In my previous article, I told you that driving free traffic can be achieved using “out of the box” methods. As long as you are creative, you can edge yourself above your competitors.
In the previous article, one of the methods I mentioned was that you should “give first and then receive”, in which it means that you must start distributing free quality reports to your visitors that could be used as a viral instruments, such as a free ebook on your niche or industry or a compeling data and statistics.
Here, I am going to mention a couple of creative methods that you can use to drive laser targeted traffic to your sites:
1. Yahoo Answers
I find Yahoo Answers site is the best resource to gain organic visitors and to obtain trust as an expert at the same time. When you answer a question in Yahoo Answers, you will have the luxury to put your resource box at the end of your answers. Yahoo, however, requires you to achieve a minimum number of answers before you can put your link to prevent spam.
Make sure that you answer the question whole heartedly to gain respect from the community. You must also commit to make your answer as the best answer, because if your answer is chosen as the finest, then you will gain more and more points and more visibility in the community. To leverage this marketing technique, you can always look for similar sites via Google. However, I recommend to focus on Yahoo Answers because it has more than 20 million visitors daily.
2. Youtube yourself
Youtube has revolutionalized the Internet Marketing world. By using Youtube, you can actually show your prospects or clients that you are a real person, and you can also show how to use your products in a virtual interactive fashion using videos.
Like Yahoo Answers, make sure that you post high quality videos. By that I do not mean fancy video with special effects and stuff. Just maintain your professionality and look clean in the video, because nobody wants to do business with someone who looks like he has not cleaned himself in three weeks.
3. Social Networking sites
You might have been a member of one of these sites – FaceBook, MySpace, Friendster, or micro-blogging services like Twitter and Plurk. Most of those sites give you the liberty to connect with new people and to even build a group of common interest. Mind you that you do not over-exploit your business through those sites.
If you want to market your business and drive traffic to your site from social networks, you must do it ethically. By ethically, I mean that you must not continuously post updates that only concern your business or sites. People use social networks to get to know each other.
One more thing, use your own photo for your social network profile, not your website or corporate logo, because people want to make friends with humans not corporations.
4. Got skills?
Give people something useful for free: this only goes if you are certain that you have a sellable skill to produce something unique that people would pay for but would be happier if they can take it for free.
For example, graphics will always be the most sought after product in the marketing world, so if you are skillful in Photoshop or web-design, you can start offering free templates or graphics as a teaser for your visitors. You then give them the full right to edit the templates as long as they maintain the “Designed By” link. If your templates are used by 10,000 downloaders, then that is how many backlinks you will have for your main websites.
Those above are just some of the creative ideas I can give. Twist them a bit with your own creativity and you would gain more free traffic in no time.
This article is written by guest author Hans David – the owner of NetMarketersCentral.com, a site for new marketers to learn Internet Marketing the right way.