Y!

Yahoo! Answers

I’ve been having fun while testing out this resource. It seems that Yahoo! Answers is not a bad little way to pick up some extra Web 2.0 traffic… Although it will never flood your site with hungry buyers.

Head over to http://answers.Yahoo.com sometime and give it a go just for fun. Don’t waste your time Asking questions of course, go directly to the Open Questions in a category that your niche market would fall under. Read through any question titles that haven’t gone to voting yet and if your websites or opportunity would make a good fit as an answer to their question, don’t be shy about hopping in and letting the asker know about it.

Certainly you shouldn’t just say something obvious like: “This site has your answer: www.blah.com” No, the point in Y! Answers is to give them instant answers to their questions.

So spend a few sentences explaining it to them, and end with your link in the resource box. That’s it, you’re done, move on to the next answer.

I have found if I spend one hour a day doing this for about a week, I can have an initial boost of 20 site visitors a day for that week and then an ongoing 5 or so for a long time afterwards.

Surely it’s no great flood, but these are targeted visitors that can keep coming for a long time. –Especially when your answer is chosen as the best answer.

The only reason I only gave this free marketing method 2 stars in quality is that these people are hardly ever in the buying mindset… So this tactic is much better for people who are just looking to feed their AdSense farms than for those who are doing actual sales.

Yahoo! Groups

Despite their no-marketing policies on many of the boards there, many have found an effective way to market through Yahoo! Groups that doesn’t seem spammy.

They simply network. It’s a little more time-consuming than posting an Ad and moving on, but it has worked since the dawn of Commerce and works here in online channels too.

Since there are uncountable thousands of groups to choose from, you’re sure to find one on your niche topic to join and participate in. The majority of Yahoo! Groups out there are open to any new members who simply confirm their email addresses. Once in, all you really have to do to take advantage of all these prospects is to talk about your shared interest with them. Don’t tell everyone what you do up front unless you’ve found one of those rare few groups that are just for networking businesspeople. (Those will have hundreds of posts a day though, operating much like a Safelist. No one reads all of that stuff!)

There are some groups that let you just post your ads as long as you put some thought into it, not simply pasting a link and moving on. Other groups are more restrictive, it’s up to the group owners to set those preferences.

The problem with the less restrictive groups is of course that fewer people actually read the posts, so what you want is to find the happy medium boards, halfway between “all postings ok” and “restrictive.” Inside any group you would want to join, you will do best to try and answer the question someone else asks with your business being part of the solution.

In case this sounds familiar, it’s exactly like Forum marketing. Never sound spammy, offer help and advice, and only market when it’s part of a solution to someone else’s question.

Go to http://groups.yahoo.com to get started. It’s a huge place but well worth the effort in any niche where people want to get familiar with other people before buying from them.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Just like with the MSN AdCenter program, Y!SM has occasional freebies too for new members. I found one for you all, this time, worth $25 to any new sign-ups.

Simply go to Yahoo.com, and click at the bottom where it says “Suggest a Site.” The page will then take you to an account login screen if you’re not already logged in. Do so, and then the next screen will be the familiar website URL suggestion form. (You ARE submitting your urllist.txt sitemap here, right?) On that very page, at the bottom, there is a $25 credit link for Y! Search Marketing. (Until this offer is gone, but I bet it will last a while.)

Like MSN AdCenter, Y!SM requires a $5 deposit. Unfortunately, the Y!SM minimum bid is higher than anyone else’s at $0.10 per click!

 

Still, because of this higher entry barrier and lesser popularity than AdWords, this can still equal upwards of 20-75 highly targeted visitors to your site.

The List-Builder Traffic Strategy

I was first introduced to list builders when I bought Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon course, over a year ago, and it still has great value today. (How could it not be at only $9?) He mentioned a couple of the free resources below and said that we should strategically link them so one list builder feeds two others, and they circle around and around until you’ve built up so many affiliates underneath you that you’ll never have to pay for traffic again. It was quite a headfull to me at the time.

He was right, of course. However, for me the overall process was much too slow. Also, what goes unsaid is that you’ll have to find a lot of constant traffic to stick in the front of this funnel to begin with, and you’ll be doing busy work throughout having to send out emails weekly or even every other day to each of your lists.

Well, although there’s no way around having to find upfront traffic and emailing, you can always use the ads given by the other builders to email to your lists to save time.

The issue of finding traffic is one that we can definitely improve on right now, as is the overall amount of time it takes to finish the whole process. With the instructions below you’ll be able to use some or all of your 100,983 visitors to build your lists with, which when done correctly, will turn into a constant stream of excellent traffic that will be there for the rest of your life.

Finishing the whole process is undoubtedly a long-term strategy; one where momentum has to be built because of the way these program’s MLM-like structures work. But they do work, given time, and they have an exponential effect. I call this “Compounding traffic”, because it ultimately yields a huge list, AND a steady, hands-free traffic flow that you could never fully use yourself.

*Luke’s FREE Recipe for Compounding Traffic*

(Freshly updated for June 2007!)

 

Step 1. Install the best two “Adbars” Instant Buzz & Free Traffic Bar.

You may have seen the earlier versions of this process, which I’m sure have been modified hundreds of times over the past couple of years. They usually include some kind of surfing exchange where you earn hits to your website by spending your time surfing other websites. I believe TS25, TrafficG, and TrafficPods are the most famous of that group these days, and you may want to investigate those to add them to your initial traffic generation strategy. Any form of traffic at all is fine for this first step, as long as it’s free, because this is strictly a BULK strategy… No paying for any of this, alright? The two Adbars I’m suggesting to you here have been carefully chosen, and don’t require you to spend any time on anything you’re not already doing. They look a lot like the Google toolbar for Firefox or IE browsers, except for the fact that they display small text advertisements directly on them.

Doing this is vital for your long term traffic growth plans, as it represents the TOP of your traffic funnel… The SOURCE of your leads. (Of course we can supplement them in the beginning with our 100,983 visitors….)

These two AdBars somehow manage to be the least intrusive, most effective, and, oddly enough, the most entertaining Ad services that I’ve found. (Sometimes the ads are simply hilarious… All during November 2006 there was a guy seriously trying to sell immortality rings on Instant Buzz!)

The best thing is of course that you don’t have to do anything like go out of your way to a website you don’t want to see… There are no timers, no pressure at all, just some funny or interesting ads at the top of your browser window whenever & wherever you surf.

Every page you visit after loading these two free services gives you an Ad credit towards your ads being shown to others. Your ads are displayed more and more when you refer others to sign up under you. If they upgrade to premium services, you get huge commissions. Best of all, loading both of these Adbars at the same time gives you twice the credits when you surf!

Step 2: Sign-up for Track That Ad.

This great service by Craig Haywood is almost too good to be true. I first heard about it because they promoted their system’s ability to send your website “500 extra unique targeted visitors each and every day” as a free member… This could actually happen, but traffic generation is not even their main service!

They also offer a great, automated, multi-tiered list building service for free, but that isn’t the main service either!

Track That Ad is primarily a free ad-tracking service, where they generate links for you to track all of your different ad campaigns with. This can be used for any purpose such as gathering demographics, split testing, URL shortening, and even just knowing which of your ads are the most effective.

This kind of service costs hefty monthly fees elsewhere (or is a huge server-side script you’ll have to buy & install) but it’s totally free here. I can’t recommend it highly enough, for all three purposes. You can click below to start your free membership, which is a fully functional version:

Track That Ad – Free Membership

 

I’ve even made one last film for you showing you exactly how to use Ad Tracking services, featuring TrackThatAd:

 

How to Track Your Links Effectively for Free

 

Once you’ve got Ad tracking down, allow me a word about your email account before we continue:

You’ll definitely want to set aside a mailbox for your list building campaigns… Not a ‘throw-away’ account, because you’ll need to access it quite often. You need an account set aside for this purpose and none other because you’ll eventually be getting 50 or so emails per day and you won’t be able to find anything else that goes in there.

(If you think that’s bad, you should try using a safelist program…)

 

I suggest opening a new, searchable mailbox like Gmail. Stay away from Yahoo and Hotmail accounts as they are not accepted in some list building programs.

 

STEP 3. Sign up for all 3 of the following free list-building services.

 

I highly recommend that you sign up for all three of the following services, which I have tested well and are the best out of many to be proven performers.

Each of the following three services can help you generate many more email subscribers than you could possibly reach on your own, each in its own, different way. They have different program specifics, but all let you build a downline 10 or 20 levels deep, which can exponentially multiply the size and/or frequency of your mail-out allowance with them.

Downlines are the key … I hope I don’t sound like I’m these guys’ paid campaign manager, but it is true. It’s just like how the real winners in Vegas are the little old ladies who spend tons on the slot machine over years, despite breaking even every time. They win by getting all those perks such as the room upgrades, free food, and entertainment.

With these programs, it’s all about how you compound your list quickly, therefore I always look out for the programs with the best downline benefits.

 

1. Sign up for List Joe here.
2. Sign up for List dot com here.
3. Sign up for List lotto here.

List Joe is the first here because it will help you build your ListDotCom downline automatically by introducing those prospects from inside your List Joe account. For that reason I like to make sure that I send everyone through LJ before they get out of the traffic funnel. (Keeping all available traffic pointed at LJ until all four downlines are full!)

I’ve charted the whole process, how it looks from a bird’s eye view for those of us who are visually oriented…

 

Keep in mind that you’d never have all flows of traffic going at the same time; the chart simply shows the direction of traffic when it does flow.

 

Step 4. Start putting it all together.

Now that you’ve signed up for everything, you can start out by using only traffic from Instant Buzz & Free Traffic Bar alone, although it is much faster to point your autosurfs to them too, and maybe even do some manual surfing to supplement those two sources.
The smartest plan would be to use some other traffic you might have access to, to build your IBuzz and FTBar downlines first, so they can be the source for most of your traffic later.

It wouldn’t make too much sense to spread out your traffic to other sources during step four, but if you’ve got to get traffic to your site, send some traffic that way, splitting all of your traffic among the three, perhaps equally.

Step 5. Sending Traffic to Track That Ad (TTA).

Once you’ve got a decent-sized downline producing surplus flow from IBuzz and FTBar, let your downline in those finish building themselves while you redirect all free traffic to the next target, TrackThatAd.

TTA is a jack-of-all-trades site that will bring you money, build your list, and output more traffic than you can put into it down the road! Be sure to use this to its fullest before moving on. (Again, you can send traffic to your website at the same time if necessary.)

It is hard to say at what point, exactly, you’ll no longer need to send any of your traffic to a particular program. Some would instruct to cut it off when you see the bottom level start to get filled, some say much later.

It really depends on the specific program and when you feel that additional traffic doesn’t help as much as it used to…. That’s good enough, because your downline will keep growing without your help at that advanced stage. At that point, discontinue sending traffic there and divert your surfers to the next program that needs it.

Step 6. Time to start writing Ads!

One of your heavyweight tools inside of TTA is a listbuilder, and from this point forward your main services will all be listbuilding services of some kind. You’ll need to get used to writing or using Solo ads to be sent to and for each.

This is the step that causes the most anxiety in people. Although it’s completely free and easy to do, no one wants to write to large numbers of people. I guess it’s like public speaking… Luckily you’ll find that most of these services have a “Promotional” section of some kind on their website, where they actually write their own Ad copy for you!
Simply go to the site that you are promoting, find the promotional section, copy the Ad or Ads that feel best for your need, and paste it/them into a text editor like Textpad to get them into the right format.

Then all you have to do is tie them together, write a sentence or more of Intro, and send the finished product out to your list! It really couldn’t be much easier, you just have to start writing with what they give you and the rest will flow from your keyboard easily.

Any time you have something to say on the topic of your niche, to make your mailing more like useful content than sales pitch, that’s a major plus… But not even necessary for this step.

And don’t forget to Personalize! It’s never too early to start building up your name recognition. –I always sign the bottom of every email I send, and I don’t trust emails without someone being responsible for them at all.

Step 7. Send Traffic to all the List builders in sequence.

 

Once Track That Ad’s downline is nearly filled, you’ll have a lot more traffic, and it will be time to direct it toward all the list builders, starting with ListJoe.

Since the purpose of our traffic is now to create subscribers, there’s no longer a reason to concentrate on fewer targets. I would say that you can have your traffic as spread out as you’d like, if it weren’t for the unique properties of ListJoe automatically signing up your downline into your other list builders. (They don’t currently include List Lotto at this time, but of course you can always email your LJ downline and tell them about it, as well as send out the LL promotional material in your allotted list sending.)

With LJ getting the bulk of your traffic for now, it will fill up even faster than TTA did. Meanwhile, the other listbuilder LJ points to will fill up at the same time, WITHOUT SENDING TRAFFIC TO THEM!

This is a major bonus of the system that I wish all list builder programs would add in. I guess some of them have competition issues that keep them from teaming up like that, but it’s holding us back as long as they continue (in my humble opinion.)

The ListDotCom does a better job of list building for me with less mailbox hassle, so I’m sure that it’ll fill up your downline before ListLotto, unless, naturally, you hit their “Jackpot.” List Lotto leaves a lot to chance by design.

Naturally, you’ll have to spend more time sending traffic to List Lotto at this point because it wasn’t easily referenced by List Joe.

 

Step 8. Sending traffic to your own List.

With all of the downlines under each program completely built up to and including List Lotto, your ability to send emails out to mailboxes around the planet will be a legendary thing. There’s just one problem, namely these lists you have access to won’t be YOUR lists.

What if some of these companies go out of business? What if the email tax finally arrives? What if you already have your own list? YOU NEED TO GET THESE PEOPLE CONSOLIDATED!

The most obvious way to consolidate the lists onto yours is to simply pitch your own list from those, and even offer a bribe to get them to sign up for your list if you have to… Give them some reason to jump over… But not too much of a reason or you’ll wind up with a list full of deadbeats who never buy anything.

A membership site works just as well as a subscriber list as well, especially if they have to pay something to get inside. Members of a membership site don’t unsubscribe without canceling their membership, so it’s technically a much better way to own a list. (Although there is a steep tech learning curve.)

But by that point you’ll have traffic flowing out of your ears! You’ll officially be a super-affiliate. Perhaps even a semi-Guru. And nothing will ever be able to take it away from you.

A quick note about Premium Services. (Upgrades)

All of the six resources I’ve mentioned here were chosen because they are both effective and free. However, the owners of them aren’t dumb, they still need to eat, so they have premium upgrades that they offer to free members in order to pay their bills, and some of them can be quite tempting.

I personally invested in the upgrades that I felt would help me achieve my goals faster, which is not all of them. I really hate to pay for anything when I know so much stuff on the net is free these days… Maybe that’s just me.

If you want to upgrade as many services as you can, while paying as little for it all as possible, I suggest taking advantage of the offers that assist each other.

For instance, Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon course, for $9, includes a lifetime “elite” upgrade to Instant Buzz. Meanwhile, if you purchase the premium upgrade for TrackThatAd, it includes a generous 100,000 impressions in IB as well! (this is probably the one upgrade I’d recommend to everyone, as TTA offers something for everyone, and it’s just a very, very good value.)
I’m sure other interlinked networks have formed like this too, so you’ve got to find and grab them when you see them. If you can spare the time, that is. It has been a while since I’ve signed up for most of these services, so I’m not in a position to say which offers which bonuses for which… Perhaps one of my readers will write a big report on that subject.

In the final building stage of this traffic funnel process, With all downlines filled on all list and traffic builders, the obvious conclusion is simply to point all of these traffic sources at your home website, list, or product ever afterwards… Of course we are easily talking about MILLIONS of visitors monthly at that point, so I hope you plan on monetizing it well.

Google Inc. is still working on ways to monetize it well themselves. :

So, which methods are best for me?

Choosing the right tactic for your current needs is always the most important question to ask. First of all you have to ask yourself if you really should be using free traffic at all, or would an inexpensive but paid (and measurable) type of traffic, such as an AdWords campaign be better. That is, after all, what the corporations use.

But if you’ve simply got no budget at all then it boils down to how targeted you need your traffic to be (Quality) & how soon you need them to show up on your site. (Time to delivery) That’s why I put the indicators on each review here.

Note: The third indicator, “Quantity” of visitors, is to be thought of as a ‘power’ rating… It is assumed that everyone wants as many people as possible.

So, simply set aside the quantity rating for a moment, and make a note of all the listings in here that you can live with the Quality and Time to delivery on. A few, like Directory submissions, should be done anyway, regardless of your other campaigns… They act as a foundation for all future traffic with the search engines. Other than those no-brainers, you should take that list that you’ve weeded down to and then look at the quantity score… The one with the most little guys there should be tried first!

If one doesn’t work for you, then simply move down the list until you find one that fits your unique skills and abilities the best. That’s really what this whole game is about, not just raising traffic, but YOU raising traffic, which means you’re limited to your own set of skills and preferences. As are we all.

Personally I have no patience for traffic exchanges but I can write ads or articles better than most. Many out there find writing a horrible experience, but can generate traffic faster than I can with exchanges alone. So it’s all up to your preferences, although I’ve done my best in this encyclopedia to measure all else equally.

Conclusion

Although this is not technically a completely inclusive listing of the free advertising sources online, it includes many more resources than any other listing I have found in one place.

In my experience, I feel that it is a great representation of all the more well established, tried & tested, free traffic generation systems, programs, & websites. At the very least you now have a place to reference the various traffic methods you come across, and any not on this list should be viewed with an ounce of skepticism.

Warning about the IM2IM “Niche”

There is a niche market that is very confusing but exciting to newbies who get into home businesses. I call it “IM2IM,” which is short for “Internet Marketers marketing to other Internet Marketers.”

At first glance you may wonder why such a niche exists, but then you'll discover that it is without a doubt the most fiercely-competitive niche that exists at all!

 

The reason why is simple. People have to sell about what they know.

If you spend all your time driving a Ford Mustang, it's no wonder what product you'll be most effective at selling. Internet Marketers spend all their time marketing on the internet... It's what we know. So what products do you think we are going to be most apt to sell?

In fact, it gets more involved than that. Services like Instant Buzz, Desktop lightning, Safelists, & Traffic Exchanges, among many others, magnify this effect 100 times!

Their problem is that they are used by, and only loaded onto the computers of other internet marketers! Think about it... Would a dog kennel owner ever have an Instant Buzz toolbar loaded in their browser? Where would they learn about a Safelist? Would a Dog Kennel owner usually be a member of many Traffic Exchanges?

Of course not... But Internet Marketers would, because these are cheap and powerful tools for us to use for our outgoing ads. Naturally, a newbie to Internet Marketing might get frustrated when they try to market to their dog kennel niche, and sometimes even give up their niche to specifically target other Internet Marketers! They see the “Gurus” doing it, why can’t they?
It's self-replicating.

Well, the embarrassing part for me is that you see me here marketing to other Internet Marketers. You may have even found this eBook through an Instant Buzz, traffic exchange, or similar ad campaign, but that doesn't mean that you should market to the same people I’m marketing to.

It's a seriously competitive market, for all of the reasons above and more. Meanwhile, there are uncountable thousands of Niches out there with no decent marketers yet going after them.

It's almost heart-breaking to watch.

Sure, if you go after one of those low-competition niches you won't have the added benefit of using a few of these cheap and easy tools, but then again you won't really need them. More traditional marketing methods will work just fine!

I'm sure that some of you reading this will doubt my motives and think to yourselves that I'm only saying this to keep my