FREE Traffic? The Honest How-To Guide

Siaram

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Seriously, if you want traffic to your site and don't want to pay or have no money to pay, then you can still generate lots of traffic. Follow my tips and you'll be fine. Ignore them and you can keep posting here forever with desperate pleas to help you achieve what we all ultimately want- More traffic/Visitors/Buyers/Players/Members etc...

Tips:

1) Make the site worthy and user friendly. People are very finicky and if the site doesn't grab them right away in some form, then you're done and your bounce rate is sky high and then Google won't like you and then you will never get a good page ranking. BOUNCE RATE is very important. Look into it!

2) It's a lot of hard work people. At first you must always be putting out your link, asking friends, joining forums, making signatures for your emails, finding free quality places to advertise like Oggix.com etc...There is really know easy road when it's for free.

3) Forums are probably by far the best way I found for quick members. Join every one that is very similar to yours (Hence people have the exact same interest which means targeted visitors to your site) If you don't find an appropriate place to post a thread, then usually the Off topic will do. Bookmark them all so you can go back later and respond. This will keep your ad or promo at the top which means more views.

4) Watch out for negative promotions. Link exchanges and credit systems usually fail because people just click and leave right away without truly visiting your site which in turn hurts your BOUNCE RATE with Google. An example? You join a banner exchange site. They promise that for each link you click, they will send you someone to click back right? What good does that do you if you click 79 links in less than a minute and the people visiting you do the same. USELESS! Forget about it. And who's to say that the people promising credits to your site for advertising theirs are even sending you members at all? Do you even have a traffic monitor program on your site to tell for sure what is going on?

5) Get a Traffic Monitor program so you see where the majority of hits are coming from and focus on those places. Google knows the web and search engines better than anyone so why not go and place Google Analytics on your site. Trust me, it sounds big and complicated but it is really simple and easy. I have almost 900 members to my game in under 2 months since I launched it so I know it helps.

6) Stay away from Traffic promoting sites that offer lots of visitors for money. Most of them just send bots which once again hurt your BOUNCE RATE which in turn kills your page rank. Others send untargetted traffic. What good does it do you if you have a site about hunting and the visitors coming by are interested in comic books???? Exactly, it doesn't!

7) Make the web and other sites work for YOU! Go to Yahoo Answers for example. If your site is about comics then ask a question like "DC or Marvel? Which do you prefer?" and let yahoo send that question for 10,000 people to view. And of course you have the link to your comic site in the post. And when people get to your site, make sure to have the same question as a poll. ;)

8) Be friendly and greet EVERYONE you can personally. I have a generic message I made for my site and an admin option to view all members online. If/when I see a new member is online, I instantly send them a nice greeting message with some tips to my game. Not only does it personalize the game more, but I have had numerous people thank me and within a day or two they have already purchased a premium membership and money is ultimately what we all want.

9) LOOK BUSY! How you ask because you only have 2 or 3 members? Well then MAKE members yourself. Before my game went public I made about 100 bots or non player characters (NPC's) to make the game look like it already had great interest on the day of launch. No one wants to join your site on Macintosh computers if it only has 6 members and the other forums have thousands right? So do what your wife does and fake it! haha

10) Don't be lazy. Stop sitting on you butt watching SouthPark or the new Batman movie and wondering why you still have only 2 new members in a week. Get creative and find your own ways to advertise.

11) Word of mouth. By far one of the greatest ways to get members on any site. How did you suddenly join Facebook or youtube??? Because people started mentioning it to you right? Youtube didn't pull your name out of a hat and say "Yeah, lets email this lucky guy today and see if he'll join" So encourage friends to promote you even if they don't like your site themselves. Honestly, about 20% of my members are from word of mouth. That is about 165 people out of 900 and guess what? Probably about 12-17 of them are premium members which means more money every week for me. ;)

12) Don't reinvent the wheel. A site will only grow if it is somehow unique and different from others. It doesn't matter how. Maybe the color scheme or the layout or functions or whatever. Just make sure to have something different or your membership will goto all the competetors who are busy making lots of money.

13) No mess and Spam and clutter! Don't throw ads everywhere hoping to get rich fast. Your 3 members won't help. Ads are a numbers game. If you have 50,000 members then you may make ok coin, but don't distract or annoy visitors or potential members when starting out. I have ZERO ads on my site because I hate them and they're ugly. I haven't had 1 complaint begging me to add some so apparently nobody misses them.

There are a lot more little tips, but that's it for now and if I helped a few people get a few more members, then it was worth it. Goodluck peeps and get busy! :)
 

tittat

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Great tips Siaram,thanks for it.Tip 9 is Funny........
 

Siaram

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Glad you liked them Tittat. Oh and here is one I forgot ealier:

14) Offer people something. People are the same all over the world. They love free stuff so why not give them something. For every member that joins my game, they get an automatic 3 day Premium Potion they can activate right away to start enjoying full benefits. People love it and what's better is that when it expires in 3 days then many are hooked and buy more potions. Try to give something. Maybe credits to use somehow or cool rank titles or for any donation people get special priviledges , but give them something to make them feel special.
 
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Domenico

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WOW awesome tips!

The one about forums I did. Besides the users you could also get page rank, think of your post as an advertisement and there's a link in your post so it's as if the site's linking to your site. I google's bots see it that way... the site's had like 5 PR...
 

Siaram

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Thanks, ya forums are great, at least they can be. But make sure you check the number of members before registering at the bottom of the forum page. Usually the forum will list how many members they have there or the total number of posts which is also a good estimate of activity and members. No point in wasting time registering to a forum that only has 47 members. Find the ones with 4700 or better still, 47,000!!!! Weeeee, those ones give quick hits to your site.
 

balaji2u

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Steps 6 and 7 are one that i lazy to do ..
One of the best shortest tutorial ever i read on the internet

One funny thing is i already over did the job on what you say at step number 9. just go and see www.forumize.co.cc to know how funny is that..

Anyway thanks a lot siaram..
Im saving this for my future reference :happysad:
 

Siaram

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Glad you liked it balaji2u. :) If I think of any more I'll let ya's all know, but so far these are the best free ways.
 

c u l8r

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All this looks good. Thank you for typing this up. I Suggested this for new people :)
 

balaji2u

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Glad you liked it balaji2u. :) If I think of any more I'll let ya's all know, but so far these are the best free ways.
:) Sure siaram ;)
can you explain me the demerits caused while change the domain names coz i planned to buy a info domain instead of my co.cc domain.
 

Siaram

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@ balaji2u

Honestly, I don't want to get off topic. I can answer this for you in PM if you want but I wish to keep this thread related to advertising as i should be and not changing domain names. ;)

As for the advertising side, I have since made a banner for trials on a couple paid advertising sites. BEWARE!!! Many or even most are scams! I have tried 3 so far and one gave my money back after I threatened to tell Paypal about their shady business practices, one was just reported for being even worse as they don't even respond to emails and don't advertise you as they promise and he 3rd is actually not bad and for $15.00 per month actually do as they claim so I am 1 for 3 so far or 33% successful. Here is the banner I made am using right now for advertising purposes:

http://ibuzzz.net/GQ4.gif

My point being, that advertising with money can work, but.....buyer beware. Many sites are set up to take your money and promise much and give you nothing that they claim, therefore you need a special tool to track these unscrupulous scammers and thieves and who knows the net better than Google? So why not set up google analytics on your site?

This simple tool will tell you so many things but, most importantly is it will tell you WHERE your visitors came from every 24 hours. So knowing this, if a site promises to send you 15,000 visitors over 30 days and claims at day 3 to have sent 700+ visits already and yet google shows no sign of 700 sudden visits from a certain source, then you know right away that the site is a scam and just took your money. That is how I got my money back with the first advertising company. I knew they did not send me 4000 visitors by day 6 as they claimed. They didn't even send me ONE!!! Google doesn't lie. So I threatened to tell PayPal and they caved in and gave my money back. ;) Google Analytics helped me fight these scammers because stats don't lie and fraudulent companies, when confronted with the facts KNOW IT!

So in closing? Do yourself a favor and get google analytics and use it in conjunction with your host's stats to know exactly where every single hit comes from. EVERY single visitor is important and a site not sending you them as they claim or just sending you BOTS that hurt your page rank and bounce rate while claiming something different is counter productive. Be smart people and don't use blind faith and don't get SCAMMED!
 

Siaram

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So if you have a little think this is advertising for your site :p hehe great tips

Well not really. Since I started chatting here I have received about 10 hits to my site from X10 so it's hardly a place I come to advertise. The forum is very diverse and many different types of sites. If it were all RPG related then ya, by now I probably would have received quite a few hits., but nope. Just trying to help some people get their page rank higher and learn some tricks that I learned myself by trial and error and lots of hard work.

Don't worry, I won't request donations at this point. :biggrin:
 

John Klyne

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"9) LOOK BUSY! How you ask because you only have 2 or 3 members? Well then MAKE members yourself. Before my game went public I made about 100 bots or non player characters (NPC's) to make the game look like it already had great interest on the day of launch. No one wants to join your site on Macintosh computers if it only has 6 members and the other forums have thousands right? So do what your wife does and fake it! haha"

Ow wow, ....to tell the truth, that does work, I have used it for some other sites of mine.....I actually made different accounts, and had them logged in, from different computers I have running in my home.

You can also, have your friends of anyone, just make an account, and ask them to set it to their homepage-and automatic login feature enabled...(don't forget to say, typing google.com yourself is not hard....since they are probably going to that site first.)

Just fake the users online....I would have never though other people did what I did....

Nice guide, I enjoyed reading it.
 

Siaram

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Well the thing is John, when you make your own site, you don't even need a different computer in your home or office. All the NPC's that I used were registered to MY email address and all had the same login password. So if someone sent one of them a message, guess what? They got a quick reply. Not from a bot, but from me. ;)

100 players all at once, all alive and willing to talk to any new member who engaged them at any time. Seems real uh? But every one is you! ;) And on a good note, at least you can feel out the first 50 or so new members to your site or forum so you know there likes, dislikes and suggestions on how to make your site better right?

Trust me, deception will get you far. Sites like Facebook know this well and use it every day. How many times have people clicked an invitation to a new application or group and decide NOT to join it and just click the "CONTINUE" button on the bottom right of the screen not knowing that to the far left is a small ad? So you click continue an next thing you know, instead of going back to the home page you are on some stupid site trying to sell you a lesbian date. haha It happens probably 50,000 times a day on sites like facebook and do you think they care? Of course not, because each time someone clicks the "CONTINUE" button, facebook makes anywhere from 20 cents to $1.00 and at 50,000 times a day, that adds up fast.

So get sneaky and do what you have to do to gain members, just don't hurt people and don't outright lie and everyone should be happy. :p
 
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John Klyne

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Well the thing is John, when you make your own site, you don't even need a different computer in your home or office. All the NPC's that I used were registered to MY email address and all had the same login password. So if someone sent one of them a message, guess what? They got a quick reply. Not from a bot, but from me. ;)

How would I be able to do that working with a forum? I am not sure how that would work out really.

Trust me, deception will get you far. Sites like Facebook know this well and use it every day.

Deception will work in some circumstances. Just has to be played out correctly.
 
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