When you begin your internet marketing experience, you tend to look for as many different ways of attracting traffic to your site as possible and these are usually free methods as you tend to be unaware of the paid methods and, even if you know about them, you don’t have the knowledge to make them work for you within your budget.
The various “free” methods, and I’ll clarify that point a bit later, include such well known methods such as:
- Blogging
- Blog Commenting
- Article Writing
- Article Marketing
- Forum Commenting
- etc
All these various methods do work and you can build your traffic and a subsequent list from your efforts, but the process can be slow and time comsuming. These methods are also untargeted so you might be spending effort on people who will not buy your products or end up on your lists
I said I would clarify the point of “free” traffic as all of the above do take time and if you cost your time at, say, $40 an hour then the “cost” of a typical blog with research and typing would be about $40
Many of the more experienced marketers swear by paid traffic such as:
- Adsense
- Google Ads, or similar on Yahoo or Bing
- Facebook Ads
- etc
The advantages of these paid methods are that you can specifically target your ideal audience which will usually grow your list and increase those who buy your products much quicker.
So how do you decide which method is best for you and that will be determined by the size of your wallet in many cases. If you have some spare cash, even a $100 can give your list a boost with a good quality targeted campaign and move you forward.
If time is on your side then you can grow you list organically by using the tried and trusted methods shown above in the section illustrating the free options, but the list will grow slower although everybody who joins your list will probably be a fan of your work.
To be honest, I am time rather than cash rich so have tended to use the free methods although I have run some Facebook Ads campaigns for webinars in my property investment arena, but as this is a very crowded section of Facebook, I did get a number of attendees and sign ups from the Ads, but the rate was low compared to other campaigns I had seen. Maybe it was the subject and people are bored of property investment or maybe my ads were not that inviting, I do not know.
Anyway, the choice is yours and I will post more about free and paid traffic in later blogs.
If you have any experience, good or bad, about free or paid advertising, I’d love to hear so please comment below and share your knowledge with us all
4 replies to "Traffic – Paid Or Unpaid, Which Is Best?"
Hi Dave,
I guess it depends on how deep you pockets are and what conversion rate you have but free traffic is what I always desire.
Dave, nice post about free and paid traffic.
In my opinion non are free,
Free traffic = costs you time
Paid traffic = money obviously
Free traffic can be very slow, good for a long term strategy but you got to stick at it to reap the benefits later on.
Paid traffic is instant targeted traffic ( lovely jubly :D) but yes you need to have a budget even if its only a small one. The power of instant traffic allows you to test very quickly what works and what doesn’t.
Hi Dave,
Interest blog post and discussion, personally I’d prefer the paid methods such as solo ads, or mailing out postcards/letters to a bought mailing list, this is because if you have free offer and want to test out whether you squeeze page is working/ converting, then you can see the results much quicker and optimise certain parts of the page to increase people to subscribe, before you got for a launch.
You could of course use free traffic methods to do the same, but like you mentioned, it’s time exhausting and you would have to wait a long while before you have any results to analyse. So overall, you just have to weigh the cost of your time and effort.
I look forward to you next post
Sky
Hi Dave,
I think you said it right, even the ‘free’ traffic isn’t free as you will have to invest time to receive it.
For paid traffic you will have to invest money, but it can pay off immediately.
While I wouldn’t use paid traffic just for everything, it has one major benefit, as Super-RAJ states. You will receive targeted traffic in an instant.
This is great for testing purposes, e.g. split testing to see which landing page converts better.
Secondly it is great traffic when you are aware of all the necessary numbers involved, like EPC and such. If you know that you will earn $1 per click, then it is wortyh paying $.40 per click.
Cheers,
Torsten