learn by listening on their iPods, usually so they can multitask or not be bored during a commute. Giving them free content is an excellent way for your name and relation to their favorite subject matter to be presented.
Much like how an article works, effective PodCasting depends on your content being interesting enough for them to want to download it, but at the same time, you must include your sales message and of course end it with a “Call to Action” that motivates the listener into following up in some way such as visiting your website.
It’s true that this rarely results in many links back to your site, and if your content is interesting enough, the best you can hope for is for fans to pass them around to each other by word of mouth… Certainly no benefit for link-building.
Still, there is a lot to be said for Brand Recognition. If you are marketing solely by advertising through PPC and SEO, then the fact of the matter is that you won’t be reaching a good portion of people out there that respond solely or much better to another form of contact.
Whereas you might not have ever reached the “Generation Y” crowd using traditional methods at all, something like PodCasting or YouTubing would get your foot in the door, and your Brand Name would be in a new niche. From there, the Gen Y individuals would look for the rest of your work by themselves if you’ve done your job right.
To get started in PodCasting, all you need is a Microphone on your computer (sometimes you can even use headphones plugged into the “Mic” input) and some free software that allows you to save & convert your voice into MP3 format.
From what I’ve heard from many pros on this matter, there is nothing better than a free software called Audacity. It even comes in Mac and Linux flavors, too.Simply take an article or some interesting copy you’ve written and read it into your computer’s mic while running this software. Practice your speech first, work the bugs out. Once finished, you simply need to name the file with some good keywords that are likely to get searched in your niche, and upload it to all the best free download sites.
There are literally hundreds of Podcast Directories out there now, with the most popular one being http://www.podcast.net.Don’t forget to offer your cast from your website, Squidoo lens, blog, or MySpace pages as well. Perhaps as a bonus for signing up to your newsletter or even just as a simple link on your home page.
Multiple media formats containing your wisdom build professionalism. This is a great way to develop your diverse brand on your website.Much like Article Marketing, writing and submitting press releases can be an incredibly effective way to get attention to your website or cause. However, not just any informative article will do for a press release; these are meant to go to the News agencies of the world… So your submission has to be at least a little newsworthy & timesensitive.
Many businesses apply this tactic by hyping up their product launches, writing a press release about the release of their upcoming product that is factual but implies that the launch is quite a newsworthy event where they are located.
The more newsworthy your ‘news’ is, obviously, the more news agencies will pick it up. The more of that pick it up and run your story, the more attention and name recognition you’ll get. All news outlets have websites these days, so any published story should deliver a high PageRank link back to your site.
Ideally, you want a story that will get picked up by ABC & CNN, so you’ll get millions of backlinks and receive 10,000 visitors every hour for weeks…Of course I’ve never met a marketer who’s pulled off that trick yet, so back in the real world what you’re shooting for is mention in the local papers and at least one big-city newspaper. That’s enough to bring some great exposure to your site.
Instead of submitting your release to Article Directories, you’ll be submitting it to press services like PRweb.com, which is the biggest and best of the bunch. They don’t make you pay for their distribution, but if you’re trying to get your message out overseas or for the most massive distribution pushes, there are fees that they charge. (I’ve honestly never had to investigate that option.) You can also make a “Contribution” at PRWeb that highlights your release in a special section above the other listings, just like an eBay featured item… This just gets your release read more by those who browse manually… The official press looks at everything anyway.
The biggest turn-off that discourages marketers from writing a press release is that it seems too difficult to make your story sound newsworthy… Especially when your news is nothing more than a product launch.
Before you let that thought defeat yo, go to PRWeb.com and read some of the stories there that have been pushed lately. Most of these stories are all just hyped-up everyday happenings. Let me give you a great example out of today’s headlines I just quickly found there:
“Google killed SEO with their filters, now the SEO Industry responds with undetectable links.( PRWEB) January 21, 2007 -- The search engine optimization industry has been hit hard by Google's increasingly complex algorithmic filters, which can often times determine whether a link is a paid one or not. Now with the launch of V7N Contextual (http://contextual.v7n.com), the SEO industry is responding with undetectable paid links.
V7N Contextual is a new service launched by John Scott of the V7 Network, which aims to give the SEO industry an edge over the Google filters and other tactics recently employed to devalue and detect paid links, and thwart the efforts of those trying to increase traffic to their website. V7N Contextual provides you with the perfect link - one that is highly relevant, well-placed, permanent, affordable, and completely undetectable as a paid link by both humans and algorithmic filtering.”
In case you missed it, all that’s really going on here is that a company called V7N has just ‘launched’ a service that provides a link-source cloaking of some kind… Hardly CNN headline news, but they’ve phrased it to sound Earth-shattering, and the end result will be that relevant SEO news websites and newsletters will all consider this story to run in their next edition.
If it’s a slow enough news day, this story could be really effective!