In the offline world, you either have the budget to attract customers or you don’t.
It’s impossible to get a steady business going without a storefront, inventory and a little advertising to get the word out.
But if you’re an affiliate marketer and you need search engine traffic, but don’t have the resources to bring it in, you don’t have to give up hope.
Nothing is free, of course. These methods require a little time and a little elbow grease.
But with the right mindset and some perseverance, you can generate lots of free traffic to your site that will put money in your pocket and get you off the ground. Best of all, you don’t need to spend a single penny.
The competition isn’t as fierce as you might think. There are plenty of people trying their hand at affiliate marketing, but when you narrow it down to a single niche, and narrow it further to marketers that are willing to put the work in right now, and you’ll often find that you can make a big splash without a lot of competition.
So the only question is, how do you get started?
Join Forums and Communities Related To Your Niche
What better way to show off your expertise and skill than helping out people who need it?
One of the best things about spending time on message boards is that it the advice you give stays there forever, so searchers down the line will always be able to find it – and your affiliate website.
Just as importantly, you can hit your exact demographic. Remember that you don’t just have to hit message boards in the community. General sites like Yahoo Answers are a goldmine for grabbing people who have urgent problems. Just remember that your advice needs to stand out from the crowd and be especially detailed and interesting.
You can speed this process up by feeding your target keywords into the message board’s search engine and commenting on recent posts that mention these topics. Don’t do this all at once, or you’ll be outed as a greedy marketer with a product to sell or a online scammer!
How To Use Article Marketing
In the same way that forum marketing gets you in front of specific people and lets you show off your knowledge, article marketing does the same thing, except you get to be more in-depth and “ask the questions” yourself by raising compelling topics.
The benefits of article marketing can be exponential, but it’s important to write more than a handful of articles – really dig in and write how to articles that are related to your niche and most importantly interesting. It’s the surest way to get your site back linked by other places in your niche.
Make sure you also thank the webmasters that approve your articles with your link attached, being polite is free and will virtually guarantee that you can post another article on that site in the future. Finding your articles is easy all you do is run a Google search for your own article or examining your incoming links and trackbacks.
As an example of this if I were to look for this article I would type in the search box “How To Generate Free Search Engine Traffic Starting Today!” and that should bring up all articles with that heading showing you where your article is located in the search engine page if at all.
You might also consider giving your own guest article a boost by submitting the article link into your Google+ account, Facebook and Twitter, the webmaster will appreciate your efforts even more.
Important: Try to avoid article spinning when posting content to another site the webmaster will not appreciate it as the quality more often than not is very low. Unless you know exactly what you are doing you will be doing nothing more than wasting your own time and that of the other web site owner.
Get Quality Back Links Using Guest Posts
Trading links with other sites isn’t just some throwback of the early 2000’s. It’s still great way to get your website in front of others without spending a lot of money. Email another webmaster and offer to make a guest post or a straight link exchange or three-way link exchange if you have more than one website.It is always best to have your link embedded into an article on the reciprocal site rather than on a links page or in the sidebar of a site.
This generally works better if both sites are in the same niche and have a little more information on them than just a list of affiliate reviews.
Don’t be afraid – you’re going to need to send your request to more than one webmaster. Even if a few don’t respond, the links you get will be well worth it.
Create Viral Content
Remember that “good” information doesn’t always have to be a flat repetition of information, and you don’t have to just be “the answer guy”. Whenever you need to stand out, or you feel like you’re in a boring niche, think of some ways to create interesting related content than people will share. Maybe it’s a funny graph, a picture, a video, or article. Sometimes entertainment and gossip can spread the word about your website better than a dry bit of information can.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarks offer an amazing combination of high traffic and authority, and search engines love seeing that you’re getting some traction on these social bookmarking sites.
They attract people every day, and lots of them are in your niche. Sign up for these sites, and don’t just bookmark the main site – bookmark the individual pages on your site to pass some back link juice on.
It’s a smart idea to use proxies so that these bookmarks aren’t seen as coming from one person constantly, linking to other sites and authorities in your niche to increase authenticity, and rotating the sites you use to bookmark everyday so that you get traffic from multiple sources – search engines love this stuff.
With a little effort and consistency, you can bring some serious impact to your link building efforts and generate search engine traffic without spending a dime.
Get started as soon as possible!
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