Would giving away free products be a viable method to increase traffic to a site? What should a site visitor have to do to be able to recieve a free product?(write content, register for the site, etc...) What has worked the best for your sites? Have you seen a steady increase in traffic? I'm trying to increase traffic to my Bluetooth site (in sig). Would a contest be a good form of advertising?
Freebies are good if you can reduce your risk of fraud. You need to be careful of not attracting the "freebie" crowd, they have popular forums where they trade info on how to get your stuff. Which can lead to more bandwidth and costs without any targeted traffic. If you have that part figured out, it's an excellent idea. I think a contest for a bluetooth prize would be good, you just have to make it worth people's time to take part in it. What kind of contest did you have in mind?
A contest could be part of an advertising campaign but you would need some way to advertise the contest.
That's a good question, i haven't really thought about it that much. Probably give away a bluetooth headset. What would you do to win a bluetooth headset? Anyone have ideas?
You can have a giveaway but what do you get in return? - first person to have 200 posts in a new forum. - email addresses - submitted articles (watch for copied data) - forum signatures - blog about your site - doesn't just give something away for teh sake of it, make them work for it and build your site links or content in the process.
After you figure out what the user has to do to win, how do you go about advertising the giveaway to get the most people to join in?
Post something in a related forum, send out a PR, blog about it, have your friends talk about it. Forum signature, email signature, be creative. You goal shouldn't be to tell EVERYONE but tell the sneezers. These are the people who tell their friends when they find something they like. How do you do that? Niche marketing. I don't know your topic, let's say you are selling kleenex with aloe to blow your nose. Ok, it's a nice "sneezer" tie in. Anyway, you don't advertise to everyone that would ever use kleenex. You advertise/tell people who are allergy sufferers and people with chronic colds. Once they grab onto a new product, the rest of the world will hear about it from them, not you.
Most people like free stuff and it would probably boost your traffic quite much. The thing is you need to have something on your site what will keep them there, and make them return for more. //Andreas
instead of giving away products, try giving information: the best software for your industry, white papers, the best links for your users, etc. it's way cheaper and will keep your visitors coming back