Monday, April 6, 2009

Creative Ideas for Passive Traffic Building

What and why passive traffic
Unless you have a big budget, or if you are very confident that your PPC campaign will have significant ROI, then passive traffic is definitely the one you should strive for. In my early days of Internet Marketing, I advertised one of my mini-site meant for adsense at a high traffic site, which has around 7,000 visitors a day. I managed to get averagely 30 visitors a day, but once I stopped my campaign web traffic was reduced to only around 5 visitors a day. I figured out that it is important to generate "passive traffic," the kind of traffic that you work hard in the beginning, and reap your reward at the end of the day.

When talking about "passive traffic," we usually think of getting it from search engine by optimizing your page. But in fact, search engine is not the only way to get it. In this article, we are going to explore some other creative ways we can do to drive passive traffic.

How to drive traffic from well-ranked sites without spending a dime?
In the above paragraph, I just shared with you on how I drove traffic to my mini-site by advertising it at a well-ranked site. A piece of good news for you is, you can still make use of the same tactic without spending a dime. To get your sales agent on other sites, write high quality content and offer to those webmasters your workpiece. In blogging we call this "guest blogging." There will of course be webmasters who will just ignore or decline your request. Don't take it personally and continue to the next one. Once you get your contents placed on other high ranked sites, then that is it. Not only you will have your "salesman" to promote your site, it will even improve your site's rank from the SEO point of view.

You don't have to stop only on blogs or other websites. In fact, any place where lots of people gather, such as community sites is a good place for promoting your site.

How to drive traffic from community sites such as blogs and forums
We had talked on how to drive traffic from blogs through guest blogging. However, let me introduce a simpler way. To do this, you will need to have your own blog. First, find blogs related to your niche, browse through their contents, and find contents that you think you can elaborate further. Then, write a content that adds more value to the original content in your own blog. Once this is completed, go back to the original blog page, leave a comment summarizing your points, and leave your blog post link for further reading. By doing this, you are helping the other blog owner to strengthen his contents, his readers will have more resources and you will gain visitors to your site. It is a win-win situation.

Another great place to put your sales agents are community sites such as forums. The trick is to find a community site that relates to your niche. I know it is not easy to find forums that give you permission to leave links in the forum posts, but if you put a bit more effort I'm sure you can find a few. The trick is as just what we did with the blogs. Find people problems, solve it and drive them to your blog post that solve their problems. Everybody wins.

At this point I think you had realized that all those tactics above requires you to be generous. Let us explore a bit more on how to drive traffic by being generous.

How to drive traffic by being generous
I learned a great philosophy lately. That is, most rich people become rich by being generous. They find ways to provide their product or services to more and more people with less and less cost. Similarly, if you want more traffic to your site you should provide more and more free services generously to your audience. One thing about free stuff is, people like to share them. When done correctly it can be highly viral and give you tremendous exposure. Some examples are such as:
  • Write free guides on your niche, provide it for free and allow other people to share it for free too. Needless to say, you should have a link that drives readers back to your site.
  • Create free templates - I'm using a free template for my blog and it has a link back to the creator's site. You can use the same tactic if you have the skill in making templates.
  • Create free software - I've downloaded a free eBook writer software recently. I'm very impressed in its great features despite of being free.
Now, I know that we are discussing on non-SEO ways to drive passive traffic, but do you know you can get the search engine to be your salesman without the need to optimize your own site? Let us see how it works?

How to get the search engine to be your salesman
When talking about passive traffic, search engine is always the best. When starting a new site, the search engines will not know that it ever existed. Even if they know, your site will have a low importance to them. So, how can you make the search engines to be your salesman in this situation? Yes, the answer is by writing articles and submitting them to well-ranked article directories. The more articles you have on the web, the more salesman you have to drive traffic to your site.

Many webmasters knew article marketing is a great traffic builder, but unable to get the traffic they hoped for. As can be expected there are tricks you must know to make it works. Read this great article marketing guide, and start building your traffic today.
By Schan Ezan
Published: 12/26/2008

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