I've tried different free marketing techniques in the past few months, and none of them seem to work that well. I posted in forums in my niche, that only brought me about 100 visitors in the past few months. I was very active in the forums on different sites and left my signature and would give full answers, but still not much traffic. Also, many forums do not allow signature links. What's up with that? Posting on blogs helps only little, since most blog links are now nofollow. Tried Yahoo Answers, answered questions and gave informative answers and included a link on the bottom, got only a dozen visitors for the period of 2 weeks I was answering. Also, if you post too many answers with the same link, Yahoo bans you temporarily. Facebook bans you if you post like more that 5 messages with the same text on a Message Wall. It seems that free marketing is dead and all of the major websites have shut down opportunities for websites just starting out to promote themselves for free. I will keep trying since I do not have money to pay to advertise but so far free advertising has brought me very little traffic. Any comments on this, would love to hear what you have to say?
I wouldn't say it's dead, but you get what you pay for sometimes if your not sly enough. There's a reason people dump money into PPC.
PPC can be very expensive! Many people go for it at the beginning and then find themselves hundreds of dollars 'lighter'. It will bring traffic, but the questions is can you make more money from your site than what your traffic costs and the answer is 'No' most of the time. It is just sad how these big companies have taken control over the Internet where you either have to have lots of money to succeed or know people who will help you succeed through connections.
I have run PPC campaigns with a weekly budget of a few hundred dollars and turned it into something. If you going to do free marking sources you have to do it in massive bulk. Think automation - time to learn and code.
Oh, I had plenty of reading on SEO, and have applied it to my site, but my ranking is no way near to those sites that have pretty much bribed all other sites or bought Google page rank through PPC. I have not tried article marketing, but heard that is better to post articles on your site than distribute them to other directories who will then replicate it and the search engines may consider your content duplicate.
I still believe content is king. If you offer people good answers or interesting articles, the marketing should basically take care of itself through word of mouth, or free links to your site. Another added benefit of good contact is that you will probably see a spike in the amount of friend requests you get on the various social media sites, and when you have friends on these sites, you can actually get your websites in front of people because you will have the ability to reach the front page/buzz pages.
How can you automate marketing? No directories or classifieds will accept automated submissions anymore. They will not even accept manual submissions for that matter. Just try advertising your site on kijiji and see what happens.
These free links you are talking about take a lot of time to build. Also, I tried using Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit, and they brought me a few visitors since I do not have people who will bring my story to the front page of Digg or will vote for me on StumbleUpon. There are many stories submitted on the same topic on Digg, but only one makes it to the front page, and you can probably guess which one...
Your thinking way too far inside the box. How about automating spaming yahoo answers, with rotating proxies? That's not something I'm saying you should do but are possible. Something more reasonable would to build a system that could build backlinks by automating posting links on blog comments. Use those backlinks to build up a site and drive traffic to some offer. And yes you can automate directory submissions I do it all the time.
Focus on SEO - getting links from a number of sources. Target low competition keywords first then build up to those with more people chasing them You will probably have to buy some links along the way though
All these methods you suggest are pretty much illegal for all TOSs I know. If blackhat methods are the only way to succeed, than this just proves it how corrupt the WWW is. The software you are using to do this is probably not free, am I right? Can anyone get their hold of this software by going to a site and downloading it?
Haha, that's funny, against TOS. It probably is but that's not the point, the internet is a competitive business place just like anywhere else. I write all my own stuff so no, you can't just download it. Try google, I'm sure you can find some stuff.
Well, most directories I tried submitting my site to have CAPTCHA or something similar installed. Can you tell me how you can bypass this with automatic submission software?
There are a surprising amount of captcha breakers out there, that's the first thing I'd look into, but if you can't code anyways it won't do you any good, right?
Oh, I can code! I know ASP.NET, C#, Java, C, C++. I just do not think this is the best way to bring traffic, you can eventually get penalized by search engines.
Yes that is true, lots of things could happen. Hell that's half the fun learning what could get you penalized but there is so much info out there and all you have to do is use google or the search feature here. This isn't rocket science, what's the worst that could happen from automating directory sign up? You gain too many backlinks too quick and google sees your trying to game the system and bombs your site. Start slow, work your backlinks up you'll be fine - where the limit is, is for you to find out. You won't learn if everyone hands you everything. So get reading.
Well what were you expecting? Sorry, but that is the reality of signatures. Did you really think you were going to get a lot? It's the same with blogs and Yahoo Answers: Bottom of the barrel. SEO isn't a certainty either. Everybody and their cousin who knows how to optimize a site is vying for page one too, so it is a matter of luck landing there. And even if you do get lucky, the traffic isn't that great, so.... Free marketing rarely works. If you want to make money, you are going to have to spend it. That's the bottom line. Next to that is word of mouth. Just ask Craig Newmark. With such sites as Google, sure, but you don't advertise on such sites. I don't even mess with them. Besides, pay-per-click ads can be for ANY site out there, not just for search engines. It is because they either do not know how to do it, or their sites suck. There are, God knows how many Webmasters out there who can get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. They did it with advertising. If it doesn't work, why is it they can do it? If you won't even try to advertise, then you might as well let your domain expire.
You are right, but you will read so many posts here saying how blog commenting and signatures and Yahoo answers brings them thousands of visitors a day. This means most of these people are exaggerating to pump up their reputation and advertise their sites in their signatures. I know that by paying to advertise I will get traffic, but I was talking about free advertising. As you said, you have to spend money to make money.