Features - Marketing

An Awesome Free Traffic Generation Method
By Sean Morrissy

While paid advertising is the best way to get traffic to your site quickly, if you're low on cash, it might not be the best method for you. This is because with paid advertising, you often have to lose a little at first in order to find out what's working for you. So if you don't have any cash to spend on advertising, then what you'll want is a traffic method that costs absolutely nothing. And while there are billions of ways to do this, I want to talk to you today about one of the best ways to do this.

Forum posting.

For just about any topic that you can think of, there are forums full of passionate people talking about various things. It's a place that's full of potential customers and leads. The only problem is figuring out how to tap into this source and get a flood of traffic to our websites or direct affiliate links. And while it is a great place to get traffic from, most people screw this up big time. They go into a forum full of prospects and immediately blast sales messages all over the forum, thinking that if enough people see something, that they'll be flooded with sales and that they'll be very happy.

But that's simply not the case and if you want to market in forums, you really can't do anything worse than blast your sales messages over the place. The best forums are like close knit communities. They hate people coming in and taking advantage of them. So don't even think about trying to come off remotely salesy.

What you need to do is join up and start posting intelligent comments in threads. A lot of forums won't even allow you to post links in your threads or signatures until you've hit a certain amount of posts. So find a good forum and start making quality posts. Reply intelligently to other threads and start some of your own if you think it's worthwhile. The key is to add value to the forum. Once you've added plenty of value to the forum and people start to know who you are, then you can add links to your own website and start promoting your affiliate site and direct links if you have them.

Something else you need to understand is that if you actually want people to take notice of you and follow your advice, you need to come across as an authority in the forum. I'm not saying you need to be a complete authority on your topic, but you do need to be someone who other people want to follow. There are lots of different types of posters in a forum and you want to make sure you're seen as an authority. Most people in forums are followers. They just post on other peoples threads and most of the time they just go with the flow. The authorities however are the people that the followers listen to.

They are sometimes a little controversial, they are not afraid to say what they really think and if they think another poster is wrong, they stand up and say it. This really is crucial, because you want to people to visit your site and follow your instructions, you don't want people thinking you don't know what you're on about.

This is another reason why people fail to succeed with forums, as they end up as people that no one else respects or believes. Ok, so if you're going to give forum posting a shot, make sure you become an authority and only post high value stuff.

Help people out in forums and they'll help you out in the end.

So here are your action steps for today. If this is for you, I want you to put this on your to do list today. Go into google and search for "your niche + forums".

Unless your niche is something where a forum isn't really applicable, you should get loads of results. But as always, the 80/20 rule applies. The top few forums on your topic will get more traffic and more action than the rest of the forums combined. So pick out the top 2-3 (assuming you can find 2-3 really good, active forums) and sign up. Start posting good content to all of them and start adding value. Doing this really should only take a few minutes per day. You don't want to post in every single thread you can see, but you want to make sure you post enough so that your username becomes known by everyone. There's a difference between someone who is an authority and someone who has no life :)

The second thing I want to quickly mention today is another handy tip I've found to work quite well with my affiliate Sites. Adding quality photos is a good way to make your sites look better and more user friendly. You don't need to add heaps of photos to your site, but a few pictures here and there can make a big difference. And while most stock photo sites are really expensive ($50-$300 a photo) there's no need to spend this much. You can always do a quick search for stock photos yourself, but I've only ever used two sites myself and I really don't think you'll need to use any more. The first one is called Stock Exchange. This is a f.ree site to use and if you're on a very limited budget then it's the one you'll want to use. It's a site where a lot of amateur photographers go and upload their photos. You can buy premium pictures as well, but the free ones are also really good. All you do is search for what you're after and see what comes up. There are loads of topics (more than you'll probably ever need), so you should always be able to find something for your site. The second site is called Istockphoto this site requires you to pay for all the stock photos, but they're cheaper than just about any other site that I know of. For smallish photos (the size of photos that you'll be using on your site) they only cost $1-$2, so you can often get all the photos you need for $20 or maybe even less. So check those two sites out and give it a shot.

Sean Morrissy runs the free affiliate marketing training centre, http://www.sixdayweekend.com So if you're interested in learning how to build a six figure business that you can run from anywhere in the world, without paying a cent for the training, go and signup for a free account at http://www.sixdayweekend.com

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